10 Small Business Marketing Tips that Work
Marketing is an integral part of running a successful business. Whether you're looking to promote your product or service or just trying to build brand awareness, different strategies will help you reach your goals.
Below are 10 marketing tactics you can work through to help build your brand, grow your presence and begin getting leads.
Create an Email List
Most marketing strategies will identify the need to build an email database. This is a must if you haven't started building an email database! You can begin by having a sign-up button on your website. If you get given business cards, enter those details into your database. Create opportunities for people to provide their details; lead magnets are GREAT and sign-up deals work wonders!
Adopting an email marketing tactic allow you to communicate directly with those who have opted in, where you can keep in touch without paying for advertising. Keep them updated on news, tips, info, blogs, and upcoming sales. As you grow your list, you can start segmenting and creating automated email sequences that capture customers at different stages of the buyer's journey.
For example, identifying when someone clicks on a particular link, like a booking button or an add-to-cart that gets abandoned. You can retarget these people with a separate message to 'remind' them if they've forgotten to follow through.
Like all marketing activities, not all of them will suit. Emailing marketing is not immune to this. But as a tool to promote your business and freely (or cheaply, compared to other promotional measures), emailing is a KEY!
Build trust with customers
Since we operate so much online, building relationships centred on trust is essential. It's more than talking about your business.
You need to be:
Telling stories that people can relate to and ideally link to your business.
Personal and provide information about you.
Consider your 'WHY'. Explain the story behind the brand and what it means to you.
BE YOURSELF! Don't worry what others think or if you wonder if you aren't being professional. You need to be yourself to attract the customers you want to do business with.
Your social platforms are an effective way to communicate your story and brand. It's a place to connect, learn more and be entertained. In addition to telling your story, sharing interesting articles and industry related updates helps build followers and fans who will share your content with others.
Offer free samples
When it comes to a simple marketing tip any business owner can implement, it's the 'try before you buy' scenario. When you offer free samples, people feel more comfortable buying from you without the risk. Product-based businesses can do this by providing free samples either in-store or online.
Service-based businesses can provide free discovery calls or other free online services, such as 'how to' guides, Q&A guides, live online sessions to ask questions, workshops and webinars.
Providing something of value for free presents the opportunity to build trust. When you are confident in your product or service, something for free exhibits you back yourself. It's not a way to then drive into a hard sell. It's simply offering potential customers a taste of what you offer.
Build a lead magnet
The development of a lead magnet is an online marketing tool you can use repeatedly. Your lead magnet is where you create value-added FREE content customers can take and use without any hooks. Well, there's just one! You'll ask people to provide their email in return, which you can then use to remarket to them.
For a service-based business, this may be free value-driven information a potential customer can take away and use themselves. For example, this could be an online resource or guide on improving your website speed at home for FREE or providing FREE recipe cards if you're a food supplier. If you're an eCommerce business, this might be signing up to receive a 10% on your first purchase.
Don't be afraid to give away too much in your lead magnet. There will always be a need for your service or product and elements a customer needs help to do. Remember, you are the expert in your field, and it's much easier for potential customers to ask for your help than try to reinvent the wheel.
Creating a landing page
If using a lead magnet, you need a landing page people where people sign-up, and you capture that important email address. At this point, it's a good idea to include a step where the supplied email address gets verified before releasing the offer. It helps avoid SPAM, and once they reply back, their browser will automatically recognise emails from you as safe.
A separate landing page helps grow your email database list too. Use it as a sign-up page where customers access free resources, the latest deals', useful tips and info and other relevant information that adds value. Mailchimp is one place where you can create free landing page sign-up forms, but plenty of other free options are available
Consider the marketing content and formats
When thinking about content, a good place to start is working out content pillars - where you note down 3-5 content 'buckets' you'll write about. For example, in my business, Pocket Marketing, my content pillars are Marketing Consulting, Marketing Strategy, Social Media Marketing and Business Ownership. Then I get to work breaking this into topics within each content pillar.
Setting aside time each week or month to focus on the content you'll be producing is also helpful. I often hear that people need to figure out what to post. Breaking things into content pillars helps avoid that. You've got various formats you can use now as well. It's no longer just about posting text and an image. Play around with all that is on offer, especially using video.
Find customers
A key marketing element all business owners need is customers! But where do you start when you need to find customers? The starting point is understanding who your customers are. Who are you targeting - who is the ideal customer you want to attract and work with?
As a business, you'll likely have some idea of who your customers are, such as their demographics. But often, we need to go a lot deeper to understand their social and psychological needs. What drives them to purchase? What are their spending habits? What happens day-to-day for them? Write down these questions and put yourself in their shoes when answering.
Start blogging
Another small business marketing tactic you should prioritise is blogging. Blogging is an excellent way to drive traffic to your website and impart free information to your customers. There are plenty of benefits to blogging, including:
Using keywords in your content that you want to rank for
Creating a piece of content you can email to customers
Breaking blog material down into chunks for social media posting
Using pieces of content to create video content
Plenty of free tools are available online that make blogging easy, and with the emergence of AI writers, there is no excuse not to get started. Blogging requires work and research if you want it to work well, and ideally should be around 1400 words long to get ranked on searches. That might seem a lot, but if you break it down into topics and paragraphs, you can quickly start to fill up the words.
Like many marketing tactics, starting is the first step. Pick a top and start to craft some words. Even if you don't get to 1400 words, something is better than nothing and will help only help you develop and get better.
Get your website SEO friendly
You might be surprised to learn how often websites need to be better optimised for SEO. Often simple and essential SEO elements are missed. Creating a website is not enough - your content should be optimised for organic searches.
That means thinking about the following as a minimum:
Correct title tags - Ideally up to 60 characters
Meta description
H1 - H6 tags. H1 titles have the highest ranking and you should have one for each page
Image Alt Text
If you know your way around your website, it's relatively easy to manage these elements. When deciding what keywords to use, consider the organic search results you want to rank for. Having adjectives in the title tags helps. For example, rather than just Pocket Marketing as the title tag, add in small business marketing solutions.
Spend some time researching which keywords are worth targeting. Some have a high search difficulty and are harder to get ranked for in an organic search. But other alternatives may be less difficult but still have a high search volume. For example, the search term 'marketing' has a high search volume of 1600 but a difficulty of 77. However, the term digital marketing agency has a search volume of 590, but the difficulty is only 29.
Look at sites like neilpatel.com/ubersuggest and semrush.com to help with research.
Try an SEO expert if you're stuck with SEO and would rather outsource it. Camilla from Joy Marketing is one of those. She knows her stuff and understands the importance of having a well-performing website. It's worth getting an audit completed so you know everything is functioning as it should.
Google Business Profile Manager
Get your Google Business Profile listing up to date. If you want to rank for local organic searches in your area, this is a MUST!
This platform is growing in momentum, and Google will continue to roll out new features.
Get your listing updated in the following way:
Complete all the fields that apply to you
Ensure the primary category is relevant to your business
If you sell products, list them.
Services. Note down as many that apply.
Ask customers for reviews - there is a link you can copy and paste.
Engage with customers by posting at least one piece of content per week - it can be something you've already posted. Think about keywords in the content.
Add a link to make appointments. Calendly is good
Update with photos of you and your business, products and services regularly.
As mentioned, this is a platform to keep your eye on. There will be new features designed to help get you seen and get extra bonus points for being active on your profile. If you don't, it's less likely that Google will show a profile that isn't up to date, doesn't put in the effort to post content and has only a few reviews.
Need more help?
If you’re unsure where to start or your current online marketing solutions aren’t achieving the desired results, reach out! I’m keen to ensure business owners are getting the right solutions for their organisation.
