Whether you’ve been running your business for a while now or you’re just starting out, an online presence is something that’s really important. Without it, the level of success and sustainability that your business has, may be significantly reduced.
Businesses can learn a lot about their consumers thanks to the amount of data that’s collected through the sites that they browse and make purchases on. For marketing, small businesses are often on a limited budget. With that being said, it’s critical that the budget available is spent in the right manner to maximize the opportunities that marketing can provide the company.
In this article, we’ll explain why marketing is so important for small businesses and five useful marketing tips that can help small businesses and start-ups with limited funds.
Why is marketing important for small businesses?
Marketing is all about getting the word out and for small businesses, the more promotion and presence the business can drum up, the better. The competition for businesses that are only just coming onto the market are cut throat. So much so that 60% of small businesses will likely fail within the first three years.
For any new business, therefore, wanting to stick around and outlast the three year mark will need to utilize marketing where they can. Thus, it is important to seek and consult to marketing experts to help you with your business. You may contact Dan Ben Nun to get it started. Marketing allows your business to connect with potential customers to let them know what you have to offer. Not only that but it does a lot to build up brand recognition and a reputation within the industry it’s in.
A lack of strong marketing can really cause a business to fade into the background and so it’s good to understand how to market your business effectively. A good ROI when it comes to the marketing budget is appreciated, so let’s get into the tips for successful marketing.
- Use any free tool or software to your advantage
A great thing that has come from the online world is all the tools and software that has been developed to make marketing a business, easier and more accessible. There are plenty of SaaS products out there that can assist in all your marketing needs and don’t need to be bleeding the bank dry by using them.
Whether you’re looking at how to write a newsletter to manage your various marketing campaign timelines, there’s software or tools out there for everything. Flodesk for example can help you maximize the effectiveness of email marketing through the various templates and design for newsletter and other email marketing materials.
Some of the notable mentions when it comes to tools for marketing include Hubspot, Asana, Canva and Buffer to name but a few. With a lot of free or basic options available, it provides more flexibility and scope for small businesses to go further with the funds they have available.
- Know who your audience are
Defining your audience is something that you need to do as a business from the beginning. When you understand who your audience are, you have a better opportunity at targeting them successfully.
Not knowing your audience is likely going to lower the success rate of any marketing that you do because it’s possibly not reaching the potential customers you’re after. With that being said, it’s good to know who your audience is and this can be done in a number of ways.
Some companies might find doing market research to be the first step in defining your audience. Some may collect any data that comes from traffic on their website to sales information that previous customers have provided.
The more data you can gather, the better it will be for future marketing opportunities and campaigns. Competitor analysis might be useful to some businesses that want to see what type of audience similar companies are attracting.
For website traffic, Google Analytics can provide a useful insight to your customer demographic. Depending on your sales system or software that’s in place, it’s also a good place to focus on finding similarities from one paying customer to another.
- Recycle what works
When something works the first time and it works again the second time around, it’s worth understanding the formula that’s being used. With marketing, sometimes, you’ll have methods of marketing that work and some that don’t. There will be certain formulas that come together and that will be effective again and again.
There’s nothing wrong with recycling what works if it remains successful. It’s only when it starts to have less of an effect, that you should then mix it up with something new. By repeating the same process or method that works, you reduce the likelihood of it failing and you losing money as a business.
A staggering $750 billion in loans were given to SMEs by the end of 2020. So of course, making that money count is really important, particularly if a lot of these small enterprises are reliant on paying back loans and money owed.
Content is an important part of marketing and with recycling, this is also another area that can benefit from reusing what has already been successful. Take a look at how the content has performed, then use what worked to reinvent it into a new piece. It might be the subject matter of how it’s been formatted on the page if it’s a blog post for example.
Why not take advantage of something that has become a marketing success? Rather than spending your time and money, trialing other options that might not be as successful.
- Do a mix of organic and paid marketing
Organic and paid marketing tend to go hand in hand when it comes to creating a company marketing strategy. As much as it can be beneficial to do paid targeting on your marketing campaigns, there can be a lot of benefit to do plenty of organic marketing too.
Organic marketing is all about getting your customers to naturally gravitate towards your brand. This can be through referrals or social media content that directs the customer to the business directly. Whilst paid advertisements can be good for those businesses with deep pockets, small businesses may have to rely on organic content instead to help build their presence online.
If you’re looking for examples of organic marketing, then here are a few suggestions to get you started:
Online Directories
Online directories are good for promotion of your company across a variety of sites. It’s useful to find online directories that are popular sources of information for those both in your geographic location and beyond.
The more online directories you can upload your company information onto, the extra boost it can give to your own website, especially if you’re linking back to your site or a certain webpage on the site itself.
Collaborating with other companies
Collaboration with other companies can certainly be beneficial to do. There are lots of companies out there that may align with some of your own values, objectives or goals as a business.
Finding a mutual benefit for your business and theirs is the right step way to creating a successful collaboration. It could be a guest post on your site and vice versa, or interactions via social media.
Social media engagement
Social media engagement is necessary because building a more personable relationship with your customers and followers can do wonders for business. A lot of customers benefit from better user experience.
In fact, 88% of users will be less likely to return to a website due to a bad user experience. So whatever interactions you can provide to your audience, make it count. There are also so many platforms that your small business can be utilizing when it comes to interacting with your audience.
Improving SEO
Search engine optimization is one that you must include when it comes to organic content. Focusing on best SEO practices can help create better organic content that will hopefully perform and be received better than previous attempts. A multi-faceted approach to small business SEO is required – from building hyper-local links to improving the quality of your website. While SEO takes time to start working, it almost always has the best Return on Investment, compared to other channels.
- Get social with social media
Social media is an impressionable platform to use when it comes to marketing online. Globally, over 3.6 billion people use social media and this a number that could reach 4.41 billion by 2025. That’s a sheer volume of people that on a global scale, could prove to be a gold mine for any small business or start-up.
Social media as mentioned above, can be a more personable way of building a relationship with your audience. It’s a change in marketing that contributes to a lot of success with businesses both old and new. Social media platforms are active 24/7, so there’s always an opportunity to advertise and promote your brand.
When it comes to choosing the platforms to be on, it’s worth looking at where you’d typically find your audience demographic. Some may be on Instagram, whilst others gravitate towards Facebook for their social media fix. By knowing what platforms your audience are on, it’ll help you focus your marketing budget and resources in the right place.
Although small businesses may be limited with resources and funding, there can still be plenty of growth and success that comes from effective marketing techniques and tips like the ones above.
