Running a small business is an exciting, challenging journey. From the minute you create your brand and establish a customer base, you will need to start considering how to market the business and attract customers. The challenge is that, as a small business, you will most likely have a limited marketing budget, and this budget size will limit how much you can achieve with your marketing.
So, with the number of small businesses growing exponentially globally, we thought that we would take a look at how you can effectively market your business to your customer base, even with a small budget. We unpack the key digital marketing channels that you can make use of to really get your brand out there.
Create Educational Content for Social Media
By now we should all know the benefits of social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok. These digital platforms assist you in reaching out to audiences that you would never have been able to reach organically before.
The trick here is to generate content that will reach, appeal to, and convert visitors into paying customers. The content should be useful and educational in order to appeal to your audience and ensure their trust in your brand.
Start your efforts by creating a social media marketing strategy. Plan your weeks and months in advance by highlighting key events, days, and holidays that you can curate content around. Create useful content that will actually teach and educate your customers about your brand.
You will establish yourself as an authority figure in the industry, and they will learn to trust your brand.
Automate as Many of Your Marketing Channels as Possible
Now that you have your social platforms set up, and your content planned out it’s time to get the ball rolling. Once you have actually started regularly posting on social media, you will notice how resource-intensive it can actually be.
Each platform requires different sized images, different variations of content, and forms of posting. So, once you get the basics right. It is easier to opt for automation tools that can streamline the process for you.
For example, if you do most of your advertising on LinkedIn, you should consider investing in a LinkedIn automation tool. This is a great tool for streamlining your lead generation process and expanding your network, among other things. It allows you to effectively engage with your audience in order to convert them into leads while also saving you valuable time that you can use to focus on other important tasks.
You can automate your email process. Platforms like Mailchimp allow you to create, schedule, and send emails to your entire database en-masse. This saves you tons of time and reduces the number of human errors that come with manual email sending.
Utilize Your Employee Insights
When it comes to marketing to clients, not enough companies look inward. This is a huge oversight because your employees are your on-the-ground brand representatives.
Keep in mind that your customer journey has several touch points along the way. Most of these touchpoints will include them coming into contact with one or more employees. So, you need to ensure that your employee is correctly trained and equipped to deal with the customer at each stage.
It is also important to ensure the satisfaction of your employees is kept as high as possible. An engaged and happy employee is a productive employee, and as customer-facing brand representatives, you want them to be as engaged and satisfied as possible. It could absolutely be worth your while including an employee survey tool in your business to monitor these satisfaction levels.
Your customer-facing employees are also highly valuable. Because they directly face the customer and engage with them frequently, they have direct information about their view on your brand. Not only do they know what is right or wrong with the products or service but they can also tell you what your customer is looking for, and what they want from you. Once again, these tools and platforms can help you get that kind of information out of your employee.
Boost Your Reach With SEO
The last channel that we are going to touch on is Google itself. Organic traffic is still one of the highest sources of traffic to websites globally. So, as much as your social media channels are vital, and emails are crucial for your database, search engines should still be high on your priority list too.
Not only is on-page SEO critical, with relevant keywords and vital SEO elements like meta descriptions and H1 and H2 headings. But other SEO exercises are key to help your brand reach and be found by your target audience.
Take a look at your link building, for example. When scraping your site, Google will take into consideration what links come into your site, and what goes out. These, together with your keywords help Google understand how to categorize your site and where to rank you.
Make use of paid ads too. You can target specific phrases and words that you know your audience is searching for by using specific keywords in your paid ads. These will also help you in moving your search engine placement to the coveted top position in the search results.
Last Thoughts
In wrapping up, in this age of heightened technology, there are various channels for you to utilize to reach your audiences. You do not need to have a huge budget, and you do not need endless resources to make it a success. Simple innovation and curated campaigns will be a winning combination.
Subscribe to the Small Business Bonfire Newsletter
And get your free one-page marketing plan template.
