If you’ve started a new business, you may be wondering how you can take it to the next level. Marketing a small business is essential in creating brand awareness, generating convertible leads and retaining clients. Read on to learn 10 small business marketing tips to help you stay at the top of the competition while meeting the budget.
1. Leverage Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
We live in a technology-based world, and a potential customer will first search for your business online. As such, you must optimize your website to rank in the top Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) to attract more traffic. Also, ranking for specific search terms increases conversions as many potential customers are convinced that your business is a trustworthy resource. There are different SEO techniques for small business marketing, including using Google AdWords, Facebook ads, content marketing, link building, etc. When designing your SEO marketing, it is essential to focus on the techniques that increase your ranking and convertible leads as well.
Suppose you own a bail bond company. In that case, investing in Google AdWords can be a great way to attract potential customers. Why? Google AdWords can optimize your website with phrases, query strings and words that people use in looking for bail services companies online. However, the strategy can work best when expertly combined with other SEO strategies.
Note: SEO algorithms are ever-changing, so you should continuously research and keep pace with the latest SEO trends. If you are not adept in SEO marketing, it is better to leave it in the hands of experts who know the best mix of SEO strategies to put in place to maintain your business on the top ranks.
2. Invest In Social Media Advertising
According to Statista, almost 60% of the world’s population uses social media. As such, leveraging social media platforms in your marketing campaigns can help you reach a wider audience and increase conversions. How?
Promoting your local excavation services on social media can create awareness about your services, attracting fresh leads and new conversions. Also, using social media for small business marketing allows you to share customer testimonials and case studies to prove customer satisfaction. Therefore, it is a great way of increasing customer loyalty and converting new visitors into lifelong customers.
Moreover, most social media advertising models operate on a pay-per-view or pay-per-click basis. As such, using social media is a cost-effective marketing strategy since you only pay for the number of clicks on your ads. Besides, these models give almost instant analytical results for your marketing campaigns. You can use these results to identify areas that need perfection to gain the most from your campaign efforts.
As you can see, utilizing social media marketing has numerous benefits. To enjoy the most, you must first understand your audience and their favorite platform. Then, design marketing content that matches their needs. Ensure you post fresh and relevant content every time to ensure a steady presence. Alternatively, you can hire a social media marketing company to promote your business on your behalf.
3. Engage in Word-of-Mouth marketing
Another great way of small business marketing is word-of-mouth marketing. It involves encouraging people, especially your customers, to talk about and share their positive experiences with your services or product with potential customers. It is an old but effective way of creating trust and loyalty and winning new conversions to your business.
To reap the most benefits, ensure the strategy employed matches your type of business. For instance, if you are a hardscape contractor, you can benefit most from influencer marketing. Influencers have a massive following of potential customers who trust and respect their opinions. Investing in their marketing services can significantly improve brand awareness and trust in your hardscaping products and services.
4. Make Good Use of Infographics
Infographics are visually appealing. They are a great way of making otherwise complex information easy to read and understand. When well crafted, infographics help to reach the target audience and pass information about your business effectively. As such, engaging in infographics marketing is an excellent way of increasing business awareness and generating leads. There are various techniques for using infographics for small business marketing.
Using Infographics In Guest Blogging
Including valuable infographics in your guest post can gain more leads than using the guest post alone. Yes, infographics can earn you additional leads from infographics shares. Besides sharing, the user of the host website can use the infographics to navigate to your site to see your offering.
Uploading Infographics On Social Media
Uploading valuable infographics on social media can earn you infographics shares and engage your followers simultaneously. The ultimate result is increased leads. To make the most impact, your posting must be specific. For instance, if you operate a roofing business, you can create valuable infographics about the best residential roofers near your place to target homeowners about your business.
Combine Infographics With Influencer Marketing
If you have hired an influencer to help with your small business marketing, complementing the marketing content with relevant infographics about your business can increase the understandability of your marketing information. This will in turn boost your leads. Your influencer company should guide you on the quality of infographics to attach to your marketing content.
5. Offer Deals and Discounts
Using deals and discounts for small business marketing can help increase your loyalty and brand reputation. Business-to-customer deals can take any form. This can include offering rewards to return customers, rewarding customers for referrals, organizing prize-winning contests, loyalty programs, etc.
On the other hand, offering discounts may include selling products at a lower price, offering a free unit for a given purchase, or offering existing customers discounts for referrals. Whatever deals or discounts you offer, ensure your customer finds value in them. Also, ensuring that your business incentives won’t drive your business into financial problems is crucial.
While the deals and discounts will incentivize some customers to preach about your business, others will find it awkward to share your business information. So it will be good to find ways of helping your customers share your promotions with potential customers. For instance, you can encourage your tree removal company customers and followers to share the information on your social media pages with their friends and acquaintances.
6. Engage Customers with Email Newsletters
Did you know emails can help with customer retention? Sending regular emails with valuable content creates a personalized feel among existing customers, which keeps them coming back. For instance, if you run an electrical installation and repair company, feeding your customers with newsletters about your current promotions, electrical industry news, and the recent improvements in your business can convince potential customers that you care for them. That said, the impact of these newsletters may change you into one of your area’s leading local electrical contractors.
If you are yet to implement an email marketing campaign in your business, creating a list of potential customers will help you get started. Find out the emails for companies that you intend to target as well as the emails for their key decision-makers. Compose and send a personalized email that explains your business and why you think the recipients could be the best fit for your product or service. Follow up the emails with a phone call
After a successful engagement, you may receive free orders or service requests from prospective customers. Even after conversion, ensure you keep the customers updated with the recent updates in your business and the entire industry. This will help maintain your clients and boost your business reputation.
7. Create promotional YouTube videos
According to HubSpot, YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google. As such, utilizing it for small business marketing can take your overall brand presence and SEO to another level. To reap the most from it, you should ensure that your YouTube channel and its contents are SEO optimized to beat the competition.
If you operate a local home builders company, your channel description should feature information about your building company and the type of YouTube videos you’ll post. Remember to incorporate relevant keywords in your description as they make an essential ranking factor. Also, link your YouTube channel to all other social media accounts to allow your subscribers to connect to you elsewhere.
After your channel is up and running, you should post well-optimized videos so that they rank well on YouTube and SERPs. One effective way to achieve that is crafting well-optimized video metadata. Well-optimized video metadata feeds viewers information about your video, including its title, category, description, subtitles, closed tags, etc. It also allows for proper indexing by Google crawlers for ranking purposes.
Secondly, you must optimize your video title and description with keywords. Remember, as part of Google, YouTube uses similar search algorithms to find content matching users’ search intent. Also, YouTube crawlers attach more value to videos with a longer watch time. So you should leverage keywords and long-form videos while maintaining the video quality to rank.
8. Use Marketing Swags and Freebies
The next tip for small business marketing on our list is swags and freebies marketing. It involves issuing free branded products like t-shirts, notebooks, tote bags, and drinkware to potential and existing customers and other business stakeholders to build brand loyalty and reputation. As a masonry contractor, leveraging this strategy in local trade fairs and other social events can help you top your local masonry contractors industry. Besides attracting customers, utilizing swags and freebie strategy can help to retain existing customers and harness vital business information. For instance, you can ask potential and existing customers to complete a business questionnaire in exchange for swag. To make the most impact, ensure what you give out as swag adds some value to the consumer.
9. Advertise Your Business Locally
Another way of small business marketing is utilizing local ads. It involves targeting potential customers close to the business location to boost sales. For instance, if you own a plumbing company, you can employ the following local strategies to gain an edge over the other local plumbers, including:
- Sending representatives (like employees, family members and friends) to share about business in local events like fairs and trade shows
- Advertising through print media like local newspapers, business cards and flyers
- Promoting your products and services through local broadcasting radio and television stations
- Using social media pages to target the local customers
The above strategies can help you attract physical traffic to your business. The advertising campaigns can be more effective if you have a website where potential customers can learn more about your business. If you haven’t implemented one for your business, you can share your contact information to allow customers to contact you as you design a website.
10. Partner With Local Businesses
Do you know that partnering with other businesses can expand your customer base? Business partnerships increase the individual partner’s customer base through referrals. Suppose you own a fence company. In that case, you can partner with a roofing company and enjoy the mutual benefit of referring customers to each other.
The chances that the leads received from a partner business will convert into your lifetime customers are high since they trust and respect the opinion of your business partner. One way of finding business partners is collaborating with friends or acquaintances who excel in areas related to your specialization. For instance, you can partner with a fence company if you specialize in any other area in the home improvement industry. Attending industry events can also help you find appropriate business partners, as they bring together people with the same interests. All you need is to be specific on the type of professional specialties you need in your partner and clearly understand how your partnership will benefit your business.
Final words
Marketing your small business can help you increase your customer base and sales. This guide details the top 10 small business marketing tips to grow your business. Ensure you work with an expert to help implement each of them, and the results of your campaign efforts will impress you.
