Top 10 Marketing Strategies
For Small Businesses, Startups, Consultants, Coaches & Trainers
Whether you’ve been in business for a while or are just getting started, having an effective marketing strategy is critical. There is no excuse for you to let your business fall behind.
As a small business owner, you may not have the same marketing budget as larger corporations. Therefore, it’s important for you to conduct your own research and carefully plan your branding, advertising, social media, pricing, services, promotions, products, and website.
Marketing your business successfully requires a concerted effort to push your brand across multiple platforms in order to reach your target market. This can be a difficult task for most small business owners – due to limited budget or resources.
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#1: Website
It’s almost an assumption that a website is a must-have for any business. It’s a powerful and valuable online real estate for any business to thrive and grow.
It’s not only a place where your potential customers would go to find information about your product or service, but also a powerful asset for SEO, content marketing, lead capture (for email marketing) and more.
Thankfully, you don’t have to break the bank to have a website – you can have your website created for as little as $398.
#2: Google My Business
One of the most powerful things you can do for your business is to rank your Google My Business (GMB) listing.
In fact, if you own a local business that caters to local customers, this strategy may be THE most powerful strategy available to you. Your listing may show up amongst top paid ads, even before other organic search results.
If you can rank your GMB listing in the top three, you can generate a steady stream of highly qualified leads.
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#3: SEO For Small Businesse
Small businesses are frequently tempted to overlook SEO (Search Engine Optimisation of a website) in their overall marketing strategy, perhaps due to other larger businesses investing millions in dominating the search game.
However, that doesn’t mean that you should totally ignore SEO because you’d still want to be ‘found’ on the first page of search results (at least).
Here’s why you need to have a good SEO in place:
- It is effective. A well-planned and executed SEO It helps boost your search ranking and can help increase organic traffic to your website.
- It is inexpensive. SEO provides a reasonable return on investment when compared to pay-per-click, social media marketing, and even purchasing email marketing lists.
- It has a commanding market share. Prior to making a purchase, approximately 90% of consumers conduct an online search for a product or service. They will not find your company if it does not appear in search results.
- Mobile search is on the rise. Google announced this year that mobile search had surpassed desktop search for the first time. Therefore, make sure that your website is optimised for mobile users.
#4: Small Business Link Building
In your search rankings, the Google algorithm considers the quality and quantity of sites that link to you. In fact, some SEO consultants even advise new businesses to buy links in order to improve their ranking. That strategy, however, may cause more harm than good.
There is no doubt that high-quality links increase authority and credibility, ultimately improving your ranking, but changes to the Google algorithm penalise sites with an excessive number of low-quality or “spammy” links. The key is to create useful, relevant content that people want to share in order to build links the old-fashioned way.
For SMEs, this entails spending money and resources to create highly shareable, high-quality content. Long-form blog posts, in-depth articles, infographics, and video tutorials are all acceptable.
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#5: Facebook Advertising
There’s a good reason why over two million small and medium-sized businesses advertise on Facebook.
It is a low-cost and effective way to reach almost any demographic. Facebook has advanced ads targeting enabling you to target a specific audience based on geography, interests, age, gender, online behavior, and a variety of other factors.
Plus, with the Facebook Ads Manager also makes it relatively easy to run and test multiple ad sets to help narrow in on a winning campaign.
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#6: Google Ads & Video Ads
Every second, Google receives over 40,000 search queries. No other advertising method has the potential to get your company in front of that many people. It’s effective yet a competitive sport – but if you know what you’re doing, it can be extremely beneficial to your business.
Despite being a paid channel, Adwords’ goal is still to deliver relevant search results to users.
As a result, proper on-page SEO is still important because Google assigns a quality score to your ad based on CTR (Click Through Rate), relevance, and the landing page to which your ad directs traffic. This quality score influences the bid rate required to have an ad displayed, with higher scores lowering the bid cost.
And don’t forget about video ads via one of the most used platform – YouTube. Since it’s part of Google, working on your Search Ads and Video Ads can be managed under the same Ads Manager account.
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#7: Content Marketing
Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content. The purpose is to attract and retain a clearly defined audience and to drive the audience to take profitable action (ie. click to buy, click for more information, etc).
Unlike paid advertising, initial payoff for content marketing slower and lower. However, this strategy a long-term term effort for sustainable growth in visitors and leads.
Content marketing is not easy and requires every element to be done right:
- Relevant topics with high quality content
- SEO optimisation
- Reader-friendly design
- Regular content creation and promotion
#7: Organic Social Media
Using social media for any business is an absolute must these days because more consumers are using social media. If people can’t find your company on social media, they’ll look for competitors who ARE on their preferred social channels.
The real question is not whether you should have active social media accounts, but how much time and resources you should devote to expanding your social audiences.
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#8: Email Marketing
Email marketing is at the heart of digital marketing.
The majority of people who visit your website will not buy from you right away. Since 2016 until today, the best way to sell is to collect contact information for additional marketing and “lead nurturing,” and email remains the highest converting channel for interacting with leads.
A “lead magnet” is the first step in an email marketing funnel. This is something enticing that you provide to website visitors in exchange for their email address.
Start building your email list and activate a long-term, profitable email marketing strategy.
#9: Offer free trial and Discount Coupons
When it comes to professional services, it helps when you offer free trial to potential customers. Offering a free consultation is a great way to generate new leads.
Offer discounts for next purchase creates brand loyalty from your existing and potential customers right from the start.
A happy customer will likely market on your behalf, telling friends and family. They are your brand ambassadors and will help promote your business. Nothing works better than referrals and recommendations by your existing customers.
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#10: Network & Collaborate
Joining local business groups will allow you to meet other like-minded people who already have something in common with you: owning a business. While there are many general entrepreneur groups, there may also be niche-specific groups and meetups in your area.
These groups provide an excellent opportunity to bounce ideas off other intelligent people, share referrals, find talent, and identify new opportunities.
They can also help you expand your network outside of the city where you live. Connections multiply, and if your group is serious about networking, you can leverage your seemingly minor connections into much more significant ones.
And what about collaboration and providing recommendations of ‘complementary’ products and services to your clients?
Your goal is to come up with a complementary arrangement that benefits both businesses. For example:
- A marketing firm and an accounting firm could collaborate to recommend each other’s services during new client on-boarding.
- A beauty therapist could provide free (or discount) on m manicure services in exchange for a hair styling services.
