A comprehensive marketing strategy is a crucial tool for small businesses looking to promote products and services. It covers how your business will present your brand and products or services in the market. Developing and improving your marketing strategy involves defining your goals, conducting market research and identifying your target audience.
When improving your marketing strategy, it's also essential to incorporate different marketing channels and advertising platforms to boost your success rate. Below, we share tried and true tips to improve marketing for small businesses.
1. Consider Blogging to Attract Users to Your Site
Blogging is a content marketing strategy that involves publishing interesting, relevant or valuable content on your website. When the content is addressed to a specific and clearly defined audience and optimized to rank higher on search engines, it drives traffic to your site and other long-term profitable customer actions.
Blogging helps small businesses gain potential customers' trust by answering their questions and providing them with essential information about your products, services and brand. Up to 60 of customers say that blog posts matter most during the initial stages of the buying process — often called top of the funnel — and approximately 33 say blogging is valuable in the middle stages of the purchasing funnel.
2. Incorporate a Social Media Ads or Google Ads Component
Social media and Google advertisements are inexpensive and effective marketing strategies for small businesses that enable you to appear before specific audiences. When curating ads, you can target specific demographics, such as age, location, gender, interests and browsing behaviors.
Creating effective social media ads involves coming up with a catchy headline, a captivating image, some descriptive copy for the captions and a link to where clients can purchase your products. Using short, creative video ads to grab the potential customer's attention and clear call-to-actions (CTAs) leads them straight to your website or e-commerce shop, efficiently increasing sales volumes.
Social media ads are more affordable and often more effective than Google ads because they don't depend on search terms, but combining the two types of ads will drive more traffic and a higher return on investment (ROI) for your small business. Google ads are especially effective if you know your customers are searching the web for your products or solutions. For a successful Google ads campaign, target long-tail keywords, make the ads concise and optimize your website's landing page.
3. Communicate With Your Audience Through Email Marketing
Email marketing is a highly successful marketing strategy that involves nurturing leads — people who've already interacted with your brand before. It starts with building an email list using lead magnets, which are free items and services you offer website visitors in exchange for their contact details. Email marketing works to attract new customers, nurture existing customer relationships and boost customer loyalty.
Here are some top email marketing campaigns to help you maximize your strategy:
- Welcome emails sent to every subscriber who signs up for your email lists or makes a purchase
- Newsletter emails that share industry news or updates and tips relating to your products and services
- Promotional emails to advertise specific products or services, share coupons or announce ongoing sales
- Cart abandonment emails to encourage people who left items in their online carts to come back and complete the purchases
- Seasonal marketing emails for promoting products and services around specific times of the year, such as Black Friday sales
4. Build up Customer Testimonials or Reviews to Feature on Your Website
Using testimonials as part of your brand's marketing strategy boosts your credibility and helps build customer trust and loyalty. It's a highly effective strategy, considering reviews are the second most important factor shoppers take into account.
Including positive reviews and testimonials in your website and promotional materials boosts your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts and speeds up the buying process for many customers. That's because testimonials and reviews provide potential clients and search engines with a clear picture of how your business solves problems. In addition, they highlight your business's unique selling points (USPs), which helps to build your brand reputation and drive long-term value.
You can use written testimonial snippets in your blog posts, post video testimonials on your social media or website and update detailed case studies on the website. Incorporating customer reviews and testimonials in marketing emails and paid ads also delivers better results as they grab the client's attention and create a lasting first impression. Using third-party review sites increases credibility and trustworthiness and boosts website traffic.
5. Update Your Google Business Profile for Local Businesses
An up-to-date Google Business Profile listing is among the most powerful marketing strategies for small local businesses. It's a free tool that allows businesses to share essential business information and increase their visibility on Google Search and Google Maps. A well-curated and optimized Google Business Profile drives more traffic and improves your SEO ranking. Here's how to optimize your Google Business Profile:
- Include your name, address and phone number
- Give a brief description of your offerings and business history
- Include high-quality, descriptive images of your business
- Select accurate business categories and subcategories
- List all your products and services
- Include Google reviews
Benefits of a Comprehensive Marketing Strategy
A comprehensive marketing strategy that incorporates different channels boosts business success by creating brand awareness and increasing sales. It also has numerous other advantages:
- Enables businesses to identify and understand their ideal customers so they can meet their needs and solve their problems
- Gains you a competitive edge over competitors
- Clearly and consistently communicates your business's USP
- Maximize your business's return on investment on marketing spend
- Increases brand awareness and boosts your reputation
- Guarantees long-term business success
Benefits of Outsourcing Your Marketing Strategy
Curating your own marketing strategy requires a significant amount of time and resources, which are better utilized when focusing on core business objectives. Therefore, outsourcing your marketing and advertising saves you time and money while gaining you professionals with the right tools and expertise to worry about how you market your business.
Business Consumer Alliance offers a business membership program to manage marketing and advertising tasks for small businesses. We offer a Sponsored Listing Program that handles the creation of ads in our directories. We also help you create a virtual storefront, manage customer feedback, optimize web pages of search engines and build a better business reputation. The best part is that you have access to legal advice and our team will follow up on your unpaid invoices.
Improve Marketing for Your Small Business With BCA
A well-defined marketing strategy for your small business will help you increase traffic and sales and embellish your brand's reputation. While it's possible to improve marketing in-house, you have more to gain when you outsource marketing and advertising to a team of experts. Outsourcing gains you access to the latest tools and innovative industry expertise while reducing your overhead expenses and increasing your marketing spend ROI.
With a BCA membership, you gain invaluable, ongoing business support to maximize your time, money and other resources. The membership covers business operations, advertising, marketing, customer feedback, legal disputes and so much more. Contact us to learn more about our business membership services or if you're ready to outsource these essential services, apply for membership in a few simple steps.
