A small business gathers much momentum in its early stages through marketing. But then, marketing is a tightrope walk. You have to balance the efforts and the money spent on marketing, else you will run out of cash and send your business crashing down.
In this article, I am going to explain 5 proven marketing strategies that will help your small business scale up the volumes. Most of these strategies can be implemented in right away. Some might take weeks and few others, some months before you can see anything materialize. However, at least one of it, if executed in the right manner can skyrocket your business to great heights.
So, here you go.
Facebook Advertising:
Facebook says that approximately Two Million small and medium sized businesses are marketing using its native social advertising tools.
Facebook ads are great ways to reach your specific target customer band right in their news feed. Moreover, Facebook ads are priced reasonably making it affordable for startups that are running with shoestring budgets.
Moreover, it is easy to create a Facebook advertising campaign. All you need is limited content copy, a compelling image and link to your website to get it up and going.
You can also track the RoI on your Facebook ad campaigns easily from the dashboard provided.
Google My Business:
Google My Business is your best partner to help your business get noticed in the neighborhood and even in the global scale easily. It is a powerful tool to use if you are running a business that receives leads from immediate locality. According to Google, “near me” searches have doubled since the past year.
Google My Business is a tool that is specifically designed for business owners. The integrations for advertising, map navigation, user reviews, working hours, images and much more can bring in leads and conversions more than what classified advertisements can do.
The great news is that you can also list your business for free in Google My Business. You don’t need a website to get started either. It is a simple way to broadcast your business info to the whole world at zero cost.
Content Marketing:
Bill Gates once said, “Content is King.” He could not have been anymore right. Even today, two decades since his quoting, content is the cornerstone for digital marketing.
42% of B2B marketers rate content marketing to be highly effective than traditional marketing strategies. Also, nearly 81% of marketers surveyed by Social Media Examiner has integrated social media marketing with traditional marketing.
Outbound marketing has thinned out. Inbound is the new norm. Content sits right in the center of it and helps businesses reach out to their customers through informative and educative content.
Content marketing has several ingredients to it to make it happen. They include:
- Great quality content
- Keywords optimized for high ranking
- Headers, titles and meta descriptions optimization
- Frequent content creation & social sharing
All this put together makes content marketing a great tool for marketers to win customers and boost their sales volumes.
Search Engine Optimization:
SEO is a magical word. There is so much hype around it. Be assured that it is well-deserving for the hype.
SEO is like a free way to bait and reel in your customers for free. The only expense you would probably need to expend is your physical effort to optimize website headers, meta descriptions and tags with relevant key phrases that customers use to search for products that you are selling. It is not rocket science and is easy. After all, most of the customer journeys are started with an online search.
You can optimize your website for search engine ranking using on-page and off-page optimization techniques. SEO is largely reliant on Google’s search algorithm. Google has included quality content, user experience and security as top ranking signals to help users find the high quality pages related to their search queries.
Google refers around 200+ algorithms to get higher rankings in search engines, recently major communities are favoring SSL encryption to establish trust and secure environment over the web. So, if you have a website, you might want to configure an SSL certificate which does the dual task of securing your website through encryption and also helps to boost higher search engine ranking. Being a newbie to SSL or SEO, you should know how SSL Certificate authority works & basics of SSL Certificate.
Email marketing
There are customers who might skip checking their email notifications, but there is none who will actually ignore any of the emails they have received. Hence, email marketing is a great way to win your customer attention, make them talk and win their loyalty.
Email marketing is the perfect tool for lead nurturing. Not all customers who visit your store are going to buy from it. But, there is still a ray of hope to make them buy through lead nurturing. Email marketing contributes to lead nurturing by keeping in constant touch with the visitors.
Moreover, email marketing offers several marketing benefits like:
- Global reach at uniform costs
- Easy customer segmentation
- Easy to measure results
- Direct and instant reach to customers
- Quick to set up and so on.
So make sure you have email marketing featuring in your marketing strategies for 2017.
In a Nutshell
Marketing for a small business is cumbersome. There are several restrictions including cost, geographical reach, limited staffs and so on.
However, the above mentioned 5 marketing strategies offer to achieve all the results without being bogged down by the problems. They are effective ways to skyrocket your business sales volumes and productivity and outwit competition.
With Google My Business and Social media marketing you can establish an impressive brand image for your business in the immediate neighborhood. Similarly, email marketing and content marketing helps achieve a level of intimacy with customers who might develop interest in the product in the long term. SEO will have you to boost the ranking and will increase customer engagement. Also, SSL Certificate will help to gain the trust of the customer.
So, don’t wait any longer. Try these strategies out and scale your business to next higher level.
Labdhi Shah
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