8 Inexpensive Marketing Ideas For Small Business from Fizzic’s Education’s Ben Newsome

Recently I interviewed ex-Science teacher turned entrepreneur Ben Newsome of Fizzics Education (I know, he can’t spell!). Ben has built a burgeoning national business, teaching kids of all ages the wonders of science. 300,000 in the past 12-months! And a huge part of his success can be put down to his respect for marketing.

Like many guests who appear on The Small Business Big Marketing Show, once the microphone is turned off, more ideas that they could have shared come flooding back.

Ben was no exception 🙂

So, he kindly sent me an email a few hours after the interview detailing some additional inexpensive marketing ideas he is using and will use to grow his business into the future.

1. Video Conferences – Video conferencing helped us not only reach distance schools but also ‘play with the big boys’ whereby major Australian museums began asking us how we were doing it and therefore begin relationships that would become future partnerships for delivering workshops and shows at science festivals & partnered delivery of holiday programs.
2. Facebook Advertising – Pairing Eventbrite with Facebook advertising for our holiday science workshops has worked a treat… especially now that Facebook Pixel is now on our site and doing it’s magic.
3. Building Partnerships – We’ve now got partnerships with Education Changemakers, the GWS Giants, NRMA, Sydney Olympic Park, PwC, ANSTO and more. We’re rapidly becoming presenters for hire where we match our delivery style and scale with large entites needing an outreach team.

   Here’s a glimpse of some of Ben’s future marketing hacks:

4. We’re about to launch our loyalty points program in late October, which will allow parents to donate points from purchases on our online store to the school to buy resources or shows from us. This could be HUGE if it’s delivered well, as parents are going to be buying things for their kids for Christmas and schools can get a direct benefit in classroom resources effectively for free for getting involved in the program.
5. Facebook Live represents a huge area to develop, we already have a base of 5800 followers and we know that many of these are teachers. Challenge will be to get them involved out of school hours as FB is blocked on some school servers. Kids live science channel perhaps!?! We could also explore Periscope, but i figure that we’re already got an audience on FB.
6. We still need to sort out more video on our website to support each experiment… this could be slowly developed into a video package that can be sold later down the track or as an opt in in exchange for email.
7. Speaking of email marketing… we’re moving all of our email marketing to Drip, with the idea that people will receive more tailored emails that speak to where they live and what they’re interested in.
8. My book is about to become an audio book, just need to put in the hours to make it happen.

So there you go … eight more inexpensive marketing ideas for small business that came to one of my many inspiring guests once the microphone was turned off!

Which idea resonates with you the most?