As a business owner you need to constantly think of ways to increase your visibility – and this means coming up with some very effective small business marketing ideas that will spur your target audience into action.
First. Identify your target audience.
When it comes to successfully doing business, you must first identify our target audience, what they do and how your product/service can assist them. Learning about your audience means learning about their interests and responsibilities.
When done correctly, you’ll know how to create a message that “speaks” to them. You can personalize your messages and sales to entice them to do what you want them to do.
Be sure that the messages you send to your prospective audience fit into their “buying stage.” For example, you may have a prospective customer who needs just a little more push to buy your product, while another customer is just informing himself. You want these conversations to happen at the right time – not too soon, not too late.
So really take some notes and ask yourself these questions:
• Who is your exact target audience?
• What are the problems and needs of your audience?
• What are the buying stages of your customers?
If you answered the questions above and you have a clear understading of your audience, it’s time you learn six important small business marketing tips to help boosting your marketing.
1. Make use of marketing automation
Did you know that 67 percent of marketing leaders are using marketing automation? This number is expected to rise in 2019.
Now, you may think you can do everything when it comes to your business – marketing, creating content, email marketing, etc. After a short time, though, you’ll start feeling overwhelmed and stressed out. The end result is a loss of customers and other failures.
By using automation software, you can concentrate on tasks that actually need your attention. Marketing automation will find you good leads, convince prospective buyers to become buyers and be efficient. Here are 4 great marketing automation tools to use as a small business.
• DuxSoup for LinkedIn automation
Dux Soup allows you to write and follow people on Linkedin automatically. With the tool you can define target groups of people you want to interact with and let the software do the rest. It’s really effective in building a large audience on Linkedin, that you can target with your organic content.
• Buffer for automating social media
Buffer is a tool that helps you to manage your social media accounts, all at once.
You can schedule content on each plattform like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest etc. weeks in advance. As a result you only have to create and schedule the content once and you don’t have to waste time logging into different accounts each day. Furthermore, you can track the overall success of your content with the software and find trends within your content.
• Use Customer.io to automate e-mails
With customer.io messages can be personalized with ease. You can send all kinds of message types automatically, based on rules to your customers or your email-lists. By segmenting your targets, customer.io is an incredibly powerful tool to maintain a steady flow of messages. Further, the tool allowes you to send specific emails based on a specific behavior of clients.
If the software, which is connected to your website, notices a particular behavior, customer.io sends out the email automatically. For example, specific buying intent at a webshop can be followed up with an sales cupon email.
• Adroll for cross plattform re-targeting
Adroll helps you to easily retarget your customers across different devices and platforms. Combinded with a smart segmentation you can target your ads better to specific groups that visited your web page. As a result you should be able to create more efficient ad channels.
With its contract free 2 week trial you can test the tool and see if it fits your needs.
• Gist for automating marketing, sales and support
Gist gives you the functionality of 9 different marketing, sales and support tools from a single platform. Have your live chat, email marketing, meeting scheduler, help desk and more all seamlessly work together in one dashboard. Create a powerful and personal experience for site visitors all the way to valued customers.
2. Create relevant content
Now that you know who your audience is, it’s time to develop relevant material – material they will respond to and engage with. Do not ever use click bait or sales pitches as a means to entice your audience. Rather, go with a personal touch. You want to come across as understanding and caring about the things they need and desire.
Don’t just push your products/services in their face. Rather, focus on offering them informative, creative and entertaining content that makes them think. This will help you far more in the long run to increase your sales and bottom line.
Here are some sites that can provide you with profound insights into content marketing:
• Backlinko Blog (great for content and backlink building)
• Hubspot Blog (developing content strategy)
• Optinmonster Blog (content examples)
Most important is to keep in mind that if you create value for the reader, sales will follow.
3. Analyze referring websites and find similar ones
Use web analytics tools like SEOreview to identify pages that link to your website.
Filter out the ones that bring the most visitors and conversions to your site. Then try to find similar pages, e.g. via similarweb.com. By cooperating with similar sites you can offer them value with the content you already have, grow your page traffic and earn new backlinks.
Check out these free tools to find the most valuable backlinks of your pages/ content pieces.
• Backlink Checker Ahref
• SEO Review Backlink Tool
• Backlink-Checker from small SEO Tools
This strategy is especially effective in creating the most value from content pieces you already have. So before creating a lot of new content make sure to increase the performance of your old content. This can save you a lot of time and money.
4. Focus on email optimization
Studies show that 86 percent of individuals use email as the primary way to conduct business. It stands to reason that email is an extremely effective way to reach your audience. It’s not going to disappear anytime soon.
Despite its importance for small business owners, email marketing can be very tricky. Just because you produce amazing content doesn’t mean your followers will actually open and read it. Great news, though! There are things you can do that will increase the open rates and conversions, while engaging your audience at the same time.
• Check Email Adresses
Use tools like QuickEmailVerification.
to be sure that email adresses exist (since your mail adress will be flagged as spam if you send too many mails to non-existing mail adresses).
• Sender Address – You want all emails to come from a recognized sender name - your business address is recommended. Check out this blog post on becoming a trusted sender.
• Subject Line – You want this line to tell the reader what they need to do? Does it sound as if something you’d open? If it doesn’t, come up with something else to capture their attention. Here some great examples.
• Design – You want the design to be viewable on both computer and mobile. Does the content hit upon what the subject line said? Make sure it does.
• Call To Action – Let customers know what action(s) you want them to take next. Make it easy for them to understand and carry out.
5. Get only involved with social media that is relevant for your business
If you’re not already, sign up with a social account for your business. But what is most important.. Be sure you use the right social medium (one where most of your audience can be found). Once you do that, make use of it. Since algorithms change regularly, it can be hard to get organic traffic. When necessary, do boosted posts and paid advertisements to find your audience.
Be sure to visit Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and LinkedIn to learn more about their ads and how they work.
If you need more information take a look at this guide on what each social network is good for.
6. Don’t just tell, show your audience
The human brain can process images many times quicker than words, which is why business owners need to focus on creating visual content such as images and videos.
Visual content is key, because people remember about 80% of what they see, only 15% of what they read and less than 10% of what they hear.
With the growth and popularity of content in the form of Facebook Stories, Instagram Stories, Snapchat, etc., it’s a good idea to stop typing and create some stunning images or videos.
Use visuals that show your products or services in real life use cases. Make the content interesting so your audience will stay engaged.
Take a look at visuals from the instagram account of HALO TOP.
Or the Instagram account of Nivea:
Highly successful brands like HALOTOP or Nivea are using creative visuals on their website, social media or newsletters to promote their products in the best possible way.
However, most of the time this visual content is produced by professional photographers or agencies. As a small business this can be too costly at about 50-100$ per picture.
zerolens is a tool that allowes you to create the visual content you need, at costs you can afford.
Try zerolens for free, here.
Hope you guys liked the selection of these six small marketing business tips and let me know what worked for you and your business.
