Tried and Tested Marketing Tips For Your Small Business

Marketing your small business doesn’t have to be rocket science.

Even with the simplest strategies, your marketing activities can bring meaningful results if you use these tried and tested marketing tips.

With the right marketing game plan, you can accomplish a lot without spending a fortune.

To market your small business effectively, we will look into several marketing tips that seasoned entrepreneurs are using.

Here are our eight marketing tips to promote your small business:

• Create a winning business website
• Publish high-quality content
• Leverage email marketing
• Run social media ads
• Work with influencers
• Offer webinars
• Run pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns
• Integrate marketing analytics to your strategies

1. Create a winning business website

Before you think about how to market your website, ensure that it can convert your web visitors into paying customers.

There is no point in bringing traffic to your website if all of them will click away without buying.

Here are a few ways to create a winning website:

• Focus on conversion. You need more than a professional-looking website to grow your small business. Aesthetics, alone, won’t take you far. Optimize your website for conversion by using compelling copy, strategically placed call-to-action (CTA), etc.
• Provide a clear description of your business. Make sure your homepage represents your business accurately. Describe what you do, who you are, and what benefits your customers can receive working with you.
• Use a reliable content management system (CMS). A CMS helps you create and manage your digital content. Choose one with features matching your needs, including user friendliness, pricing, and scalability.

Wix, for instance, lets you drag and drop page elements, create content, and build a user-friendly website quickly.

This image shows Wix’s drag-and-drop page builder. Image source: Author

Showcase your products and services on your site, and include images of your target audience interacting with them.

Remember to highlight the benefits your products offer, rather than its features. Doing so will produce better conversions.

2. Publish high-quality content

Content is vital to marketing your business because it engages your audience, ranks higher on search engines, and fuels your inbound marketing efforts.

Your content depends on your target audience and goals. Use content types that are relevant to your audience and add the most value.

Try these content types:

• Listicles. Presenting information in a list format makes your content easier to read, understand, and share.
• Articles and blog posts. Well-written content aimed to help, entertain, or give valuable information, helps build your relationship with your readers.

For example, if you’re a clothing retailer, publish a blog post about current fashion trends or tips on how to mix and match their clothes.

• Infographics. Infographics make complex info and stats easier for your audiences to consume, which engages them. Plus, it’s a great way to repurpose content.

3. Leverage email marketing

Email newsletters that solve your audiences’ problems will make you their go-to company. You build trust and meaningful relationships with your audience.

Use marketing automation tools such as Omnisend to streamline your email marketing campaigns and improve your email marketing ROI.

The tool allows you to create automation workflows, generate actionable reports, and audience segmentation features, etc.

They also have professional-looking newsletter templates so you won’t have to create your email messages from scratch.

Omnisend has a library of customizable newsletter templates. Image source: Author

Omnisend’s drag-and-drop feature allows you to design your email messages easily by adding elements such as images, social sharing buttons, and text blocks.

The platform has many automation features, reducing the amount of time you spend running your email marketing campaigns.

4. Run social media ads

Diversifying your paid ad strategies through social media ads allows you to augment your integrated marketing strategies, boost your engagement, widen your reach, drive more traffic to your website, and increase your sales.

Make the most out of your campaigns by considering these social media marketing tips:

• Determine your campaign goals. Whether you want to increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, or generate leads, setting clear objectives helps your team zero in on what’s important for the company. This prevents them from doing other things that are mere distractions.
• Identify your target audience. Building buyer personas helps you understand your customers’ pain points and create targeted messaging and marketing strategies for your social media campaigns.

5. Work with influencers

Use influencers whose readers are your target market to market your products and establish your authority.

When influencers market a product or a service, the unspoken message is they trust the product and the product maker. They wouldn’t run the promotion if they aren’t happy with the product, after all.

When an influencer gives your products their thumbs up, their followers end up trusting you as well.

Find influencers in your niche by using free online tools such as Influence.co.

This is the advanced influencer search options on Influencer.co Image source: Author

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Search for influencers by category, the number of Instagram followers, Facebook page likes, average monthly visitors, and more.

You can find influencers quickly, allowing you to spend more of your time and energy on growing your business.

6. Offer webinars

Webinars help you connect, interact, and deliver valuable content to your audience in real time, making it an excellent addition to your marketing campaigns.

Webinars are often used for product demonstrations, sharing valuable tips and insights, consultations, etc.

Consider these tips when coming up with webinar topics:

• Check your FAQ pages (and your competitors’) for questions that your customers want answered.
• Go through your blogroll and look for posts with the most engagement. These engagements serve as social validation that your audience is interested in the topic.
• Ask your target audience directly by running surveys and polls. Get their feedback on the things that they want to learn about. If you’re a marketing agency, ask if they’d like to learn about marketing terms, strategies, how to price a product, etc. Their feedback will give you a better perspective of what topics are important to them.

7. Run PPC campaigns

Using pay-per-click (PPC) marketing is one of the fastest ways to drive traffic to your website and increase your brand awareness.

Even if your small business is newly established and you have zero followers or email subscribers, you can still reach thousands by running PPC ads.

To get better results out of your PPC campaigns, consider these marketing ideas for your ads:

• Know what keywords your competitors use. Do your own keyword research, but it doesn’t hurt to check the keywords your competitors are bidding for and build your ad strategy from there.
• Run split tests. Create two variations of your ad campaigns and monitor which gets better results. Then optimize your ad spend on the winner.
• Use retargeting. Instead of targeting new groups of people, run your ads to those you’ve targeted in the past. Zero in on people who commented on your ads, added your products to their virtual carts, or watched your video ads, etc. These people have a higher likelihood of clicking your ads.

8. Integrate marketing analytics to your strategies

Digital marketing analytics helps you assess, analyze, and measure the performance of your campaigns and other marketing efforts.

It gives you actionable insights about your campaigns, helping you improve your marketing strategies and make better business decisions.

Follow these tips for integrating analytics into your marketing strategy:

• Learn your audiences’ behavior. Monitoring how your customers interact with your brand will help you refine your strategies and marketing plan for better conversions.
• Track lead sources and revenue. Knowing where you’re succeeding in generating leads and earning revenue in your marketing efforts lets you identify campaigns that you should sustain, remove, or improve to get maximum results.

Develop a high-performing marketing campaign

While these digital marketing tips are by no means complete, following them can take your small business to the next level.

As you act on these tips, be sure to run tests and track your results. You can tailor each marketing strategy to the dynamics of your industry, allowing you to get far better results with your marketing campaigns.