So you own a small business, and you’re looking to grow through the use of clever marketing. But where do you start? What is the most effective way to do so? If you are reading this right now it means that you both do your research, and work hard in order to grow your business.
As such you are most likely looking for a comprehensive guide to teach you how to approach marketing on every front in a way that is relatively low cost, high reward. The thing is there is no one secret, or trick, that will let you see lasting,
sustainable success in a marketing campaign.
What you need to do is to follow a consistent strategy across a variety of platforms to build a presence with your target customer, and then you need to use that presence to sell.
In this guide, I will be going over a combination of strategies that will allow you to build, and use an online presence in a way that will give your business a consistent return on its investment in marketing.
Get Blogging
No seriously, blogging is a huge resource when it comes to building an online presence. It is such a versatile tool that you can use it for nearly any business. Create how-to articles, write about problems that your customers might be facing which your product/service just so happens to solve, or interact with other businesses in the same niche to create backlinks to your site. One of the largest reasons to do so is to build a solid email list, and the value of your email list is one thing that cannot be understated.
Head to Social Media
This one seems obvious, you should have a social media profile for your business on some of the larger traffic sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. The part that’s not as obvious is that these should all be connected to every other one that your business has, and they should be active.
Doing this will allow you to have recognition amongst your customers no matter where they spend their time online. With these all connected together, it will help you with SEO concerns, and you can direct them towards you’re more in-depth content, which will increase the chances that a prospective customer will buy your product/service.
Use Email Marketing
This is where all of the work building an online presence, and connecting with potential customers pays off. To use this effectively you should never think of it solely as a means to sell, rather you should sprinkle the sales into a stream of worthwhile information. In fact, selling should be a minority of the content that you send to your email list, this is because you want to retain your current list as much as is possible and to increase the chances that they see you as a trusted resource.
A reasonable expectation for you to have would be sending one out of three emails a week containing some sort of sales material, and for that to land a sale with five percent of email recipients. If everything else has been done correctly this should provide a significant number of individual sales that will grow as time goes on.