An effective marketing strategy for a small business requires awareness of trends and emerging opportunities. The best time to reassess your marketing plan is when you feel comfortable and confident in it. To remain competitive, it requires a constant review of best practices in the industry and thinking ahead of what is to come. It is also important to choose the right marketing techniques for your type of business, resources, budget and the amount of time you have to invest in it. If you are a small business, you do not have advertising dollars to waste – you have to work smarter with your marketing strategies. Consider these top marketing tips to help grow your business online and start earning the income you dream of.
Blog Your Way to the Top
Blogging is an excellent way to integrate search engine optimization (SEO) practices into your small business website.
Develop quality content
When you optimize your website for search, adding blog posts with quality content can help to increase your rank in search results. This strategy can help you to gain more visitors to your business website. This strategy is more than just blogging on a regular basis, you must also have valuable content that visitors want to read. If you are not ready to take this on yourself, consider hiring a freelance writer or a copywriting service to help you.
Email Marketing
Email marketing continues to be an effective marketing tool for small businesses. Most Americans receive promotional emails from businesses that they make purchases from. Email marketing is one of the best opportunities to gain repeat customers.
Add more resources
In addition to sharing your company’s product or services, you can include resources, helpful links, your blog content and industry news. Be careful about your email frequency and make your content engaging and interesting. Remember, if it is not something you would read, your readers will not want to either.
SMS marketing
Mobile technology has had a huge impact on marketing small businesses. More than 90% of Americans use mobile devices and text messaging (SMS).
Use software and services
There are SMS marketing services that offer web-based software to help you build lists, create messages and send them just like email marketing. This method of marketing message distribution has excellent open and response rates.
Tailored Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing has become the new core of marketing mediums. Your small business cannot afford to maintain the status quo in your marketing activities.
Extend your brand
Social media has the opportunity to extend your brand throughout your community at a low cost. You can also personalize your marketing efforts by identifying consumer actions and target your audience based upon their interests. By targeting specific groups to market your business services or products to you, gain more return on your advertising investment than you would with traditional media efforts.
Earned Media
Pitch stories to your local media outlets or industry publications. This is valuable to legitimize your company in the community you serve, and also to build backlinks to your business website.
Article marketing
You can take this a step further and pursue article marketing where you write guest posts on other websites or publications. The best part is that this marketing effort is affordable.
Be a Subject Matter Expert
Offer to speak a seminars, workshops or other community events to gain publicity. This strategy not only legitimizes your business, it also helps build your professional profile in your service area.
Start local
Not sure where to start? Consider becoming a member of your local chamber of commerce to seek out speaking engagement opportunities.
Build Partnerships
Partner with nonprofit organizations and other businesses to build your brand and support local organizations and entrepreneurs.
Save on advertising
Whether you offer to do a giveaway of services or prizes, the partnership can help you to extend your reach and enjoy the cost savings of sharing advertising expenses.
Claim Your Space
Do not let someone else gain your username on social media or control your location in directories.
Protect Your Domain
Make sure you claim your space online whether it be domain names, Google Places, Yelp!, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Not only do claiming these accounts add to your credibility, they can also help you manage your reputation and gain traffic from web-based leads.
Ask Your Customers
Your loyal customers are a great way to gain new ones. One of the easiest strategies to building your small business is to ask your customers to share their testimonial or review through online review websites like Yelp, Facebook, and Google.
Get rave reviews
You can also feature the best reviews on your website or marketing materials. Do not be afraid to ask your customers to refer potential customers to you. Ask and you will receive.
Step up your online marketing efforts to see measurable returns by generating more attention and leads.
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