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You launched your own business. Word of mouth can only get you so far. Now it’s time to accelerate growth by marketing your company.
The goal of marketing is to find the right audience for your products or services and apply the appropriate marketing strategy to reach that audience. Fortunately, small businesses can choose from a plethora of marketing tactics to achieve their objective.
This practical guide outlines seven strategies to successfully execute marketing for your small business.
Before jumping into the strategies, review these considerations affecting how to market your business.
Building your marketing strategy starts with defining goals. Are you looking to acquire new customers, oversee your company’s reputation, referred to as reputation management, or other objectives like customer retention or increasing the average purchase amount per customer?
Setting goals allows you to construct a marketing plan that aligns the limited time, resources, and budget at your disposal towards the local marketing strategies that achieve your business and marketing objectives.
Another consideration is understanding your target customers. What motivates them to seek a business like yours? Where do they spend time online? Insight into these kinds of attributes dictates the best ways to reach your customers.
Along with this, learn your market dynamics. Who are your competitors and how do they market to customers? Which industry trends could change how customers engage with your business?
Research is the means to acquire these insights. Look for industry info online, call competitors, and survey your customers.
Marketing for small business relies on limited resources and budgets. Hence, successful business marketing focuses efforts around the tactics that generate the best return on investment (ROI) for your marketing dollars.
To identify which deliver compelling ROI, you must test different strategies, collect real world results, then evaluate if it’s worthwhile to invest more into the strategy or pursue others.
Many cost-effective marketing channels exist for small businesses. The following highlights impactful digital marketing tips to grow your company. Whether you’re looking to market a new business or perform B2B marketing, these strategies work for any type of organization.
A business website provides the foundational marketing component to reach today’s digitally-driven consumer. A website serves as your company brochure, educating potential customers on what you offer, and why they should buy from you.
In addition, your site serves as the destination consumers arrive at from online strategies such as a Google search or an email marketing campaign.
You can choose from several options to set up a website without costing a fortune or requiring technical knowledge. Even a Facebook page can serve as a proxy for your website, albeit temporarily while you prepare a proper website.
Here are tips to help with using a website in your sales and marketing efforts.
We know Google as a search engine, but the company also offers many marketing options. You can reach a large audience at reasonable costs. Because of this, Google is a vital part of small business marketing strategies.
Two areas lie at the heart of Google’s marketing options for small businesses: search engine marketing (SEM) and Google My Business.
With SEM, businesses pay for text ads to appear above Google’s search results, but that payment occurs only when a consumer interested in your offerings clicks the ad to visit your website. Small businesses gravitate to SEM because of this model, and some use SEM as their only marketing strategy.
With Google My Business, companies provide Google with business information which Google then uses across its products, including its popular search engine and Google Maps services. By supplying these details to Google My Business, your company receives exposure to Google’s tremendous base of users. Moreover, you can read and respond to customer reviews, and receive statistics such as how many customers Google sent to your business. Best of all, using Google My Business costs you nothing.
Use these suggestions to get you started with Google’s vast marketing opportunities.
Social media has grown into an effective marketing strategy for small businesses. Social networks such as Facebook possess deep customer analytics and data insights to the point where you can easily find consumers fitting your ideal customer profile and target your advertising to this audience.
Moreover, social media is key to reputation management. Anyone can post unfavorable comments and reviews online about your company. You can lose customers because of these negative posts.
So you must be involved in social media. Because of this, its advertising effectiveness, and low cost, if your time and budget limitations require you to choose just one marketing strategy, social media should be your first choice.
Here are some handy tips to integrate social media into your marketing strategy.
Small businesses are most often associated with direct marketing. This strategy involves a business reaching out directly to a specific group of customers, such as delivering flyers to nearby residents.
One of the most popular direct response marketing techniques is email marketing. It’s flexible enough to work for any type of company. A retailer can execute an e-commerce email marketing strategy while an insurance agency can send an email newsletter with insightful advice like home security.
Another important benefit is the ability to tailor emails to different customer segments. For example, send a welcome email to new customers to strengthen that relationship. Meanwhile, repeat clients might get a follow-up email thanking them for their business with a coupon to incentivize additional purchases.
This personalized messaging captures the attention of busy consumers far more effectively than a one-size-fits-all blanket email. As a result, personalized emails increase the likelihood of customer engagement and the ultimate purchase of your company’s goods and services.
So how do you collect consumer email addresses to implement email marketing? This can be done through the purchase of an email list, or by taking the time to collect the emails yourself by asking customers to sign up as you build up your client base.
Small business email marketing can seem intimidating, so here are suggestions to help you.
Inbound marketing deepens customer relationships over time by building trust and delivering value through a variety of digital tactics. These tactics attract customers to your business rather than you pushing outbound messages, like ads, to them, hence the name.
An example is posting articles on your website about topics related to your business. Customers seeking information about these topics are incentivized to visit your website, and since they arrived of their own volition, they tend to think favorably of your business.
In addition, inbound marketing strengthens your website’s SEO. Also, posting insightful content positions you as an expert in your industry. And because you’re delivering value to consumers even before they become customers, inbound marketing improves your business reputation as well.
Follow these suggestions to put inbound marketing to use.
Mobile marketing is a powerful strategy for small businesses. It lets you drill down to a specific customer, delivering your message in the most intimate setting available today, a customer’s mobile device.
Mobile marketing offers many benefits. Nearly all consumers own mobile phones, so you can reach a large audience. Mobile use is also related to a sense of urgency. Consumers look for a business like yours on their mobile device because they possess an immediate need, for example, to find a highly-rated restaurant for lunch.
Through mobile marketing, you raise customer awareness about your business right when they need you most.
Follow these tips to reap the rewards of this underused marketing strategy.
Video content consumption is at an all-time high, and consumers watch videos to make purchase decisions. This makes sense when you consider a research study that confirmed 65% of us are visual learners. A video displays detailed info of a product or service along with visuals to help viewers understand the value delivered by the offering.
Video marketing provides a range of options to promote your business. If you offer a complex product, an educational or how-to video works best. A B2B service like an accounting firm or software company might seem stuffy, so humanize your organization with an emotional video explaining the personal story of your company’s history.
Creating an online video no longer requires expensive equipment. Your mobile phone can do the trick. Here are additional tips to make video marketing work for you.
Marketing is a process of experimentation. Pick a strategy and test it. Measure the results using marketing metrics like ROI to see if that strategy achieves your goals.
If not, don’t become discouraged. Simply experiment with a different strategy, and keep trying different ways to market your business until you strike gold.
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