Marketing can be tough if you’re a small business owner. Everyone is competing for attention, and it’s hard to stand out from the crowd mostly because you don’t have a big budget for marketing.
However, a limited budget should not stop you from attracting and maintaining a customer base. The rise in digital marketing has made it easier for small business owners to find a way to create a presence and attract informed buyers.
The goal of marketing is to connect your business’ value to the right customer base. Here are five ways to achieve this.
Facebook Advertising
Over two million small to medium sized businesses advertise on Facebook because it’s an inexpensive and effective way to market to virtually any audience.
With Facebook’s advanced targeting features, you can target a specific audience based on location, interests, age, sex, online behavior, and many other factors. Creating Facebook ads is very easy. All you need is a solid headline, a bit of descriptive copy, one image, and a link.
The Facebook Ads Manager also makes it simple to run and test multiple ad sets, allowing you to leverage the winning formula and reach profitability without needing advanced technical expertise.
Google My Business
Ranking your Google My Business listing is one of the most powerful things you can do for your business. In fact, if you run a local business targeting local clients, it may be THE most powerful strategy available to you.
Google My Business combines all your different Google platforms – Google+, Google Maps, your Google, Google Analytics, and Google Insights into one central place, making it easier for you to work with.
This tool immediately gives your business more credibility and visibility and should be number one on your priority list.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience and drive profitable customer action.
Unlike paid advertising, content marketing focuses more on long-term results. The initial payoff tends to be low, but the long-term, sustainable growth in visitors, leads, and customers can single-handedly carry a business.
To be effective, content marketing requires quality content, SEO optimization, reader optimization, promotion, and consistency. If you are considering this strategy for your own business, make sure you have the time and capital needed to get going with no initial ROI, and then DO YOUR HOMEWORK.
Social Media
Using social media for business is non-negotiable. This is because over 67% of consumers use social media for customer support and if people can’t find your business via social media, they will look for your competitors who ARE present on preferred social channels.
The real question here isn’t whether you should have active social media accounts, it’s how much time and resources you should invest in growing your social audiences.
For some businesses, it makes sense to invest heavily in organic social media growth, for other businesses, investing in Instagram might not make sense. The key is identifying where your customers are and how they like to be approached.
Some of these channels have the potential to skyrocket your business growth. To get the right one, you need to ask yourself the following questions:
What demographics make up your customer base?
Where do they live?
Where do they hang out online?
How do they look for products in your niche?
Who do they listen to when making decisions relative to your product?
Use the answers to select the viable channels for your small business, and then run small tests with each strategy to see what fails and what performs.
