Starting your own business? Congrats! It's a huge first step in the right direction. As you probably already know, during the early stages of starting a business, there's a lot you need to consider as a business owner. From accounting and hiring to small business branding and a social media strategy: As a newfound business owner, there’s a lot you need to juggle! It can be a challenge trying to keep up with everything.
That's why we put together a list of marketing material ideas to help you effectively market your brand. This list will ensure nothing gets swept under the rug when you’re ready to launch your business.
Here’s our go-to marketing material examples:
What You Need: Marketing Materials For Small Business
1. A Website
The internet is the most-used resource that helps individuals discover new brands and businesses. Before establishing your company or opening the door for new business, you’ll want to ensure you have a simple yet effective website.
Don’t worry. You don’t need to have every landing page figured out before you start your business. However, we suggest creating a few web pages and aligning them with your small business branding.
Here are a few we recommend:
- Main Page
- Product or Service Page
- Contact Us Page
- An About Us Section
- Business Address, Hours of Operation, and Social Media Handles
2. A Brand Style Guide
Your brand style guide is going to be your go-to tool for creating all of the different types of marketing material you need. Your brand style guide should include color choices, fonts, and your logo.
You’ll mention how your logo can and can’t be used and other important details your design team should keep in mind when creating assets. This brand style guide will ensure all of the marketing material ideas you plan to use are consistent and on-brand.
3. Social Media Platforms
During the early stages of small business branding, it’s all about increasing brand awareness and establishing your brand identity. Before launching your business or building out marketing materials, you’ll want to secure your handle of choice across all the social media platforms you plan on using.
By adding your social media platforms to the types of marketing materials you create for advertising, you’ll have an opportunity to build your following and improve brand awareness during the early stages.
Here’s what you’ll need to do:
- Choose a social media handle that matches your brand name
- Create an account on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest
- Secure the handle on each social media platform
- Add your logo and website URL to your bio.
- Create your first post!
Once you’re moving in the right direction, you can start thinking about a social media strategy. If you’re having trouble building your following at the beginning, consider a social media contest to generate some excitement and handle some branded swag!
4. Business Cards
Whether you’re a B2B or a B2C, you’ll want to have some business cards on hand! These are great for handing out to potential customers and vendors you plan on working with. With a simple and tasteful design that pairs with your branding, you’ll establish credibility in your industry and keep your business top of mind with every connection you create.
5. Design assets for Advertising Small Business
Whether you have a small or a large budget, you'll need a few assets for advertising a small business! These assets can be used for social media advertising, print, and display ads. You’ll want to have some go-to designs you can use to generate some excitement around your new business and attract more individuals to your website.
6. Newsletter Signup
Once you start pushing new traffic to your website, you’ll want to have a newsletter sign-up set up on your landing page. This ensures you retain new customers and start nurturing them into paying customers.
A great way to get individuals to sign up for your newsletter is to entice them with a discount code or a special offer. Before you start to generate a ton of traffic to your new site, consider setting up a workflow with a welcome email. This ensures every individual that signs up for your newsletter will receive a discount code in their inbox right after showing interest in your brand. This is a great marketing material idea to incentivize shoppers to sign up for your newsletters, establish credibility, and get individuals excited about your brand.
7. Branded Business Swag
Here’s where the real fun begins. If you want to leave a favorable impression on every customer you connect with, you’ll need branded marketing products for small businesses. Company swag increases the value of your marketing initiatives and can help you make meaningful connections with everyone you meet.
When you’re starting out as a business, you could use all the added brand visibility you can get. Whether your sales team is going door to door or you’re booking in-person client meetings: You'll need branded items if you want the upper hand against your competitors. Every connection you make in the early stages is vital to your success and can benefit from the branded swag.
Our Top 5 Marketing Products for Small Business
Reusable Water Bottle
- Reusable and sustainable
- Exciting ways to showcase your branding
- Choose from different materials like Stainless steel, plastic, or aluminum
- Appeals to a larger audience
- Best-selling custom water bottle: Titan 24 oz. Tritan Water Bottle
Branded Journals
- Great client gifts for meetings or office visits
- The choice to silkscreen, emboss or pad print your logo
- Fun colors and materials to choose from
- Pairs well with a pen or other stationary items
- Best-selling custom journals: Symmetrical Journal
Custom Pens
- A low-cost giveaway that yields high results
- Relates to a larger audience
- Fun colors, styles, and looks to choose from
- Pens are useful, versatile, and fun to brand
- Best-selling brand pen: Panda Pen
Branded Coffee Mugs
- Every morning your client grabs their coffee, and your brand top of their mind
- Great for establishing a partnership with new customers
- Choose from a wide variety of materials and colors
- Fun branding opportunities
- Best-selling custom coffee mugs: 12 oz. Artisan Coffee Mug
Branded Cinch Bag
- One of the most popular marketing material ideas you can use
- Customers can use it for work, school, grocery store visits, and more
- Increases brand awareness
- Fun opportunities for small business branding
- Best-selling cinch bags: Robin Drawstring Bag
Invest In Quality Company Swag with Bagmasters
Starting a business is a huge accomplishment. You should be proud of everything you went through to get you to this moment. As you get closer to opening your business, you’ll want to have branded marketing products for small businesses to leave that lasting impression on potential prospects. With company swag, you can increase the ROI of your marketing efforts and keep your brand top of mind with all of your new customers.
At Bagmasters, we can help you take your marketing vision to life and provide you with the high-quality branded swag you need.
Start browsing our collection of promotional products today to get started.
