As a small business owner, it’s easy to become overwhelmed when you compare your marketing strategy to powerhouse brands with enormous resources at their disposal. Don’t let yourself be intimidated. Rather, apply a few simple strategies and start maximising your business potential.
Photo credit: Unsplash
Spring-Clean Your Data
Actually, You Know What? Clean It Every Season! A marketing campaign rooted in data-driven processes depends heavily on the accuracy of the data you feed into it. Neglecting to clean out stale information from your database could result in your spending your precious marking budget on reaching out to the wrong people in the wrong way. Inaccurate data points lead to bad marketing decisions, which is a total waste of time and money. What’s worse, you’ll be putting off the customers you should be connecting with. Make sure that your small business marketing strategy is on-point and targeted to the right customer. If you schedule regular data cleans, you’ll see results in terms of sales and customer perception.
Become Obsessed With Your Audience
If you’re putting together a marketing strategy for your small business, step one is to obsess about your audience. Kind of like a stalker, but without being creepy… At a minimum, you want to ask yourself (and do your best to answer) the following questions: Who is my audience? What kind of work do they do? What are their values? How do they like to describe themselves? As you start to gather this information, one distinct (or perhaps several slightly different) customer profiles may start to emerge. Having several different customer profiles is great, as it helps you split your marketing efforts, saving your having to apply a one-size-fits-all approach. The more information you have, the more fleshed out your customer profile will become. Assigning demographic features will help you get to know them ‘as a person’ (yes, this is weird, but it works!) and once you’ve lined up your buyer persona, your advertising campaigns are more likely to land. Think of a customer profile as the feathers down the side of a dart: they help your dart fly straight and land where you want it to land, ideally on the bullseye.
Jump On The Automation Band Wagon
As a small business owner, you’re probably stretched extremely thin. When something needs doing in your business, you either do it yourself, or you supervise it, so you’re never able to fully devote yourself to one thing at a time. As your business grows, there will be certain areas of your operation that will need your undivided attention. Thankfully, online marketing is not one of them. A Google Ads complete automation solution is an efficient choice when the time comes to start thinking smarter about how you spend your precious time and resources. While automation support can be a lifeline when you’re stretched, it is recommended that you don’t wait until things start falling apart before reaching out for an alternative to the time-consuming work of managing your online marketing campaigns. If recent uptake figures are to be believed, online marketing automation tools are the way of the future. Not only will this technology save you money, but you will extract more value out of your leads than ever before.
Targeted Content
Content Marketing is king when it comes to building an audience for your product and making sure your website or business page comes up in Google’s search ranking. Nailing the exact demographics of your product’s audience makes it that much more possible for you to generate the targeted, informative and relevant content your customer wants to engage with. Forget clickbait and empty, aggressive sales-pitches. Those methods do not foster trust within your audience but push potential customers away. Rather, invest the time into connecting with your customer on a more personal wavelength. Demonstrate that you understand and appreciate them as individuals and that their needs and desires are central to your business. Though this may sound easier said than done, you can do this by offering providing insightful, informative tips and information on subjects that your customer cares about. And don’t neglect the value of pure entertainment: Offering simple entertainment to your customer, without trying to sell them your product, has been shown time and again to be a great way to edge your audience towards becoming a customer. Win-win!
Whether you’re a small yet established business or are still in the early stages, nailing your business marketing strategy should top your to-do-list. These marketing tips for small businesses will help you grab the slice of the market that you deserve.