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Research from SalesForce suggests that 66% of small to medium business owners are personally responsible for at least three of these areas of their business: product development, marketing, operations, human resources, finance, customer service, and/or information technology.
It’s no wonder then small businesses need marketing tactics that are not only effective, but also efficient. Small businesses simply don’t have the same time and resources as large enterprises.
Here, we’ll take a look at eight marketing tactics that small businesses can use to boost their marketing efforts.
Marketing tactics are specific and targeted marketing actions. That is, they’re more specific than a broad marketing plan.
For example, after you’ve built out your strategy from a sample marketing plan, you can implement specific tactics to push closer to achieving your goals.
Given their limited resources, small businesses need to leverage marketing tactics that are efficient, simple, and high impact. We’ve kept those criteria in mind as we assembled this list of marketing tactics your small business should try.
By the end of this list, you’ll have a handful of actionable ideas to help jumpstart your small business marketing.
There’s no one-size-fits all approach to marketing, and this tactic will help you decide which of the other tactics here will work best for you.
Using data to identify which customers are the most profitable for your business can go a long way. With this information, you can make better decisions about who to market to and what marketing channels will be most effective.
This idea is straight from marketing 101 and the concept is simple: you need to identify the segments of your customer base that are the most valuable and market in a way that resonates with them.
If you’re operating a local restaurant, which customers seem to spend the most each visit? Families? Professionals from a nearby office? Seniors? Depending on the answer, your optimal marketing plan for your small business may vary significantly.
Of course, some insights about your customer base will require more nuance and detail to analyze. CRM software and database marketing can help you make more advanced insights and develop more targeted campaigns as you go.
Simply put, identifying your most valuable customers can be boiled down to two marketing KPIs (key performance indicators): customer lifetime value (CLV), which is how much revenue a customer generates, and customer acquisition costs (CAC), which is how much it costs to acquire a customer.
It's important to understand that revenues don’t tell the whole story. A customer that spends $500 but costs $400 to acquire isn’t as valuable as one that spends $200 and costs $50 to acquire.
Use these steps to get started identifying which of your customers are most profitable:
Email marketing makes it onto seemingly every list of digital marketing tips, and for good reason. Lyfe Marketing reported that email marketing return on investment (ROI) is 122%. Additionally, an industry report by Emma found that 59% of marketers get more ROI from email than any other channel.
By building an email list, you’ll be able to leverage one of the most reliable low cost and high impact direct marketing channels to your advantage.
We recently took a deep dive on creating an organic email list, so we’ll give you a crash course to get started here.
Building a library of useful content can serve as the cornerstone of a pull marketing strategy. Interesting and engaging content will draw users to your brand and help establish your business as an authority on a subject.
As a result, content marketing is useful for both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) marketing strategies.
As a small business, your target audience may not be aware of your brand at all. However, if a blog, whitepaper, or instructional article you put together helps them solve a problem, you can capture their attention.
Content marketing is all about creating content that your target audience finds useful.
Blogs, whitepapers, case studies, videos, podcasts, and e-books are just a few examples of potential channels for content marketing. Here are a few tips to help you get started with content marketing:
Today, most people in your target audience are likely on at least one social media network. As a result, social media has become an important part of most businesses’ digital marketing strategy.
By building a social media presence, you’re able to engage your customers where they are, on a channel they are comfortable with.
Paid search can be an important part of social media marketing, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. Instead of, or in addition to, paying for ads, this tactic is all about creating a presence organically.
There’s no step-by-step formula for social media success. The smaller communities that make up larger social networks each have their own intricacies that make them unique.
In addition to identifying your target audience, you’ll need to clearly quantify your goals. Are you trying to build brand awareness? Increase traffic to your site? Build a community? All are possible on social media, but it is important you’re specific in your objectives.
Here are some tips to help you get started:
One of the biggest challenges a small business faces is building brand awareness and establishing credibility. Referral programs can be an excellent way to overcome this challenge.
In fact, Nielsen found that “recommendations from people I know” was the most trusted information source for consumers.
With referrals, you can use this to your advantage. Referrals enable you to leverage your existing customers to gain credibility with new customers.
Referrals can be a powerful source of social proof your products or services are worth a consumer’s investment.
Here are two ways you can get started using referrals to boost your marketing efforts:
SEO is hypercompetitive. With multinational corporations investing heavily to rank for specific search terms, small businesses must be strategic to be successful here. One of the most effective ways small businesses can compete is to focus their SEO strategy.
Ranking for “deli sandwiches” is much harder than ranking for “deli sandwiches in Lubbock Texas.”
Focusing your SEO strategy can be difficult. There’s so much you might want to rank for but going too broad too soon may be ineffective. Try these tips to help you get started:
With the allure of SEO, it can be hard to justify spending for search results. However, doing so can yield an impressive ROI.
Additionally, while SEO takes time to build up, paid results pop up in searches shortly after payment. This means paid search can be an effective way to quickly grab your potential customers’ attention.
Getting your paid search or PPC (pay per click) strategy right can be tricky. You’ll need to do some research and make an informed decision about budgets to succeed. Consider these steps as you get rolling with your paid search tactics.
You know those panels that appear on the right side of Google results with star ratings and contact information for local businesses? Like this:
They’re part of Google My Business and you can use them to improve your small business marketing. While results vary significantly by industry, Google My Business listings can lead to a decent chunk of customer actions every month: website visits, calls, or direction requests.
In fact, according to BrightLocal, the average business has 59 actions per month occur from their Google My Business listing.
Fortunately for small businesses, getting started with Google My Business is straightforward. These three steps can help get you going:
Like most things, getting your small business marketing right requires context, nuance, and trial and error.
By using some of the tactics we’ve covered here, you can help jumpstart your efforts and hit the ground running. There’s no need to try everything at once, rather pick a few tactics that make sense for you today and grow from there.
Our Small Business Expert
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