Low budget is the top third marketing challenge for small businesses these days, according to experts. Startups with angel capital usually are less likely to spend on marketing because when there is a limited business budget, online marketing might be one of the top expenses small businesses look to cut down. Marketing is all about attracting prospects, prospects become customers and customer help you generate revenues. In simple words, it shouldn’t be avoided at any cost, especially in this era of digital world where people love to shop online.
There are a lot of ways (both online and offline) you can market your business or products and the right mix of activities can help you make a marketing campaign successful and effective.
In this article, there is a big list of small business marketing ideas to help you promote your business in the best way.
Make Sure Your Website Delivers Great Experience
A website with an appealing appearance can make a business look professional. But its functionality and ability to acquire new leads and customers are the other vital things to stand out. If your official website is outdated and difficult to navigate, then consider a redesign and opt for a responsive and easy to navigate web design.
If you are unable to pay for a professional web developer, you can take advantage of website builders that are fast and cost-effective too. As more and more searches are done over different mobile devices, a mobile responsive and fast loading website can help you appear in more search results. Mobile-friendly sites offer greater SEO benefits as Google has announced that they will rank responsive and fast loading sites higher.
Start Building Your Email List from Day One
Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing tactics to reach your audience. But you will need to build a bigger email list for this purpose and from day one. A simple yet appealing email sign up form on your website or blog helps you get website users to sign up for your email list. However, a website or blog is not the only place to get email IDs for email marketing but you can also extract emails from different social media sites like LinkedIn by using email extractors such as Wiza. Offering some incentives to your users for email sign up can help you grow your list faster.
Start a Blog
Blogging offers exceptional marketing benefits to businesses of all types. No doubt it takes time and effort to establish a blog for business but results are awesome always. You can create compelling, informative, problem-solving and useful blog posts relevant to your business and industry.
You can also write about the latest industry trends and breaking news to become an authority in your field/industry. Well written and properly optimized blog posts also provide you with more chances to appear in more search results. In this way, you can get more visitors to your business website to convert them into valuable customers. Constant blogging builds customer trust and improves your online presence.
An Ongoing Optimisation Strategy
Your business website will provide no benefits is users are unable to find it on search engines. Website SEO at the start is not enough, but you will need a continuous website optimization strategy to rank it higher in search engines and to appear in more searches. You should also be updating your site with fresh and keyword-rich content to stand out from the crowd. Also, create a link building strategy to increase the authority and visibility of your website.
Plan an Email Marketing Strategy
Right after creating informative content and building more landing pages for your products, you will definitely want more people to visit them. It is the place where email marketing comes in handy. As email list subscribers want something informative, useful and valuable from your site, you should build an effective email marketing strategy to provide them with useful stuff without making them annoyed.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is another effective and cost-effective marketing strategy for small businesses to attract more customers. It is all about creating and distributing high-quality content that is relevant to your business and tempting to your audience. Content marketing is considered as a valuable digital asset for any business if done correctly.
Whether it is your website, blog or social media profiles, always produce different types of content like articles, visuals, videos, podcasts, and infographics, etc. to keep your audience engaged effectively.
Build a Strong Social Media Presence
As everyone is on social media these days, it is one of the best ways to reach the target audience even without spending a lot of bucks. Almost every business is available on social media platforms. But just having a profile is not enough. Businesses need to do more in order to get more from social media presence. They need to do things like keeping profiles up to date with the latest information, posting informative and useful content, sharing user-generated content to add value, responding users’ queries and asking them for feedback, etc.
Create Appealing Videos
According to research, more than 50% of internet users want to see interesting videos from their favorite brands and businesses. Similarly, social media sites like Facebook and Instagram are introducing more visual layouts to entertain users in the best possible way. That is the reason, small businesses should be creating interesting videos to convey the corporate message in a great way even without making customers bore. Corporate video content can also be shared across different social media channels like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram to grab the attention of more users.
Learn from Competitors
You can learn several marketing tactics not only from your competitors but from other successful companies in your industry. Look at their websites, social accounts and emails to learn a lot of new things to tailor your marketing campaigns accordingly for better ROI. Several competitor analysis tools are also available that can be used to compare similar businesses in your field to get more marketing ideas and techniques.
