Small Business Marketing Ideas

Are you looking for small business marketing ideas to help you market your business at a low cost? It doesn’t matter if you are starting up your small business or it has been in existence for a decade; finding potent marketing strategies is significant.

There are multiple marketing tactics that you can implement for your marketing needs without hurting your small budget. We will give you some of the strategies that might help to skyrocket your business because they have been proven to be very effective for small businesses.

Some of these strategies will take longer to bring results while some will bring in results pretty fast.

Facebook, Emailing, conferencing and SEO might not be the ingredient to your marketing success because Marketing success has no universal secret and, we all have different businesses. We don’t know if the strategies will work because we don’t know your business, your customer base, and your demographics.

Reading this article will increase your knowledge of viable marketing channels that will leverage your small business.

Also read : Unleashing the Power of Ecommerce: A Proven Marketing Strategy for Success

Create A Website For Your Business

A website is very crucial for your small business. If you want to boost your online presence, a website will help you boost your visibility. Ensure that you create a professional-looking website that tells your customer who you are, your location, what you offer, and how they can contact you.

There are so many advantages to owning a website. Other channels might lock you out when their policies but with your website make the policies because you own it.

Another plus for a website is that you can sell your products or services at any time of the day and generate organic traffic.

With a website, there are so many marketing initiatives that you can employ to market your small business.e

Start A Blog

If you want to attract organic traffic (who doesn’t want more traffic), then you have to consider blogging. A blog is one of the best tools for building credibility and attracting prospects who are yet to decide on purchasing your services.

As a small business, you want to use less expensive tools to market your business. You can use free website tools to start your blog. These free websites come with free template tools that can be useful to you.

You can hire someone to help you create your posts if you cannot write for your blog. The most important thing is to ensure that you post content regularly on your blog at least once or twice a week to increase your website’s visibility.

Don’t forget to include a call to action at the end of your post. A call to action will compel your visitors to subscribe to your blog and get emails.
This is a clever way of collecting leads and giving more information to your potential customers if they haven’t reached the buying stage.

Email Marketing For Lead Nurturing

You must be excited that you just converted your web traffic to leads. Don’t go overboard because the leads are yet to make a purchase. You still have a job to do: converting those leads to real customers.

Email marketing is the basis of digital marketing. This strategy is not only an effective channel for communication between businesses and customers but it is also absolutely free.

The good thing is, is easy and most people like to receive professional and business communication via email.

Email marketing is not limited, you can use emails to communicate with your existing customers as well as new customers. Moreover, you can use email marketing for coupons and deliver sale information.

As a small business owner, you might not have the time to send out newsletters and other promotions.

What if you decide to use email marketing for content sharing? You can decide to go a notch higher by sending your clients unique content regularly. Subscribers enjoy interesting content so sending emails of fresh unique content is a clever move.

However, you can simply use marketing automation to make your marketing process a bit easier.

Build And Manage relationships With CRM

CRM strategy is not just for big businesses. If you thought you don’t need a CRM strategy for your small businesses, you’re in for a big shock. CRM is crucial for any business that wants to succeed.

You cannot afford to push away customer relationship management.
CRM done effectively helps in customer retention, reduces marketing costs, reduces the cost of sales, boosts sales, and increases profit margins.

CRM strategy helps you to store all your sales and marketing information so you can easily keep track of your records.

Invest In Advertising

If you want to increase your customer base and boost your revenue then you should invest in advertising. There are multiple advertising options that your business can use.

Google Ads

Google Adwords is an online popular advertising tool that helps business owners attract people searching for services and products similar to theirs. As a business owner, you need to know that a website and social media accounts are not enough for marketing your business online. You have to go the extra mile if you want tremendous results.

Luckily, you can access both free and paid tools online to help your business grow and reach a wider market.

You can start using Google Ads by following the steps below:

• Write your copy
• Include the keywords you want to target
• Set your daily budget
• Select the starting and end dates of your campaigns

Facebook

Facebook is a very crucial platform for small businesses. This platform has billions of users from all corners of the world thus it is one of the best places for digital marketing. As a small business, Facebook will help you engage your customers and also attract new customers.

This digital platform has various free tools that can be useful to a small business that is on a marketing mission with a tight budget.

This social media platform not only builds your online presence but it builds trust with your customers. If you don’t have a Facebook account or page yet, you are missing out on many things.

You can promote your business with Facebook so many ways, and you might get confused about what to do. You can follow the below steps if you don’t know how to get your foot on this social media platform:

• Create a business page
• Post content regularly on your Facebook page
• Engage followers (algorithms favor posts that have great engagements)
• Use Facebook Ads
• Create interesting content for your followers
• Utilize all Facebook features (for example Facebook live video and Facebook stories)

Youtube

Have you ever thought of using youtube to market your small business? Youtube is one of the largest search engines in the world with billions of users therefore you can make a kill out of it. Many business owners have realized that they can get massive profits out of Youtube.

With over 6 billion hours of video posted every 30 days, you can market your business and attract more customers through this media.

So how do you go about it?

• Create a channel for your brand
• Use the right words (Just like Google, Youtube uses keywords to search for videos so make sure you use the right words every time you post a video)
• Include your social media links to your Youtube Channel
• Post videos describing your services( how-to videos are very important because they show people how your product or services work so make sure you create content for your services)
• Use thumbnails (it might be hard for people to notice you if you don’t use interesting images or thumbnails)

Instagram

Instagram is a robust social media platform that big companies have taken advantage of to market their businesses. As a small business owner, it is time you started using this social media network for your marketing purposes.

Don’t get intimidated by the presence of big businesses on Instagram. Many small business owners have used the platform to leverage their businesses.
You can start marketing your small business on Instagram immediately by following the steps below:

• Set up your account. If you already have a Facebook page or account that has a huge following then it linking it to your Instagram account is a clever move. Instagram allows you to link all your social media networks to your Instagram account.
• Use Instagram stories (With Insta stories you can combine multiple images and videos that disappear after 24 hours just like in Snapchat)
  Monitor results (pay attention to what’s working to see what type of content your audience is interested in)
• Engage your audience on the comments( Don’t put up a post and disappear online. Try to reply to the comments.)
• Try influencer marketing( influencer marketing is known to be one of the best ways to boost your Instagram following)
• Use hashtags ( Unlike Google and other social media networks that use keywords, Instagram uses hashtags. If you want your posts to be on the top of searches then you need to get familiar with hashtags)
• Create videos frequently(videos are important for small businesses)
• Use Instagram Ads (You probably want to carry on with your advertising journey without incurring extra costs. But with Instagram Ads, you have the opportunity to advertise your business at an affordable cost)
• Host Instagram contest
• Collaborate

Use SEO

Have you ever known you can use SEO to market your small business? If your answer is no then you are wrong. SEO is not meant for huge businesses only but it’s also the best for small businesses. Although it might seem like an intimidating endeavor in the digital world, it is very possible to attract new customers.

You can improve your chances of being seen by potential customers when they search for products and services similar to yours.

There are two elements of SEO.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO refers to elements like meta descriptions, title tags, and body content. It is easy to work on your on-page SEO because you have direct control over the components.

If you have never worked on your on-page SEO then you can start by optimizing the elements. Include relevant keywords in the components to improve your ranking on search engines.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO means all factors outside your site that affect its ability to rank on search engines. Off-page SEO is a bit complex than on-page SEO.

For better understanding, the most important off-page component is a link from other sites. These links act like votes.

If you want to make the link-building process easy, ensure that you create high-quality content. As long as your content is useful, people will share it and that’s why you have to invest time to create valuable content.

Conclusion

There are so many ways of marketing your small business. You have to remember that monitoring is also critical just as implementing the tricks of small business marketing strategies. Ensure that you implement and monitor the performance of the strategies that you will use to market your small business.

Featured image: Photo by Mike Petrucci on Unsplash