Marketing your small business to the masses can be a daunting task. It can be hard to know where to begin and what marketing channels to try. The good news is that it is possible to run an effective marketing strategy without the benefits of a huge budget. In this blog post we’ve put together our 4 top tips for marketing your small business whether you’re on a shoe string budget or open to spending a little more to gain new leads.
Social Media
Small business owners are often tempted to maintain a presence on all social media sites. While it is important to concentrate some of your marketing hours on improving your social media presence, you should choose one or two sites to focus your activities on. The key to social media success is consistency. If you focus on Twitter you should make sure you allot an hour/two of your day to tweeting, retweeting and liking posts from influencers in your community and taking part in live twitter chats. The more active you are on the site the more leads you will get from it. And of course, the beauty of social media sites is that there are typically no charges to using them.
Email marketing is an inexpensive, effective method of marketing to the masses and communicating regularly with your customers. In fact, email is still the preferred contact method for customers according to a Google Consumer survey carried out by SparkPost. Email service providers such as Mailchimp run a free plan for small business with up to 2,000 subscribers and their email templates are easy to use for those of us with zero to little design experience. You could start off by creating a welcome email campaign for customers who have signed up to use your product/service or bought an item from you. From there, you can decide when to email them depending on their interactions with your site. Remember to avoid sending customers multiple emails throughout the week as they will be sure to unsubscribe if they feel like they are being spammed.
Blog Post
Not only is regular blogging free, but it also establishes you as a thought leader in your industry and can increase the value customers attribute to your service, product or expertise. Along with this, Google looks favorably on sites that are constantly being updated with fresh content and takes this into account when ranking your site on Google search pages. Blogging gives you the opportunity to provide your customers with experience driven expertise and can answer frequently asked customer questions without the need for face time with you. If you have the ability to add a blog feature to your site we would advise you to begin with one blog post a week and build on it from there. Just make sure to include links to your blog post on your chosen social media site.
Paid Advertising
Finally, adopting a paid advertising strategy can seem the most daunting to someone with limited marketing experience. Again our advice is to start off by testing one paid advertising channel to begin with. We recommend you use Facebook advertising to start as it is the easiest to use and you can begin testing with a tiny daily budget. Don’t lose hope if your ad performs poorly in the beginning, paid advertising is all about testing and iterating to increase the number of users who click on your ad and convert to buy your product or service.
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