Never underestimate the power of marketing for a business of any size. Marketing is becoming essential in customers’ decision-making. For small businesses, you may not have the funding to hire specialists or employ an external company to help you with advertising.
Here are a few ways you can be proactive in your marketing effort but before we dive in, check out the marketing sales funnel to see just how important it is to market properly when trying to grow your business.
1. Facebook Advertising
Two million businesses advertise on Facebook. It is an inexpensive and effective way to market to any audience. Facebook ads are specialists in advanced targeting and allow you to target an audience based on interests, sex, location, age, online behavior, and many other factors. Creating ads for Facebook is simple and easy to do, even the most technophobic business owners can create quality advertisements on the site. You can also run multiple ads at once to help figure out the winning formula for your company.
2. Google Adwords
Google has the power to help your business reach thousands of search engine users. For this reason, it can be a more expensive option but still cheaper than hiring a marketing agency. Google assigns a quality score to your ad to determine the bid rate you will need to get it displayed – a higher score means a lower cost. You will still need to employ proper SEO to improve your score through CTR (click-through rate), relevance, and the landing page your ad sends traffic to.
3. Content Marketing
Many marketers believe that content marketing is the most effective form of marketing. Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing relevant and consistent content to attract a clearly defined audience. It focuses more on long-term results which means the initial payoff is often very low – the intent is to accumulate sustainable long-term growth. As opposed to paid advertising, content marketing requires much more effort and knowledge to be put into it. You need quality content; it must be optimized for SEO and you need to be consistent with your content creation and promotion. This includes blog posts, videos, podcasts, and various other online mediums in which people consume online information. If you choose this method, you need to do your homework and invest plenty of time in it.
4. Email Marketing
Most visitors to your website will not immediately purchase your products or services so it is important to gather their information in order to carry out additional marketing. Email marketing begins with a “lead magnet” which is something that you offer your website visitors in exchange for their email address – e.g. a free trial, a discount code, site membership, or a free digital download. You will then have a comprehensive list of contact information for people who have visited your site and expressed interest in your products whom you can target with promotional emails.
5. Join Local Business Groups
Joining local business groups offers you the chance to meet up with other like-minded small business owners. There could even be some niche-specific groups and meetups in your area.
