Once you have started a small business, it is most likely that you want to spend enough time & effort promoting and marketing it. You want to reach the right audience who would benefit from your product or service. Leave no stone unturned and incorporate both online and offline marketing strategies to make the most of it.
We understand each business is different and there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ marketing strategy in place and each business has to be provided with a customized strategy according to the needs, concerns, and ground realities of the business.
This write-up seeks to spell out broad guidelines that can govern the marketing strategy of small businesses. This is not a comprehensive list; rather, it will help a business owner evaluate his/ her options when it comes to finalizing marketing strategies. So let’s begin:
Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses
- Create a Website: One of the foremost things a small business can do is to build a professional-looking website, which in time would serve as the most important asset for your business. This would be the platform that would showcase who you are, what you offer, where you are, and how someone interested can get in touch with you.
One of the first things anybody does after hearing about a new business is to check it online. Hence, it is important that you have a presence online to establish credibility and trust among the audience. Your website isn’t just a brochure, but it is a 24×7 storefront of your business, which in time can be turned into a round-the-clock salesperson.
- Start a Blog: This is one of the ways to drive organic traffic to your website and can be aimed at those who have trouble making up their mind for purchase. Starting a blog can be quite inexpensive with free website tools that allow you to build a blog. Start posting once a week and try to educate your potential customers about your product, possible benefits, and why you are better than others.
With each post, try to add call-to-action (CTA) nudging visitors to subscribe to your blog and receive emails. This can be a great way to collect leads and offers a reliable medium to offer information about your product to the subscriber’s inbox if they are still not ready to make the purchase yet.
- Promotion on Social Media: There are multiple platforms, and it can be tough juggling all of them together when new to social media. Start small but start well. Pick a channel that works for your brand and stick with it for some time until it starts showing some visible results.
As you grow your business and get more hands-on with social media, expand your presence across to other channels. Overall, social media can improve traffic to your website, improve your standing on search results, and provides a platform to engage closely with your customers. One of the most promising things to do on social media would be to start a Facebook Business Page that can serve as the second website for your brand.
- Paid Advertising: It might sound a little bizarre that we are asking you to spend money on advertising when there isn’t much of a marketing budget to talk about. But believe us, paid advertising on social media is comparatively inexpensive, considering traditional forms of advertising. Although there are organic ways to build a brand, this happens to be a faster approach.
Pay-to-play tactics are a great way to capture an audience with high buying intent. Paid search with Google Ads can be a great way to gain top placement on search results and for reaching a targeted segment of the audience. Earlier, social ads were limited to text and images, but videos have added a new dimension to marketing. Start with promo videos from VideoCreek which can create professional-looking videos in no time.
- Email Marketing: Most of the visitors who come to your website will not buy from you immediately. Use this opportunity to capture ‘contact information’ from them to build an email list. This can open doors to send out sales, event notifications – not to forget- relevant and meaningful content (newsletter). This is one of those strategies that allow you to keep the conversation going with new and existing customers.
With email, you can showcase the humane side of your business with behind-the-scenes action, social gatherings, and milestone events in your business. A customer in all likelihood is going to stick with a business that is more open and honest in its approach; emails are one of the ways to show this. With advances in technology, there is plenty you can do with the ‘good old email’.
- Join Local Business Groups: By joining such groups, you get in touch with like-minded people who share a common ground with you. These can be forums where you can bounce off ideas, get referrals, find new talent, and identify possible opportunities. This can be a possible catalyst that would expand your network and has the potential to multiply your connections and bring business benefits in the long term. While there may be groups you can join online, face-to-face conversations are known to produce more tangible results. You never know, what you may end up with – joint ventures, profitable partnerships – the list can be endless.
- Speak at Events: If personal branding and establishing authority is what you are looking for, then there is nothing better than speaking at public events in your niche. Initially, you may not even come across events offering speaking opportunities. But you need to be persistent and work your way up by speaking at smaller events as a prelude to bigger occasions. This will give you enough practice and time to fine-tune your public speaking skills. Over time you would be seen as an authority and thought leader in your business, improving your connections and network manifold with ease.
Conclusion
Being a small business owner is tough and getting marketing done in the proper way to stand out from the rest is even tougher. It involves putting in the effort and zeroing-in on strategies that are relevant to you and implementable from your point of view. That said, it is not impossible to find strategies that work and bring visible results. Today, businesses are not confined to just print and media, which require deep pockets. When it comes to video making, you can always rely on VideoCreek. We are surrounded by multiple marketing channels that are vying for the customer’s attention. It is just a matter of clicking on one of these channels to receive that all-important boost for your business.
