6 Marketing Tips for Small Businesses
If you are starting your own small business, learning effective marketing techniques will be key to your business’ success. In order to effectively market your company’s products, you’ll need to have a specific goal in mind as you design your marketing strategy. Below are six tips for narrowing in on your marketing goals and effectively reaching your customers.
1. Know Your Audience
The most important part of marketing your business is knowing who your average customer is going to be. If you are a company that sells construction equipment, you are not going to be marketing to teenagers because they are not your target audience. Instead, you’ll make marketing materials that are more mature and may display statistics and facts. For example, if you are selling a product that prevents metal corrosion, you could use a statistic about how $300 billion is spent annually on metal corrosion in the U.S. A possible customer who did not realize the depth of the impact of metal corrosion could see that statistic and realize that it is an issue they need to take more seriously, which could lead to a sale for your business.
2. Coupons, Discounts, and Deals
When you first start your business, offering discounts to your potential customers will encourage them to take a chance and try your new company. For example, if you are a clothing retailer, you can offer 10% off an order to new customers or give away a small product such as branded socks or a hat with every order over a certain price point. Offering “freebies” encourages people to spend more in order to unlock the deal.
3. Utilize Social Media
Depending on what your company is selling, you can use social media to market yourself in a few different ways. If you are marketing a service, you can use social media to highlight reviews from your customers and talk about your employees. For example, if you’re a small remodeling business, having a Facebook post on your business’ page where you show a before and after of a project alongside the customer’s review is a great way to promote the work you do and establish credibility.
Make sure to look at your competitors’ social media to see how they use their social media accounts to get ideas for your own pages. You can also see where they are lacking more objectively and therefore improve your own social media presence by seeing what gaps in the market they are leaving open.
4. Hang Signs
If you have a physical store or business, displaying signs advertising your business in the surrounding area is a great way to increase brand visibility. If someone recognizes your name from a sign, they may respond more positively to other advertisements since they will already have some recognition of your business. If you have a shop, making your sign eye-catching is important because anyone who lives within five miles will, on average, see your sign 50 to 60 times each month.
5. Use SEO
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of optimizing your website so that you will appear higher in google’s ranking. SEO is important because 92% of people searching for a business will choose a site from the first page of results. This means that if your business shows up on the first page, you will get more site traffic, which will then lead to more leads and customers to your business.
One way to optimize your website for search engines is to have a blog on your website. Having more real content on a website makes it more attractive to Google, and therefore you will rank higher. In addition, you can use content from your blog on your social media accounts in order to bring people to your website and increase traffic.
6. Utilize Email
Getting an email list is a great way to reach out to potential customers. If you program a pop-up onto your page that will prompt visitors to sign up for your mailing list, you’ll have a better chance of having them revisit your site. Combine this pop up with the earlier tip about coupon codes and offer those that sign up for the email list a special promotional code when they sign up. This way they are more likely to make a purchase and to return to your website once they have already made their purchase.
Remember when you are marketing your new small business that the most important thing is to get the message of your company out there. If you are filling a gap in the market, you will already have potential customers out there, so all you have to do is figure out how to reach them. These methods may help you, but in the end, you will probably have to do some trial and error in order to get through to all of your customers.
