If you are just starting out your journey of owning and running a small business, you may think of marketing as a luxury, but the data-driven nature of contemporary marketing makes it a necessity. Even if your business isn’t big, you can implement small business marketing strategies that work well on a budget.
The magic of digital marketing can accelerate your growth and progress. If you practice the right tactics, you’ll beat your competition.
Here are some small first steps you can take to make a big online marketing footprint.
Email Marketing
Not only is email a low-cost marketing tactic, but it’s also a quick and easy way of marketing your business to the right people if done the right way.
Email marketing lets you:
- Sell your products, services, and deals
- Quickly communicate with subscribers and potential customers
- Segmented audiences to specifically target their needs
- Build relationships with buyers
The benefits of email marketing for your business are plentiful. Here are just a few:
High Conversion Rate
Any good marketing tactic has one end goal–a conversion. Email has higher conversion rates than any other type of digital marketing campaign out there. Email is all about spending less to earn more. The average ROI for email is $44 for every $1 spent.
Low Cost
Unlike a lot of other facets of marketing, email only needs a good platform and a good offer to go along with it to have a high chance of success. The money that goes into advertising, print, and postal mailings isn’t needed when you deploy email marketing. Email marketing typically costs pennies per email sent making it way more cost effective.
Easy to Track
Wouldn’t it be so comforting if you knew exactly how your marketing was performing and how it was helping business? You can monitor how people interact with all of your emails. Keep track of:
- Open rates
- Link click-through rates
- Which links in an email were clicked
This lets you measure the success of your email and how it influenced sales of your products and services.
Special Offers That Let You Stand Out
Every email you send needs to have the best chance to stand out. Create an email that has a special offer exclusively for the people who buy from your industry. This offer can take on a number of forms like:
- A special email-only discount
- Promotion of a flash sale
- Exclusive content that people will find valuable
- A simple introduction to your business and your specialties
If your company is B2C, discounts and offers on your products are great ways of engaging with people. If you’re B2B, you can send readers a link to an insightful blog or eBook you’ve written that contains vital information and education about your industry.
Email is an easy way of nurturing your relationship with subscribers and customers. It should never be a one-and-done deal. You should continue to provide value to them and make offers that keep them engaged and keep them loyal to your brand.
If you don’t have a plan for email marketing, draft one out with these questions in mind:
- What unique offers can you make to people?
- Why should someone want to subscribe to your list?
- How will you track the success of your emails?
- What will be your email schedule on a monthly basis?
Social Media Marketing
Social media is a mainstay in how people communicate. As of 2017, 2.46 billion people are active on social media channels, and that number is only expected to grow in the coming years. If you’re a small business owner, social media is a vital tool for your small business marketing strategy. It comes with lots of benefits.
Brand Awareness, Loyalty, and Trust
Social profiles help you interact directly with the billions of people who use platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn every day. The more you post to these channels and engage the community, the more you spread awareness of your brand and message. Regular social engagement is essential to making your voice heard and turning people into customers.
Talking directly to customers on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn is also the perfect chance to nurture your relationships with them. You can show you care about their experiences with your company by addressing their questions and problems in real time.
This kind of personal service improves customer relations greatly. Not only does it reinforce their loyalty, but it also helps build trust between you and them.
Targeted Advertising and Promotion
Social media is another way of promoting your offers and products online. If it’s a special deal that you’ve worked hard on, you can pay to advertise your deal on social media to improve its chances of success.
Unlike traditional forms of advertising, social advertising lets you promote your deal in more targeted ways. Narrow down the audience of your advertisement with some key factors:
- Age
- Location
- Behaviors
- Interests
The more targeted you make your ad, the more likely you are to spend your ad money on people who will want to buy from you and become future customers as well.
Low Cost and Time Dedication
One of the biggest myths about using social media is that it’s time-consuming, but it doesn’t have to be. Even just posting a few times a week across different platforms can move the dial a lot, and responding to comments and messages from people only takes a minute or two.
Aside from advertising, social media is entirely free to use. Post as often or as little as you’d like without a charge!
Supports Different Types of Content
For many of us, social is an all-encompassing content hub. And you can use virtually any form of media as part of your plan for social media marketing.
Social media is the perfect platform for sharing your best content, such as:
- Images
- Articles
- Videos
- Infographics
- Industry trends and news
To get people to talk about and share your content, it’s up to you to publish quality content that matters to their interests. How many likes, comments, and shares your content gets can be a good measuring stick for the quality of your content. Whatever produces the most activity on social is what people want more of.
It doesn’t all have to be original content, though. If someone else has published something useful that pertains to your industry or your audience, share it. If you continue to share quality links, people will stay engaged with your pages and return to it for more content.
Insights and Analytics
The more you post, the better sense you’ll get of what your followers like the most. Social makes this easy with analytical tools. Monitor the insights and analytics that are available on every platform to measure your success. Keep track of:
- Engagement
- Comments
- Likes
- Views
- Reach
Tracking the performance of your social posts helps you pave the way forward for smarter and more targeted messaging in the future. Data teaches how to better engage your audience and how to best reap the rewards of social media.
Posting regularly to a platform like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn is an essential way of engaging with your community. If you know the audience you’re talking to, it’s easy to form a tone and a style of posting that stays consistent with your brand and consistent with what people expect from you.
Create a Google My Business Profile
Google My Business is especially valuable if most of your customers are local. Google is the biggest search engine on the web and the number one way most people find information online that they’re looking for.
A company with an optimized Google My Business (GMB) profile is more likely to win new customers than a company without one. It offers several key perks:
Better Visibility in Google and on Google Maps
Having a comprehensive GMB profile raises your chances of being discovered by people who are looking for businesses in their local area. The process of localization tells Google that you’re a legitimate company in the community that people can go to and rely on.
Platform for Displaying Important Information
GMB lets you introduce people to your business before they click on a single link. Your GMB profile shows up to the right of a search results page and displays whatever information you have filled out.
When you create a GMB profile, at a minimum you should, fill out:
- Business name, address, and phone number (NAP)
- Business description
- Hours of operation
- Business category
- Website URL
- Logo
Some optional information that might be helpful:
- Pictures
- Special hours for holidays
- Appointment URLs
- Posts
This gives people a quick look at who you are, where you are, and what you do. This is a quick way of establishing rapport with a person long before they ever engage with your business.
As a bonus, you can have listings on other directories online to enhance your chances of being discovered. Some of these include:
- Yelp
- Yahoo!
- Bing Places for Business
- Foursquare
- Apple Maps
- Merchant Circle
Make sure that all of your online business information is accurate and consistent across all channels. Any inaccurate or inconsistent information can confuse Google and confuse people who are looking for you. This can create a negative impression and that can cause missed profits.
Review Generation
What other people say about you online can make a big difference in sales. If what they’re saying is positive, it can translate into bigger profits. You need reviews from people who have done business with you.
If you don’t have any reviews to show off, ask your favorite customers to leave a nice review of your business online. The best platform to generate reviews can be industry-specific but may include:
- Your Google My Business Profile
- Your Yelp Profile
- Your Yahoo! profile
Online reviews matter a lot to consumers. 51% of consumers will buy from a local business if it has positive reviews, and 72% of consumers find businesses with positive reviews more trustworthy. It’s simple. Positive reviews turn into credibility. Credibility turns into trust, and trust turns into more business.
Reviews are easy to generate and quick to show up. Eventually, once you have enough good business flowing, people will leave reviews of their own accord, but it doesn’t hurt to continue to ask for them. As long as you are honest and credible in your business practices, you will continue to have a reliable stream of good reviews to show to more potential buyers.
Content Marketing
People want to learn. People want to be entertained. Content marketing has both educational and entertainment credentials, and it generates business for your company.
Content marketing is the kind of marketing strategy generates long-term, positive results for your business. Here are a few:
Industry Recognition and Respect
Content is information that teaches something unique about your services and industry in a way that’s accessible and easy to understand. It’s the middle ground between education and an advertisement. If you want to beat your competition, you need to stand out as a top industry expert and leader. Content is your ladder to the top.
What do you know that your competition and customers don’t? That’s your secret to creating quality content. Content should also be poised to answer the questions people are asking. The more relevant it is to people’s needs, the more likely it is to be found in search engines and shared across social media.
Different Types of Content That Generate You the Best Business
Depending on your skills and resources, you should produce a variety of content to share across all of your different marketing platforms (your website, email, social channels). Some popular content types include:
- Blogs
- Whitepapers
- eBooks
- Videos
- Infographics
- Webinars
What types of content you produce the most depends on what people most strongly respond to. For example, test out how a group of blogs perform against several videos to determine how your budget is better spent in the future.
Search Engine Visibility
Google loves content. Content is the best way to apply SEO and enjoy the benefits of having your business found more frequently online. Properly optimized content improves your rankings on Google, which translates into more web traffic and more people who want to buy from you.
The best advantage of search visibility (SEO) is it provides a regular stream of new customers because people are now finding the business.
A bigger budget can be spent on big marketing campaigns, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of the resources right at your disposal. Even just going from nothing to a little in your small business marketing efforts can have positive effects on the course of your business growth.
We can be the professional at your side to guide you on which marketing strategies work. We specialize in digital marketing for small businesses like yours and implement proven strategies at affordable rates. Contact us today and let’s kickstart your marketing plan.
