When marketing your business, your goal is to connect it to the right people. It sounds simple, but if you have experience in marketing, you know that it can be everything but that.
The marketing cycle between big and small businesses is practically identical. However, they differ on almost everything else. Small businesses have a limited budget and staffing. They use creative approaches and communication techniques that are nowhere near the ones employed by large enterprises. Meaning small businesses can follow the same marketing process, but they have to devise strategies of their own.
If you want to bring your small business closer to the correct customer base, you can apply the marketing strategies below.
Build a brand identity
One reason why bigger companies approach marketing differently is that they’ve already established a brand identity. Their brand is already well-known and, for the most popular ones, iconic. For small businesses, the first step to effective marketing is building a brand identity. By establishing your brand, you let your potential customers know what your company is, what it does, and what it believes in.
Building a brand identity can be costly, but it’s necessary for success. Whether you choose to hire a freelancer or partner with another organization, expertise is needed if you want to achieve the brand identity you want.
The essential elements of brand identity are (1) wordmark or logo, (2) corporate font, (3) style consistency, (4) shape and form, (5) tag lines, and (6) other visual elements such as the iconic ribbon of Coca-Cola.
Know your customers
For every business, there’s a tailored marketing strategy. Businesses cater to different customer bases, so you can’t just copy the strategy of a well-marketed company and apply it to yours. Before you begin strategizing, it’s crucial to understand your target customer base.
Demographics, age, location, online activity, and manner of searching products are key information that you must know about your customers. Knowing these will help your business create an effective, fine-tuned marketing strategy with the highest chances of positive results.
Build a website
With a brand identity established and target customers well-known, it’s time to build a website. You can think of a website as a modern business card. When people look up your company name in Google or other search engines, it’s the first thing they will see and give them the first impression of your company. First impressions matter a lot in marketing, so you want to ensure that your business will leave a good one, if not excellent.
Just like establishing a brand identity, building a website is best done with the help of an expert. A reputable web designer will know the best way to present your business through a site and will include protective measures that are critical to keeping your data safe. But before you get into building a site, you first need to buy a domain name, sign up for web hosting, and acquire a content management software.
Use digital marketing tools
Most of the marketing done by companies nowadays, especially amid the pandemic, was done digitally. To cater to the spike in demand for digital marketing, many digital marketing tools have been developed, and any company that seeks growth should make use of them.
There are tons of digital marketing tools to choose from. You can better manage customer relationships with social media management platforms or connect to leads with digital business cards. Using search engine optimization (SEO) tools, you can drive traffic to your website and step up your brand’s visuals using graphic creation tools. Whatever marketing tool your business needs, there’s sure to be one out there that will suit you well.
Take advantage of SEO
As mentioned, there are SEO tools available to help businesses to boost traffic to their website. The primary way this is done is via Google searches. When people search for a product or service that your company provides, you want your website to be at the top of the search results.
However, you’re not the only company catering to that customer base so it’s going to be a fight for the top spot. To win, you want to optimize the keywords of your website’s contents with the ever-changing Google algorithm in mind. A well-optimized website will rank higher on searches and get the most exposure.
Put ads on Facebook
Almost everyone with access to the Internet has a Facebook account, making Facebook one of the best platforms to spend your advertising money on. Facebook is excellent for advertising not only for its vast reach but also for the ability to target the right audience that it provides.
Facebook has access to user data which advertisers can use to pinpoint demographics, age, sex, location, interests, online habits, and other information that will help you fine-tune your marketing strategies.
Send emails
No one likes a deluge of promotional mail every time they open their inbox, so if you want to market your business through emails, you’ve got to do it right. Sending emails to customers and potential customers is easy. You can have it automated, and it doesn’t cost much. However, if your emails just annoy recipients and push them to unsubscribe from your mailing list, then it’s all wasted.
The best way to do promotional emails is to send useful and relevant content at the right time. Make sure your emails are personalized and have compelling subject lines, so recipients are more likely to open and read them. Knowing the best time to send emails is also important if you don’t want to lose a subscriber.
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