Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

No matter how big or small, new or established your business is, it is essential that you have a strong online presence. Ecommerce is already big business, but it is forecast to continue growing at an incredible rate. Conservative estimates suggest that the number of eCommerce users will have grown to nearly 274 million by 2025.

Online marketing is essential then, but the good news is that marketing tips for small businesses don’t have to be expensive. In fact, free marketing or affordable marketing approaches can work just as well as elaborate paid marketing campaigns. Here is a summary of the top ten tools, techniques and strategies for small businesses to help you market your business in the most effective and accessible way possible: 

1. Establish a Social Media Presence 

4.62 billion people or more than half the world (58.4%) now use social media, so if you’re not already using this free and wide-reaching marketing tool to engage with your customer base then you’re missing out. The ultimate free marketing tool, social media is a great way to grow an engaged audience whilst expressing your brand’s personality and building trust with your audience. You should start by promoting your blog posts, which will help to drive traffic to your website. This is a simple and easy approach to social media.

As your confidence in using the tool develops, you can also use social media to engage directly with your users and followers, you can also run polls and request feedback, using this valuable direct feedback from your existing users to shape new campaigns or the direction of your business. And tagging loyal customers, influencers, and even other brands in your posts can help them to gain traction. The key to using social media for marketing is to be consistent, and to commit to engaging with your community. 

2. Explore SEO

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the term used for the practice of improving both the quality and the quantity of web traffic your site gains by ensuring that the content on your website is more easily readable by Google, and other search engines. SEO can be an incredibly valuable tool for small businesses. The beauty of SEO is that anyone can do it and it’s more accessible than you might think.

It’s also important to note that SEO is as beneficial to the customer as it is to the small business that is implementing the SEO policies. 53.3% of all web traffic comes from organic search, so ensuring that your website is able to take advantage of this organic search will be hugely advantageous to your business. 

We cover this in another blog post which you may find useful if you want some further info.

3. Conduct Keyword Analysis

A good keyword strategy can help even the smallest of businesses to compete with big brands when selling, or attracting attention, online. Keyword analysis can help you find and prioritise the keywords that will perform best for your website and social media content. By using popular keywords that people search for, your website or web pages will rank higher in search results and therefore attract the most relevant traffic. There are a wide variety of different keyword tools that you can utilise to undertake your keyword research, and if you don’t have the time or the expertise to do this then there are also companies that can do this on your behalf. 

Whilst keyword analysis and SEO have been listed as two separate strategies on this list, the reality is that they are closely enmeshed with each other. Keyword research is an important part of search engine optimisation because you need to find relevant keywords in order to attract the right traffic to your website. The more optimised both your website content and social media content are, the more relevant traffic you will attract, making this a long-term way to grow your website traffic. For this reason, continuing to introduce new content to your site will also be beneficial. Writing a blog post is a great way to inject relevant keywords into your website and will also add value to your target audience when they ultimately land on your website. 

4. Publish Great Content on your Small Business Blog

If you have time to invest in your online presence, one of the best things you can do is add a blog to your website and start publishing high-quality content on a regular basis. There are 600 million blogs on the internet worldwide, demonstrating what a valuable and easy-to-adopt medium it is. We have already outlined the importance of driving traffic to your website, and writing a blog post can certainly support this, but it has other benefits too.

The blog content that you write can be repurposed to help you build a social media presence without having to generate any additional content. This can help to expose your business to new audiences that might not yet be aware of you. Blog writing can also help to convert traffic to leads by using lead-generating calls to action on each blog post and adding value to your audience with the quality of your blog content. This high-quality content will also develop trust in your brand from your customers, or potential customer base, ensuring that they feel more comfortable working with you. 

5. Develop an Email Marketing Strategy 

Because small businesses should work smarter, not harder, you can also repurpose the blog content you have created to add value to your emails when contacting your email database. Developing an efficient email marketing strategy is an incredibly effective way of communicating with your existing customer base. You can talk to your customers directly, and land directly in their inbox. The benefit of this is that you are reaching the right people at the right time, meaning that email marketing can be used to generate sales, inform customers of time-sensitive offers (such as sale periods they may wish to take advantage of) and generate increased traffic to your website.

Email marketing is considered to be an effective marketing strategy with Forbes research revealing that 42% of the 500 subscribers they surveyed felt their email marketing strategies were either effective or very effective. By repurposing content to use in your email marketing campaigns, they can be relatively quick to implement whilst still being an effective way to interact with your audience. 

6. Create Video Content

Video content is considered to be by far the most engaging type of social media content. One study found that video content is 12 times more successful than other types of content on social media, and that it generates higher engagement rates than both text and image content combined. It should be noted that creating video content is much more time-consuming, and may require a little more technical knowledge than simply uploading a photo to your Instagram or Facebook accounts, but as the research above shows, if you have the time, the pay-off is certainly worth the investment. 

Video can also be used on your website to encourage users to stick around a little longer. Users spend 88% more time on a website that has video compared to one that doesn’t. But there are caveats to this. Good video content should be relevant to your website and add value to your text and image content. Adding a cat video to your website might make your users stick around a little longer, but unless you own a cat grooming business it is unlikely to have any tangible impact on your conversion rates! 

7. Establish Brand Ambassadors 

Many big businesses utilise influencer marketing to harness the audiences of celebrities, or pseudo-celebrities, and the influence that they have on their fans as a marketing strategy. If someone you admire recommends a product, then you are more likely to try it yourself. Brand ambassadors can help humanise your brand by showing how the product works in real life, using their genuine love for the brand to shine through. Whilst using well-known influencers as brand ambassadors is likely to be prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of small businesses, a smaller brand ambassador scheme could be just as effective. 

You could use your existing customer base as your brand ambassadors. When someone is legitimately engaged with a brand, consumers notice and this authentic passion is highly contagious, which can then drive sales of your product. Why not encourage your customers to act in this ambassadorship role by offering small incentives (discounts on subsequent purchases for example) to share their own experiences of your brand on social media, which you can then use in your own social media, website, or email marketing campaigns. 

8. Attend Networking Events Within Your Industry 

If you’ve established your small business but still don’t feel that you’ve made a significant impact within your industry, and your focus is on marketing your business to other businesses within your sector, as well as to potential customers, then attending networking events within your industry could be the right approach for you. Many networking events and global conferences welcome multiple industries at once and provide a tailor-made destination for introducing your brand to industry leaders. 

So how might networking events within your industry help you to market your business to other businesses on a wider scale? Just some of the ways in which small businesses can use these events include: Building relationships with new suppliers, gaining new clients if you operate within the B2B sector, building strong business relationships with other small businesses offering similar services to your own, or even developing partnerships so that you can work together to offer a more comprehensive service to your customers (a wedding dress shop might form a partnership with a florist, for example, ensuring they both gain revenue from each wedding whilst ensuring the flowers match the dress.)

9. Run Social Media Contests 

Let’s be honest: everyone likes to get something for nothing. And for this reason, competitions and contests are incredibly popular on social media and often gain huge amounts of traction. When used correctly, social media contests can help you to grow your number of followers on social media very quickly because they incentivise people to follow you, but there are other benefits too. Contests can increase brand awareness, attracting potential customers who might have never heard of you before. They can also lead to an increase in subscribers to your email database, and by driving traffic to your website, they can also increase sales and engagement. 

10. Introduce a ‘Refer a Friend’ Scheme 

Customer referral is a valuable, but underutilised tool for small businesses to adapt. Referral schemes usually offer a reward to existing customers in return for the referral of a friend who either signs up to an email database or goes on to make a purchase from your brand. Some examples of rewards offered to both the referrer and the friend include discounts, cash rewards, vouchers or points.  

One of the main benefits of introducing a ‘refer a friend’ scheme is that it’s a great way to generate quality leads for your business: effectively you are asking your existing customer base to do the hard work for you. Referrals tend to make referrals: once the new customer has benefited from your referral scheme, they will be more likely to refer their own friends in order to take advantage of another referral scheme perk. This is a great way to grow a valuable and engaged customer base, and the work involved in this scheme is minimal from the point of view of the small business. 

If writing is not your forte, or you haven’t got the time, it’s an area worth investing in because it can be so powerful for your site. If you’re trying to figure out the best option whether to do it yourself or outsource, we’d be happy to facilitate the best out come with yourself. Get in touch with Blog Writing Services UK to find out how to optimise your blog and make your website rank for search engines, but most importantly, for your customer too.

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