However small your business is, visibility is important.
Not only do you want your business to be seen by as many people as possible but you want the right people to be enticed into buying whatever you are selling.
Your marketing strategy must therefore not only cover reach but must also be targeted to your consumers. Doing this will greatly boost your revenues.
Here are a few tips you can use to leverage your small business:
Find out your target market
For a small business, every cent determines whether your business will flourish or whether you should pack up.
Therefore, do not waste money on a market that isn’t even interested or suited for your product or service.
Find your niche and invest in advertising to them. Find out the different personas of your customers and appeal directly to them.
Define your business goals
As small business owners, we sometimes get caught up in the small stuff and forget to check with our business goals.
Be specific about defining the goals of your small business.
You must already be measuring profits, sales, expenses, revenues as well as other key performance indicators.
When you add online marketing to this mix, you need to be able to tell exactly how your efforts are impacting the business.
If, for example, you own a blog, you can use metrics such as total visits, bounce rate, channel-specific traffic, customer retention rate and new sessions to track the results of your digital marketing efforts.
Create a budget for your business
You may not have a lot of money to put into online marketing but you can use what you have in your arsenal to yield positive results.
You can do this by choosing activities that complement each other (such as SEO and content marketing), ditch whatever isn’t working and spread your material across platforms.
Instead of just posting your content on one platform, use free tools that are available to broadcast your marketing strategies across different digital platforms.
Build a brand
If today you are selling tomatoes and then tomorrow you are selling kid’s furniture, it will be hard for customers to identify your brand.
As hard as this may be, build a brand and stick to it. Building a brand is not just about getting a brand name and logo for your small business.
It includes the language you use to communicate with your customers, the design of your site, the online platform you choose, the type of payment and your overall experience of your users.
Make use of SEO hacks
Your business needs to be displayed among the top when customers search for it. This is done using SEO tricks.
You will need to optimize your business’ URL, include target keywords in the content you put out and contribute on other popular sites as a guest blogger.
Increase your local customers
The best thing about local customers is that they keep coming back. Include them in your marketing strategy and have them review your business.
Having good ratings will bring even more customers to your business.
Post information about the location of your business so it is easy to find.
Utilize the power of social media
Once you know your target market, it is time to communicate with them.
Look for pages or topics that your market is interested in and communicate with them. Draw them to your site so they can see what you have to offer.
Be open to and pay attention to feedback from your customers. This will enable you to adjust accordingly and increase your sales.
Leverage email marketing
Social media promotions many times do not work on their own.
This is because people are constantly being bombarded with new information; it is very difficult to remember just one thing.
This is where email marketing comes in.
Have your customers subscribe to updates from your business via email. You can send them special offers, discounts and alert them when you are having a sale.
Have a good website
Websites are not just for cramming with information about your business.
Do your research and find someone who can design a customer-friendly website for you.
You should take into consideration your niche when designing your website. Learn from the most successful and impressive web designs.
Find the best time to post content on your site
What’s the point of creating great content if no one will ever see it?
Luckily, most social media sites have analytics that shows you when your customers interact most with your content.
Focus on posting content at times that best suit your customers. Be sure to be responsive to them as well.
Social media should be part of your marketing strategy
Social media is not just for fun anymore.
Even the biggest brands still leverage social media to acquire new customers and interact with existing ones.
By using social media, you can chat with you consumers, alert them of any new products or promotions, stream your daily activities, and best of all, you can do this right from your Smartphone.
Find out what social media channels your target audience is in and be proactive in engaging with them through these channels.
You can do this by:
Creating private groups for employees to encourage members of your team to attend work events, participate in discussions, schedules and whatever else may be going on in your business.
Posting on social media and encouraging employees to respond to your pages.
This encourages the visibility of your business profiles.
Creating open groups for customer questions. Here you can also post about your products, share videos and any information that would interest your customers.
Optimize your Google My Business page
To make your business more discoverable, use Google My Business.
By using this, you get better rankings in the local search, connect your Youtube account, respond to reviews and communicate with your customers.
