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You need your small business to stand out. To do that in a modern, competitive world, you need a clearly defined small business marketing strategy. Whether hiring an agency or attempting to do it yourself, there are tons of options to make your plan fit your small business.
With all the moving parts that can be involved, however, it’s easy to miss some of the key details that can make your small business marketing strategy really shine. Today I’m going to share some of those tips with you.
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Small Business Marketing Is About Competing For Attention
There are over 2 million blog posts written every day, not to mention countless social media posts from hundreds of your competitors. That’s a ton of content that your marketing efforts have to cut through. Attention is the commodity that your small business marketing is trying to gain for you.
No matter how well-thought-out your small business marketing plan is, there are almost always a few things that can be made better. From quick image tweaks to a complete overhaul of your content, you want to take advantage of everything that will give you an edge.
Use These Small Business Marketing Tips To Boost Your Marketing Strategy
They say the devil is in the details, and when it comes to small business marketing, that couldn’t be more accurate. There are tons of little bits to any great strategy that get overlooked, dulling the shine of an otherwise perfectly executed plan.
When you take the time to polish the finer points of your small business marketing strategy, you’ll start to cut through the clutter and get the attention of your target audience.
Don’t Make Every Piece Of Content A Sales Pitch
One of the biggest content mistakes that people make in small business marketing is forgetting the difference between marketing and sales. When you replace marketing with sales, you’re going to push people away. Stop using every piece of content to ask your audience to buy.
Stop using every piece of content to ask your audience to buy. Click To TweetMarketing is about building brand awareness and getting the consumer to trust you. It’s about creating positive feelings towards your company and creating a connection with the people who will eventually become your customers. You ruin that when you spend every interaction trying to get them to open their wallet.
Clean Your Email List Frequently
Your email list is possibly the most valuable piece of information you have for your small business marketing. But there is another value to it you may not have realized, and you could destroy that value if you’re not regularly cleaning it. It’s your deliverability rate.
Having a ton of emails that don’t open or interact with your emails hurts your deliverability score. The major email providers will block you as spam if there are too many people who don’t open, read, or click-through your emails. By cleaning off the bad addresses and removing the people who don’t touch your correspondence, you improve that score and make your list go further.
Make Your Content Easy To Share
Creating viral content is the goal of any small business marketing strategy. Getting your company’s name and personality seen by thousands if not millions of viewers is a great way to bring awareness to your brand. So why would you do anything to make that more difficult.
Place social share buttons where they’re easy to find. Make them float along with the reader so the content can be shared with ease. Add click-to-tweet buttons along your content, allowing your viewers to share notable quotes from your content. Add a “Pin This” button to all your images. Try to reduce the difficulty for your audience to share your content wherever possible.
Create Headlines That Make People Want To Read
One of the toughest parts of small business marketing is getting your audience to consume your content. If they don’t, they can never be inserted into your lead funnel. That means you’re not getting what you really want from your online presence.
The first and most important key to getting visitors for your content is to create a headline that catches people’s attention. Only about 40% of people actually read an article. Most stop at the headline. That means you have to write one that compels people to open the article and read what you have to say.
Segment Your Email Lead List
You want every communication to be as effective as possible. That means you need to make sure the right message is getting to the right people. To do that, you need to figure out what you know about your lead list and group similar leads.
Segmentation is the practice of dividing up your email list based on the things they have in common. Interests, careers, income brackets, gender, degree fields, and any other factors that your leads share in common are suitable qualifications to group by. And, yes, your leads can be a part of more than one group. By grouping them correctly, you can send emails that speak your audience’s language.
Encourage Check-Ins From Your Clients
One of the best ways to get a recommendation from your customers is through the check-in. Sites like Facebook, Google Local Guides, Yelp, and Swarm all allow your customers to let their friends know where they are. When their friends see, they’ll ask questions, which means new customers for you.
One of the easiest ways to encourage that check in is through a special price discount. Maybe it’s 5% off for checking in, or maybe you offer a bigger discount for checking in more than once. Perhaps you give your customers a free bonus when they check in. Whatever it is, it’s getting your clients to help you market your small business.
Use GIFs In Your Emails
Emails are a tough part of small business marketing. Most people have a crowded inbox and don’t take much time with the emails inside it. If you want them to take pause on yours – and hopefully take action because of it – you need to do something that grabs their eyes.
People are, by nature, attracted to motion. That’s why the use of GIFs is a great way to get people to stop and read your emails. Head over to sites like Tenor or GIPHY to grab a GIF related to the message your email is sending. Or use Photoshop or GIPHY’s GIF Maker to create a custom GIF that fits your message.
Focus On The Experience Your Product Creates
Many small business owners tend to focus their marketing efforts on talking about all the neat features of their product. It’s a normal thing to do for someone who is passionate about their company. However, it’s not what’s going to get your audience to become your clients.
Focus on the things owning your product will do for your audience. Tell a story about the experience they’ll have as an owner. You see, modern buyers, especially millennials, are interested in what kind of “adventures” they have in their lives. Focus your content on helping them imagine those experiences.
Don’t Give Too Many Options
When you put together a call-to-action, be it in email, on a landing page, or within a social media post, you need to avoid offering too many options. Otherwise, people might face the paralysis that can come from having too many choices. When that happens, they’ll choose to leave.
Instead, keep your choices to as few as possible. When you can, give your visitors only one choice (besides leaving). That way they don’t face the overload and are more likely to follow your call-to-action’s directions. That means more leads for you.
Use Client Reviews To Your Advantage
Consumer opinion drives buying decisions nowadays. That’s especially true in the millennial age bracket. That’s why it’s important to leverage customer reviews as often as possible. Those reviews, especially when highlighted by your social media, will cause people to buy from you.
Be sure you ask for referrals from your clients on a regular basis, offering them some sort of incentive to do so. Using a service like SurveyMonkey will allow you to get their opinion on several of your areas of business, as well as capture a review that you can use to market your company.
Publish New Content As Often As Possible
To publish new content less frequently than once per week will make sure your content gets lost in the crowd. That’s the last thing you want your small business marketing efforts to do. That means you need to prepare to invest the time to get consistent marketing content delivered frequently.
Weekly blogging gets your content seen enough to drive site traffic. When you can drive site traffic, you get more leads. If you can manage to blog 4 times a week, you’ll see 450% more leads. Those are numbers you can’t afford to ignore. However, that might be a bit much for you. Try to at least manage a weekly article.
Try To Connect With Your Audience Emotionally
If you’ve ever noticed, the most viral content has a way of making its audience feel something. Great laughs, moving stories, and enraging news tend to get spread the fastest. It’s no secret that people respond most to the things that make them feel something.
Try to make your content spark an emotion. If you can create a spark of feeling, be it a smile, tear, or any other emotion correctly suited to your audience and the action you want them to take, they’re more likely to share that content and help you get your message further.
Define Your Goals Quarterly
When you do your own small business marketing, making regular headway is critical. You need to know where you start, and most importantly, you need to know where you’re going to finish. That means you need to take the time to set solid goals regularly.
Have a system for setting marketing goals. Define a set of measurable metrics that you can judge your results with. Consider social media engagement, website visits, email click-through-rates, and leads converted. When you know what you’re trying to achieve every month, you can aim for it and focus on it with better success.
Small Adjustments Can Get You Closer To Your Goals
It’s easy to believe that there is a huge gap in your small business marketing between where you are and where you want to be. Don’t be fooled, though. A lot of the time, a few small adjustments can get you to the goals that you’ve laid out.
