What are the best 8 Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses?
Even with a modest budget, there are many options available to create a solid marketing plan for a small business. With affordable marketing strategies, you can attract customers and generate income with which to accelerate your growth.
Deciding where to invest your time and limited resources for small business marketing can be difficult. Many entrepreneurs wonder what they should invest in to increase their sales.
In my experience, an integrative approach is usually the most sustainable over time. In this article, I discuss eight tried and tested strategies that I recommend to all small businesses. Other more ambitious strategies are simply out of reach and make no sense (such as television advertising).
Public relations
The value of a credible third party promoting our products cannot be underestimated. Not only press articles help to gain the trust of customers. We can also benefit from wide dissemination by leveraging our audiences. Influencers and bloggers can fall into this category and can share our company with their followers, giving you endorsement with a potentially exponential reach. This can be a creative (and low-cost, if done correctly) way to attract the attention of the media or our target market.
Content marketing
Creating content that is relevant and interesting to our target audience can help us generate new leads by capturing their interest and building trust. You can also help us build our brand by answering customer questions and providing reasons why they should choose you. Through articles, infographics, ebooks or videos we must show our experience, differentiation, and values to attract potential customers and drive the purchase decision. Quality content is often shared and linked: we can increase the authority of our domain by linking to other websites that offer interesting and reliable material.
Associations
Partnering with another company or organization that has a target customer similar to ours can help us increase the reach of our marketing actions. Complementary products and services can be a good starting point. By sharing email lists, exchanging content, bundling offers, or even co-branding programs, advertisements, or sponsorships, both partners can benefit.
Presence in social networks
Having our own communication channels not only allows us to control the message but also to build a community around our brand, company, and product. This free communication channel can be a great opportunity to showcase user-generated content about your product, get positive reviews, or address customer service issues. Especially considering that many buyers consult the comments of other clients and investigate the reliability of a brand or company on social networks.
Presence in search engines
Most people search for information online, and this type of search can account for the majority of a website’s traffic. This makes optimizing access to our page extremely important. Through strategic positioning in search engines, we can make ourselves visible to potential customers with a high purchase intention. Also, if a customer seeking help finds a good solution, this will help us position ourselves as a reliable and credible source.
Email marketing
If we have successfully created our email list we already have the data of a group of people with a certain interest in our company or product. By segmenting this group based on different characteristics, and sending them an email with the right content and offers at the right time, we can positively influence their purchase decision without additional impact on the marketing budget.
Brand ambassadors
This is a profitable way to generate sales as it avoids high advertising costs. Ambassadors are only rewarded if they achieve their intended goals, which encourages them to promote our products or services. They can be influencers, content editors, or review and coupon sites. These agreements can be structured to pay based on clicks, leads, or sales.
Referral Marketing
Harnessing the goodwill of satisfied customers is one of the fastest, easiest, and most profitable ways to grow. Hence the importance of mobilizing our clients to spread the word about our products or services, reminding them to share their experiences, and encouraging them to bring in new buyers. This is likely to result in highly qualified leads at a much lower cost than if we had to find them on our own.
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