When it comes to a small business, you may have got the best possible business idea, an attractive logo, and some good connections.
But is it enough for your business to be successful?
Having everything already well settled with bet business plan, best products, and services but everything goes in vain if you are not able to attract your potential customers.
Now the question arises; how to attract potential customers?
Relax, we know that being a small business you tend to panic at every question we ask. But if you have the answers to the questions we ask, well and good, but if not then calm down as we are here to help you out with the same.
Remember, your small business success actually depends on multiple factors and most important from those factors is how smartly you market your products and services to attract potential customers at the front end and also how wisely you retain your customers at the back end.
Further, the role of marketing is just to connect your business with the right customers and give you success only if you are determined enough to work with the right marketing strategies.
Now, what are the basic points you need to consider before formulating or implementing any marketing strategies?
- Where is your place of business?
- What demographics could make up your customer base?
- Where could your potential customers live?
- Where could you find them online?
- How do they look for some products and services in your niche?
- Who do they actually listen to when making decisions relative to your product and services?
Once you can answer this question, you can easily determine which marketing strategies will make sense and be viable for your business and which would be the total waste of time.
Best marketing strategies for your small business.
Content Marketing
Content marketing has the greatest commercial impact on any business in recent years.
What is Content Marketing?
It’s a process of creating and distributing valuable, consistent and relevant content to attract and retain a defined audience and thus drive profitable customer action.
Content marketing is the only marketing strategy that focuses on the long term results as the initial payoff tends to be too low and the long term sustainable growth in visitors, leads and customers can easily handle alone to carry a business.
We know content marketing is not as easy as eating a piece of cake, but it’s as hard as making that piece of the cake perfectly and thus content marketing requires every element as mentioned below to be fine rightly:
- Quality content
- Consistent content creation
- Relevant topics
- Optimized for SEO
- Optimized for readers
- Consistent content promotion.
Further, if you know, content is not always limited to just blog posts, but it also includes videos, podcasts, online courses and other mediums in which people can consume information.
Small Business Owner ?
Scribbify is a content marketing company. We’ve helped our clients get more sales, traffic & build a brand online. We offer free consultation where we tell you how you can grow your business and go as far as to create a free action plan for your business. You can get the consultation free of charge and learn more about how to get more sales, traffic & authority.
Brand your business – because branding establishes a clear identity of your small business
For you to communicate with your potential customers about what your business is all about, what you do, what you provide and where you stand in the market, you need to compulsorily have a clear identity of your business. By identity we mean, you need to have a suitable name, a logo, a tagline, colors for your business.
It should all be in such a way that your customers can perceive what your business is all about. If we go to define the major aspects of branding, you will understand more in-depth why branding is important:
- Brand – it is a perceived emotional corporate image as a whole.
- Identity – it is a visual aspect that forms part of the overall brand.
- Logo – it is that aspect that identifies a business in its simplest form via the use of a mark or icon.
- Tagline – it is a combination of a few words that define your business.
- Colors – it is that aspect that helps to determine how lively business is.
Hence, consider branding your business first.
Know your business and customers in depth – because you need to know your potential customers.
It’s never like a single marketing strategy work for all size or kind of business. And hence it becomes important for you to think carefully about your target customers, what do they prefer?
- Where do they look for your product and services?
- Where do they live?
- What is their demographic?
- What would attract them to you?
Having clear details about your customers will give you an idea about how to develop a targeted and more effective overall marketing strategy that would bring your business success.
Have a presentable website – because when your potential customers search you online, they would want to have an easy understanding with your website.
How do you get a presentable website?
- Plan your website – Define user requirements and analyze the competition.
- Design your website – Design wireframes, interaction sequences and navigation that ate easy to access.
- Prototype your website – Develop and test dynamic prototypes of usability so that it is easier for your customers to understand.
- Review your website – Review wireframe designs with the customer so that you can connect with them easily.
To let people know about your online presence, you need to have a well designed and presentable website. When you take so much efforts to bring potential customers to your website you need to have a user-friendly, easy to navigate and logical laid out website. You should work on your website from now.
Use Social Media Ads – because with this trending usage of social networking websites it is the best way to target specific groups.
With social media ads, you can focus your advertising on factors such as interest, online behavior, age, sex, location, interests, online habits and so on. This marketing strategy is a relatively inexpensive, effective and most successful way to market virtually and reach the maximum number of potential customers in limited time.
Further, creating social media ads us very easy, you just need an attractive headline, an image or a short video, a link and a but descriptive copy. Social Media Ads Manager also makes in too simple and easy to run and test multiple ad sets that allow you to sharpen in on a leading formula and reach profitability without needing any advanced technical expertise.
Just make sure that you use a good marketing tool to run your ad campaign and speed up your journey to a positive rate of investment. The popular social media ad campaigns are Facebook Ads and Instagram Ads.
Understand the power of SEO – because one of the best and most effective ways to direct web traffic to any website is through Search Engines.
Keeping the page keywords optimized, even if any search engine especially Google changes its search algorithms is the must. That would help your website to surely rank higher on the search engines.
It’s a normal tendency of a visitor to click on a website that is shown on the priority basis, so take advantage of the same and have your website to show up at least on the first page of results, that would definitely increase the chances to grow your business with each click you receive.
Use Google My Business – because it is a tool for any local business that requires local customer base.
As a small business, you need to attract potential customers from your local area and hence you can use Google My Business for that. It’s the most effective strategy if you plan to attract the local clients and customers for your business.
When any person from your local area, searched on Google for the products and services you provide, Google My Business helps them to locate your business on a priority basis. Further, when the potential customers see your website or profile and also read the reviews, your business would automatically gain credibility and people’s trust.
Further, Google My Business also combines all the different Google Platforms into one central place to have easy access and control over your business activities.
Use organic Social Media – because using social media for any type of business is never non-negotiable.
It’s normal with the recent trends that of a potential customer doesn’t find your business and n any social media, they would definitely look for your competitors who would be present on such social platforms.
Further, you don’t need to have an active social media account but it’s most important for you to decide how much time and resources you are willing to invest in growing your social audiences.
Promote product awareness with free samples of products or free demos of services – because when you desire to build awareness for your product and services, you need to let people try it first.
Keep yourself in your potential customers’ shoes and think like them.
Would you trust and buy a product and services if you haven’t experienced it?
No. So how do you expect your buyers to the same?
You need to obviously have a marketing strategy of giving free samples and demos as that would help your potential customers to know about your brand and choose you in the future.
Use Email Marketing – because nowadays everyone has at least one email address.
If you already don’t know, let us remind you that email marketing is the cornerstone of any digital marketing and hence it has many advantages when it comes to the marketing channel.
Further, most of the visitors who visit your website don’t tend to buy from you immediately and so capturing their contact information for future additional marketing is a must.
Moreover, when a person subscribes to your email list, you get an opportunity to display your credibility and authority when you provide the valuable content to them via your email.
Advantages of email marketing:
- Easy to do, setup and run
- Easy to segment
- Easy to automate
- Easy to track and optimize
- Instantaneous communication
- Relatively inexpensive
- Global reach
These were the best and effective marketing strategy when it comes to small business.
Other marketing strategies you could consider are as follows:
Sponsor a local event – because your potential local customers attend such events and you sponsoring such events would attract them towards your products and services, ultimately giving your business success.
Work the referrals – by using your existing customers to get you more business by giving them incentivize referrals to encourage to bring and attract other interested customers.
Conduct webinars – because they tend to be more engaging than normal video ads and would definitely attract more customers.
Advertise in niche print media – as it is most effective in solo marketing strategy and also is best used with the online marketing strategies and these two channels are arranged in such a way that they complement each other to create an engaging experience for your potential customers.
Write a column every week or two – because sharing your expertise in the form of weekly or monthly columns can get credibility and value to your brand.
Join the local business groups – as that would definitely allow you to meet up with other similar thinking people who already share some common thoughts with you like owning a small business. They would also help you to expand your network around the place you live in.
Speak at various local events – because only a person having great expertise, value, authority, and credibility is invited to speak at such events. So take complete advantage of the same.
Conclusion:
Focus on what works for you the most as there are many different types of marketing channels to try and implement to increase your visibility and gain business success. Remember to be open and to try different marketing strategies and most importantly focus all your energy and resources on what works best for you to gain business success so that you can actually experience your goals.
To Team Scribbify,
Firstly Blog presentation is excellent.
and Secondly From your Blog i.e. “Best Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses for 2020”
I really like two points which are most effective for every business whether they are online or want to shift to the Online world.
1) Google My Business.
2) Use organic Social Media.
Thanks for sharing.
keep posting.