Tested Content and Video Marketing Techniques for Small Business

In digital marketing parlance, content is king. Good content is indispensable to effective marketing in the digital world; the reason content is everywhere out there. Marketers need content in their websites, social media handles, for their email marketing campaigns, brand design and content marketing strategies. However, an effective content must not only have good quality, it must also have context. Before creating content therefore, you must keep your audience, the platform you are using, your brand, and the customer experience in mind. That is about the best way to create quality content that has context and gets the best marketing results.

Content Marketing Techniques

With the right content marketing techniques, you can plan on pleasing your audience consistently with high-quality content, by way of the following content marketing methods.

Blogging

Marketers usually create content and market it through their blogs. That is blogging which is about the most popular content marketing technique out there. Through your published blog content, you can start generating recurring traffic to your own site. That is the kind of content that serves multiple purposes for your business, particularly for:

Driving organic traffic
Troubleshooting for customers
Building your brand authority as a thought leader
Serving content for paid traffic, and
Providing helpful content for users

Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is about the best way to expose your brand to new audiences by guest posting on other blogs. This you can do through a mutual blog-post exchange with other brands, pay to contribute, or even by just providing valuable free content to another website. What you choose to do depends on the relationship you establish with other businesses/brands/popular blogs. It is all about better exposure for your content. If your guest-blog host is hugely popular with a large following, that’s great.  It gives you a great platform to better spread awareness for your brand. The key to guest blogging is to provide plenty of value first then plug is your business later.

Podcasting

When compared to other forms of content marketing techniques, podcasting appears to be a relatively new content marketing strategy. As an effective marketing technique, it does not appear to be too saturated yet. You can package influencer interviews, specialized how-to expertise and suchlike great info for your audience in podcasting form. If you are packaging influencer interviews, getting your first big interview is usually the hardest part. If you manage to get a good one, the snowball effect can keep your momentum going for quite a while.

Gift Content

Depending on the product you are marketing, you can create some free content as giveaways on your website. Your website visitors can have these gifts in exchange for their email addresses which you need to build your email list. Such free content could be in form of an eBook, access to a guide, a checklist, or even some discount coupon. Just make sure to offer some valuable things to your audience in exchange for their email addresses. On your website, you can then create landing pages and signup forms to promote your content. Next move is to drive traffic to these pages. If the pages are well optimized, they will help your conversions to new leads and even sales.

Video Marketing Techniques

Smart marketers can always find affordable ways to incorporate video into their small business marketing strategy. This is because of the high effectiveness of video marketing. If your marketing videos are well shot, they could make all the difference between your customers choosing your product or your competitor’s. Most times, such videos might really be all a buyer needs to buy your products outright or sign up for a free trial.

Here are a few highly effective and budget-friendly ways you can use videos in your small business marketing program:

Product Videos

Marketers use product videos to explain more about the product/service they are marketing. Through these videos, marketers can clearly outline how the product works, why it’s helpful, use cases, and even its salient and useful features. These videos tend to act like premieres to exciting movies. If well shot, videos should be exciting enough to grab viewers’ attention and make them to click a link to learn more about the product/service, make a purchase, or sign-up for a full-fledged demo.

How-to Videos

Marketers create how-to videos to practically teach their customers how the product/service they are marketing works. Whatever the product is, most buyers always want to know how they can use it to do for them what the marketer says the product can do. A proper video demonstration of how a product works can actually entice buyers to buy the product. Marketers like to create such videos to show customers how to for instance assemble a piece of equipment they are selling. That practical demonstration is usually more helpful to buyers than any Manual of Operation no matter how beautifully written.

Reviews and Testimonials

Most online shoppers usually trust customer reviews. A very high percentage of online shoppers read online reviews before making their buy decisions. Reviews are more in text form while Testimonials if in video form tend to get better attention. With Testimonials, you get to control the narrative and use them on any platforms or channels you prefer. You may choose to collect just short one-liner testimonials for your website/blog. Long case-study testimonials are best suited for your YouTube and social media channels.

Video Advertising

You can market your business with video on social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok and YouTube. Some of these videos could be short in-stream skippable video ads, non-skippable bumper ads, overlay ads, or display ads. For best results, you can experiment with different ads formats to see which resonate most with your audience. You can then choose the ones that get you the best returns on your marketing investment then build your marketing strategy around them.

Tested Email and Search Marketing Techniques for Small Business

Email marketing may be old school but it is still a very effective marketing technique. It has been around for quite a while but because marketers still hugely depend on it, it does not appear to be going anywhere anytime soon. It is hugely cost-effective as well and very easy to use too no matter your marketing experience. Marketers who always operate very tight marketing budgets are encouraged by the fact that when they consider ROI, email marketing generates about $36 for every $1 spent. Now that is an awesome return when compared to other marketing techniques. Doubtful if you can find any more cost-effective small business marketing technique than email marketing.

The only drawback is that you’ll need to build a credible email list first. That can take quite a while but it is worthwhile in the long term if you can diligently build one and segment it for effective marketing purposes.

Here are some email marketing techniques that can help give a boost to the email marketing program of your small business, irrespective of your marketing experience or the product/service you are marketing.

Email Automation

Email automation helps marketers to save time and resources if done right. Manual email marketing entails a lot of work and patience. By using email automation tools, marketers can set up automated campaigns to message the right customers with the right message at the right time and with the right effects. These tools can also be used to set up an automated campaign to send new subscribers a sequence of and well-timed emails. They come in very handy too to create an automation that helps to cross-sell products to current or previous customers.

Email Newsletters

Because email newsletters are simple to use and usually get good results, they are about the most classic email marketing techniques out there. With regular email newsletters, marketers manage to keep their customers up-to-date about new products, discounts/coupons and even promos. If well designed and crafted, they help to keep customers engaged and encourage them to interact with the brand. Effective newsletters must contain among others some vital info such as up-to-date Discounts and promotions, New product launches, Upcoming events, The latest content/blog posts and some selected personal info about the people behind the brand.

Promotional Email Campaigns

Promotional emails are best used to reward your subscribers and get them to visit your eCommerce store or website. They usually contain a lot of call-to-action to entice recipients to open the mails. If for instance your email is offering a “Free Shipping” coupon or up to 40% discounts on products, these alone might be all the customers need to kick start and even finish their shopping from your store. Free shipping offers and discounts are two of the most significant factors influencing email recipients to open promotional emails.

Search Marketing Techniques

With the deepening of the internet, promoting and marketing products has taken on a different hue. This is the advent of search marketing where search engines play a dominant role. These days, search marketing has become an absolute essential for the survival of any online business. The days of Yellow Pages and asking your neighbors where to find the nearest grocery store appears to be gone for good. You can now just whip out your smartphone anywhere anytime and ask Google just about anything and you get answers instantly. Thanks to the power of the internet and search engines like Google. Search engine techniques are many and varied but below are some of the techniques that are very popular with marketers.

Google-My-Business, GMB

GMB is an online business mart where you can market about any product particularly to local audiences. Google easily takes you to eCommerce stores in your local environment if you search for businesses “near me.” For this reason, you can easily search for phrases like “Salons near me,” “Gyms near me,” “Grocery near me,” “Plumber near me,” and so on. Such phrases are searched millions of times every year and your business gets thrown up by Google if it is optimized for local searches. Without proper SEO and marketing, your business won’t appear in such search results.

Search Engine Optimization, SEO

Search engine optimization is the process of improving your website, social profiles, blog posts, and product pages to rank for specific keywords. It is usually a long-term strategy that takes a big-time commitment to put in place. If properly done, it will help drive free organic traffic from search engines to your website/blog.  SEO comprises many different activities on your website which include but not limited to:

Creating quality content
Decreasing bounce rates
Improving retention rates
Earning backlinks
Structuring the internal links
Increasing the loading speed

Voice Search Marketing

The use of voice search marketing increased with use of mobile devices in marketing. This has made voice search to really grow in popularity. Search engines on their part now have improved algorithms to do voice searches. With that, more and more people now talk to their voice-enabled devices every day particularly for marketing and scheduling purposes. But, optimizing for voice search is slightly different from optimizing for text search. For best voice search results, a marketer must endeavor to create content that answers questions in a conversational tone. You can do this correctly by first finding out questions that your audience frequently asks and you supply the answers in a conversational tone.
 
Search Engine Marketing, SEM

SEM is the process of purchasing ad space on Search Engine Results Pages, SERPs. These ads are typically the websites listed on the top, bottom, and sometimes the side of your Google searches that have the word “Ad” next to them. You can pay to have your site show up for certain search results and get in front of your target audience. When your ad ranks high on SERPs, it gets better noticed by searchers using the keywords your ad is optimized with. That’s where SEO gets really important in search engine marketing.

How to Build a Small Business Marketing Plan

If you run a small business, you need a plan for your marketing strategy. Without a plan, you’ll end up marketing in the dark without any tangible results. Marketing without a strategic plan is a recipe for disaster. You cannot have a successful small business if you keep it under wraps. If you do, you may not be in business for much too long. Marketing and exposing your small business is what helps it to grow. Marketing gets your products/services in front of people who need or want them. Usually, good marketing helps to convince buyers that you have the right solution to their problems. Through it, you can sometimes manage to convince consumers that they have a problem that needs fixing and you have the right solution to the problem.

To market successfully, you need a small business marketing strategy. That requires intentional planning. It must also be dynamic enough to be relevant since things move so fast these days. You cannot for instance expect last year’s marketing strategy to still work perfectly for you one year down the road. The reason your marketing plan needs to be up to date and effective at all times. If you want an effective marketing plan for your small business, it will help if you can stick with the following guide to create one.

Clearly Establish Your Marketing Goals: The first thing you do is to establish clear marketing goals you want to achieve and create key performance indicators (KPIs) you can target and accurately measure to determine if you are doing well. Such goals can include the volume of traffic, number of leads/customers, volume of sales and revenue target.
 
Identify Your Audience: Next is to clearly identify your audience. Who exactly do you want to market to if you want to achieve your set goals? Your marketing strategy is doomed to failure without a good understanding of who your audience is. You must put on paper and clearly define who your business is targeting and by what means/channels. You must figure this out correctly because if you don’t, you’ll be marketing in vain without tangible results.

Set Your Marketing Budget: As most marketers very well know, a marketing plan without a budget is a mere wish list. Therefore, you must accurately figure out expenditure costs and what you can achieve by what you spend on marketing. Figure out how much you can allocate in your marketing budget to, for example traditional advertising, email marketing, social media marketing and so on. Be sure the expenditure is measurable against projected results or achievements.

Decide Your Marketing Channels and Tactics: If you factor in the products you are marketing and the characteristics of your target audience, you can decide on the most effective channels to use. Knowing quite well that it is virtually impossible or even prudent to invest in every marketing channel or tactic out there, you must deliberately make choices in favor of what will yield the best results for the type of marketing you want. Depending on your marketing budget, you can pick a handful of channels and strategies to prioritize.

Draw up Your To-Do List and Make Assignments: This is one great way to keep to schedules and targets on formats you can see and use as achievement/progress guides. You can start this by making check-boxes and assigning names to tasks. You then outline everything that needs to happen in tandem with your plan then take each marketing strategy from idea to execution. Each completed achievement is marked off done before you move to the next.

Set Your Deadlines: For your marketing plan to be effective, you must clearly set out dates and even time for when you hope to accomplish your marketing goals. You must be able to clearly define and track all your marketing goals against the deadlines set. If for instance one of your goals is to increase sales and revenue, you must decide how much of that you expect to achieve in the time-frame of one week, one month or by the end of the quarter or the year. These time-frames will help you to know exactly when to track your actual performance against your projections with a view to knowing how well you are doing.

Last Line

If you stick with this plan, your marketing results will amaze you.

7 Promotional Ideas Tips for Your Small Business

It is usually a huge challenge for many small businesses to differentiate themselves from their competition and capture the attention of customers. What makes the difference is how the businesses are promoted. Most small business owners probably know this already. They know how important it is to promote a business with vigor. What most however fail to fully understand is how and where to carry out the relevant promotion activities. What to advertise, how to advertise and where to advertise becomes pertinent. Even though advertising a small business can be challenging because of the characteristic low advertising budget peculiar with many small businesses, there are many routes and steps you can take that are cost-effective. Exactly where these here promotional ideas, and tips are relevant.

 

1. Create and Share Quality Sponsored Content: If you want to get your brand quickly known, think sponsored content. It is one great way to get your brand out there to make it known. What nature of content is best to sponsor? Expert marketers recommend blogs and videos sharing via the right channels. So, you can create original high quality content in blog posts or videos. Next is to work with and collaborate with reputable brands that are willing to share your content for a fee to share it.

2. Promote on Social Media: If you promote on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes, you can take full advantage of their in-house marketing tools and their huge popularity to brand your small business. Presently, over 4.5 billion people worldwide are active on social media 24/7. With such a huge audience, there’s no better place at the moment to promote your small business. Most marketers know that each social media platform attracts a slightly different demographic. What that means is that you can better target your ads to reach a very wide audience at minimal costs.

3. Use Paid Search Advertising: Online paid advertising is usually very effective particularly if it is PPC, pay per click. If you invest in paid search advertising, it is possible for you to directly reach potential customers who are looking for what you are selling through the relevant keywords in your content. Therefore, even with a very low ads budget, you can target a specific audience based on location, browser, and other relevant information.

4. Market with Affiliate Programs: Affiliate marketing programs are low cost marketing strategies small business owners can take advantage of. They are excellent high-impact marketing strategies that thrive on a mutually beneficial partnership between product merchants and affiliates.  As a small business owner, you can partner with other brands, content marketers, bloggers, or social media channels to promote your products/services with a profit sharing arrangement. Affiliate programs are a great way to generate leads for your small business through social proof. Building a great brand reputation for your brand derives from there.

5. Sponsor Ads on Social Media: If you advertise online, all you want is traffic. By sponsoring ads on social media, you have the great benefit of your ads appearing in your audience’s news feed, even if they aren’t following your page. That means traffic which is good for your business. Sponsored social media ads can be very successful because, you can directly target specific demographics that are most likely to buy your products/services. That way, you get the most value from your ad spend.

6. Use Influencer Marketing: Some research findings indicate that over 60% of consumers trust influencer endorsements. What this means is that most consumers are more likely to buy a product recommended by an influencer than the one endorsed by the seller. Most consumers rely on influencer endorsements to make their buy decisions because of the trust they have on the influencer. This is why it is much better to rely on Influencers to help build the brand reputation of your business and to generate leads at a lower cost than on traditional advertising which costs higher.

7. Advertise at Your Local Chamber of Commerce: Worldwide, local chambers of commerce are places where business owners and business minded people interact closely. That makes them one great place to advertise your small business if you ask me. Through them, you can easily reach new people in your community at minimal costs. You can also build highly rewarding relationships with other local business owners particularly in your business niche. For business inquiries, many people usually like to visit the website of their local chambers of commerce. That makes the chambers a very effective way to reach new customers.

Want to Make Money From Home, Try These Small Business Ideas

Are you still wondering how you can earn a living working from home? Even if you have a 9-5 job, you can still work from home and earn some good money on the side. Circumstances have forced more and more people to work from the comfort of their homes in recent times particularly because of the covid pandemic restrictions. This trend is likely to continue into the foreseeable future. Remote work at home is fun, convenient, profitable and quite suitable for stay-at-home-mums in particular. So, if you are keen on becoming a home-based entrepreneur yourself, you may consider the following small business ideas for starters.

 
Content Writing

Anyone with the right skills and knowledge can write content for their blog or for marketers. Content is written principally to attract traffic to a business website. Content is hugely important for online marketing purposes because it is key to search engine rankings. Great content can be packaged in form of blogs, video scripts, and eBooks to attract prospects, leads and customers. Content writers can use existing content writing platforms like Fiverr or Upwork or go it alone on their privately hosted blogs. Whatever way you choose to write content, so long as it attracts traffic, it is OK. That is the traffic that will enable you to promote and sell products and to earn commissions if such products are from a third party product merchant.

Online Teaching/Tutoring

If you have the academic qualifications and inclination, you can teach subjects in any educational area online to earn money. Online teaching business is a perfect business to start from home. When people are generally restricted as in recent episode of covid pandemic, more and more people became interested in online school and home schooling. At such times, anxious parents usually arrange some form of teaching for their children and wards outside the traditional classroom education. That creates a lot of demand for online teaching. It is one job anyone can undertake from the comfort of their homes provided they have a good web cam, a good backdrop, microphone, and lighting backed by a decent computer and reliable internet connection.
 
Virtual Assistant Services

Most busy Executives these days require the services of Virtual Assistants, VA to help them out with routine jobs. If you have the temperament, great organizational, communication and detail skills, you can become a Virtual Assistant.  VA can be an excellent business opportunity for anyone who is willing and able to work for busy Executives. To do well, you’ll need to have unhindered access to a computer, the internet and a phone. VAs usually support Executives by way of a variety of routine tasks such as handling communications like social media handles, emails, phone calls and even Whatsapp and text messages. They can help their employers to schedule meetings and events, travels, hotel reservations, and any other routine administrative details.

Marketing and Branding

You can have a viable home business if you have a penchant for packaging and branding products or people. It is just like some sort of consulting or coaching business. To get known in this business, you can raise your profile through public speaking, writing articles, growing your following on social media or contributing to existing blogs and newsletters. It is simple to get started. All you need to get going is a functional Website, Logo, Business name, e-mail, Business cards, online stationery (for proposals and invoices), a cell phone and a good idea and you are in business for real.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is one great way to earn income from home by promoting products for product merchants and getting paid commissions for your efforts. To get started, you need to select good products related to your business niche to promote through your blog content. With a good computer and access to the internet, you get going with affiliate marketing. Since advertising is costly, product merchants are always looking for affiliates to help promote their products as a cost-saving opportunity. That is where affiliate marketers get to be in business. All they need is to have a blog or a website where they can steadily promote products for product merchants. It can even be done through some sort of sponsored content with influencers particularly on social media. This way, affiliate marketers can build quite some profitable business by simply driving traffic to a business website. If clicks/sales are made from the website through the affiliate links embedded in the content, the affiliate earns a commission.

Web Designing

Web designing requires skills and knowledge of the computer and the internet. In the digital space of the internet, starting a web design business from home can be a lucrative business avenue. Most people are taking their businesses online, and these people need functional and well-hosted websites for that purpose. With an internet access and solid hardware and software that meet your needs, you can design websites for online business owners and make good money. If you can arrange good hosting for the website and help to optimize the content with relevant keywords, you make money too. Search Engine Optimization SEO, on the website is one skill set in high demand you really need. Through it, websites get high ranking on the SERPs of search engines and that helps such websites to receive good organic traffic from the search engines.

Selling Products Online

Yeah, you can do business out of an eCommerce store of your own. These days, many more people are doing a large portion of their shopping online. You can take advantage of that to sell your own products/services. It is up to you to sell whatever product/service you choose. You can do so through a number of online platforms like Etsy, Amazon Marketplace and the likes that may offer you free or low-cost slots for your online store. If you understand the platform you are using well enough and how to use it to sell your products/services, you can make good sales and earn income. However, you must make sure you have the right marketing strategy suitable for each platform and the products/services you are selling are in demand.

Transcription Services

The world is increasingly interconnected and there a lot of info out there that needs transcribing. Researchers, medical services/hospitals, journalists and even graduate students do need transcription services a great deal to help them with huge data that needs transcribing. This data may be in the form of audio and video. What the transcriptionist simply does is to listen or watch the content then type out the exact words spoken. This is often with time stamps to enable their clients use the materials in their work without too much stress. The main skill you need is the ability to listen well and type fast enough to get the whole stuff down for easy read. As a transcriptionist, you earn less if you work for a service than if you work directly for yourself. That is typical of most freelance jobs though.

Customer Service

Customer service is usually one huge headache particularly for big companies. Because the field is wide and varied, some companies are flexible enough to allow for home-based or remote work to handle their customer service. The service entails so much since you can never know with customers. However, in dealing with customers many companies usually need help to take orders from customers, answer questions, guide them through billing and a number of other activities that customers may spring up requiring quick handling. Good customer service operators get paid handsomely.

Digital Marketing Tips to Advertise Your Small Business Online

Small business owners traditionally face very daunting challenges in their marketing campaigns to advertise their small businesses online. That is even with the well-known digital marketing campaign methods like Email marketing, SEO, Social Media Marketing, Blogging and so on most marketers like to use. Many marketers do get by though. You can get by as well if you take these here tips into account when designing and shaping your own digital marketing strategy.

 

Set Up a User-Friendly Website

A user-friendly website is actually one of the very basics of advertising your small business online. It serves as your business window in the internet world. If you aim to get web visitors to your website, the site must be well designed and friendly enough to welcome them. It is through this site you can deploy the right marketing techniques to advertise your business and attract customers. Through it, you must have the right information readily available to help the website visitors make their buy decisions. If your website is good enough, it should directly reflect your brand’s character personality and answer queries/questions or concerns visitors or even customers may have as they hit the site.

Position Your Website for SEO

Online marketers usually worry about how major search engines particularly Google can notice and index their websites. The answer lies in SEO, Search Engine Optimization which is a process of optimizing your online content to enable search engines rank it high in their SERPs. That way, they send more organic traffic to the website for searches of specific keywords the website content is optimized with.
 
Set up an Account on Google My Business, GMB

GMB account is free and easy to set up. Since Google appears to be the first place searchers take to in search of products or services, it is just wise to take the advantage and use it to advertise your small business. A GMB account helps your business to show up in search results when people are looking for your type of products/services online. That makes GMB a perfect and budget-friendly tool to advertise your small business online. 

 

Have a Strong Social Media Presence

Having a strong social media presence can be key to the effective advertising of your small business online. The reason is because of the huge popularity of social media platforms and the ease of sharing information therein. However, you must endeavor to pick only the social media platforms that are right for your type business and you can manage easily without undue stress. This choice is from among the most popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest and the likes. Because each platform has a different type of audience, for sake of demographics, you must have your social media strategy which is suitable for your type of business. Regularly sharing high quality content on social media helps to advertise your small business at minimal costs.

Optimize for Local Searches

Every small business is local. Most searchers first search for businesses “near me” on Google when they get online. For this reason, if you optimize your website for local searches, it benefits from this huge search results. If your business location is part of your local SEO, search engines like Google take note. That helps to increase the visibility of your small business particularly to local searchers which is your target audience. On social media, if you set up your business as a location on Facebook for instance, it can ensure that users tag you on account of that location. That again helps to amplify the visibility of your business. You can carefully place geographically-related keywords as often as possible in the titles, headers, image tags, body, and meta descriptions of your website to increase your local visibility. Even when describing your products and services, you must ensure that you are optimizing your location. Make sure your location is in your business listings as in GMB, social media profiles, and your website pages. That helps your business visibility in your locality a great deal. 

5 Tips to Rapidly Grow Your Small Business Online

Every small business owner wants his business to grow. How to stimulate this growth remains a very challenging enterprise for many. Experienced small business owners say there is no generally accepted formula for stimulating small business growth. This is the reason most are in favor of a multi-faceted and multi-dimensional approach. However, there are a few things you can do well enough to give your small business the best chance for growth. These 5 tips if properly used can be helpful.

 
1. Pay Attention to Digital Marketing

The first challenge a small businesses owner faces is how to get his business in front of potential customers and customers. No business grows without people becoming aware of its existence. What is the best and cost-effective method to promote this awareness? It is certainly digital marketing. Digital marketing is one of the best ways for a small business to promote itself. That makes it hugely important and imperative to develop a digital marketing strategy for your small business right from the outset of your marketing activities. This strategy must take into account many factors to ensure its effectiveness. These factors include the type and form your marketing activities will take inclusive of the marketing channels. You can thus consider marketing through Emails, paid ads, social media platforms, search engine optimization (SEO) and suchlike proven digital marketing techniques.

2. Understand Your Customer Base

Every business is all about serving customers/clients. If you cannot serve customers well, your business can never grow. Understanding your customers is the first step to serving them well. For this reason, you must always factor in their needs/wants when you’re developing products/services for the market. How do you know if you are serving your customers well? It is through honest feedback from them. Honest feedback is one of the best ways to build a better understanding of your customers. By taking into account all issues raised by customers in their reviews as well as conducting surveys, you can build a great relationship with your customers. You can in addition better understand the current market demands and market stimuli. These can help you to improve on the areas where your business might be lacking and to grow the business.

3. Prioritize Good Customer Service

According to the popular marketing cliché, the customer is king. You are in business to serve him. No matter the scale/size of your business, you cannot afford to ignore your customers. You must pay keen attention to your customer wants/needs at all times. Always explore any and every way to serve your customers better. That now brings into sharp focus, the issue of customer service. To get the best from your customers, you must engage better with them. Be sure to have a social media presence where you promote more engagement with your customer base. You can in addition have a great opportunity to listen to their concerns and ideas. These are great ways to improve your customer service. If you can as much as make quality customer service a key feature of your business strategy, it is sufficient to stand you out from your competitors. That means a lot for the growth and profitability of your business.

4. Network Widely

In any business, a great network is business strength. As a small business owner, never miss the opportunity to network widely. Many of such opportunities can be found in seminars conventions, sales promos, social media, product launches, talk shows, new tech intros or any such public events where you may get to meet many other persons in your business industry. Even if the people you meet at these events may not necessarily be working in the same business niche as yours, they can more often than not become very valuable contacts for your business at some other time. Some of these people may become your business partners, investors, suppliers, creditors, vendors, customers and even employees.

5. Make Employee Training Essential

When your employees are growing in knowledge and service, your business grows in tandem. For this reason, the growth of your business doesn’t depend only on your drive or your products, your employees are a crucial factor too. Therefore, if you deliberately create a well-trained, motivated and effective marketing team, your business benefits immensely. If you remunerate your staff well and offer them excellent opportunities to advance their careers in your business outfit, you can always get the best out of them.

Conclusion

Running a small business no doubt presents huge challenges. The prospect of growing your small business might seem daunting, but with the foregoing tips, good results can be obtained. The real marketing advantage of small businesses is that they can deliberately offer personalized and attentive experience to customers more easily than bigger outfits. Even if their ads budgets can’t match competitors, deft investment in digital marketing is one great way they can get noticed. That ultimately helps them to boost traffic, leads, customers, sales and revenues.

Key Tips for Small Business Marketing in Tough Times

Economic realities worldwide are always characterized by ups and downs. This affects marketers a great deal. When the economy suffers an unexpected downturn just like we currently have with the covid-19 pandemic ravaging the world, smart marketers must be able to think outside the box for their businesses to survive. Generally, at such times, there is always the tendency for most marketers to focus mainly on how to cut costs and save money. That usually poses very huge challenges for many marketers. If fewer and fewer customers begin to spend less money on your business, you will be forced to lower your business expenses to help your cash flow if your business must survive the unexpected turn of events. Part of the things you must do to help your business is to explore credible ways to ramp up your marketing efforts to get more sales despite the tough times. That poses some challenges no doubt but if you are able to take full advantage of these here key tips, you may turn out better than many of your competitors.


 
Review Your Marketing Strategy

Tough economic times are usually very perfect times to test out new marketing strategies and products/services to meet people’s needs during the times. Therefore, ramping up or even changing your marketing strategy in addition to testing new tools is worth trying out. In fact, anything you can do in your business which helps to lower your marketing expenses is worth trying. Marketing experts advise that in tough economic times, you can even do more marketing at lower costs. One of the commonest ways to do this is to simply switch from paid ads to free ads using online media tools to promote your business. With free ads, it is possible to increase the intensity and frequency of your ads without any additional costs and you get good results.

Redirect Your Products Offering

At times of economic downturns, it is better to focus on changing up your products offerings to better meet the needs of your customers since as the economy changes, your customers’ needs change significantly as well. That is called business adaptation. Not many businesses can survive tough economic times if they’re unable to adapt to such changing times. So, in times of tough economic downturns, when customers realize that you are striving to meet their needs despite the tough times, they tend to continue their patronage in reciprocity.

Adopt Grassroots Marketing

Many marketing experts like to recommend a grassroots approach as an effective marketing strategy when the economy is down. Many others like to call it “reverting to old school” marketing strategy. It relies hugely on word-of-mouth marketing which is as old as marketing itself and still very effective as well. It costs next to nothing too to pass on your message from mouth to mouth. Word-of-mouth marketing could kick start by simply passing a message to just one person, a few individuals or a small group. The words get out of there by way of normal people to people social/business interactions and the message will spread wider and faster to a much larger audience. On and on it goes just like that and your business benefits as a result. You can easily pass on good words about your business if you can seize any opportunity to speak at some religious/community/social events. If somehow, you manage to get your audience curious and excited about your business, they remember and many will pass on the information which may earn recommendations and referrals for your business.

Segment Your Marketing

Market segmentation remains a very good marketing strategy particularly in tough economic times. Economic downturns usually affect different people in different ways. That is why it’s smart marketing to be able to gauge where your customers are at in the economic downturn and to segment your marketing to meet them where they are. It is futile to simply assume that some people have or haven’t been affected by an economic downturn. If you can properly survey your audience to gauge their needs, you can then correctly segment your marketing to meet those needs. Doing so enables you to market the right products to the right people at the right time and even in the right place. That can help to boost their patronage even in tough times. Market segmentation may seem like a little too much extra work, but you’ll realize it’s worth it when the results start coming in.

Stay Connected and Available to Your Customers

When customers realize that you really care about them no matter how tough the times are, they too will remember and care about you. Simply caving in and disappearing during economic downturns is bad for business. It pays to remain steadfast and available to your customers despite tough times. Many customers do appreciate that as a great sacrifice for them and many never forget. The good news is that with the depth and versatility of the Internet, staying connected with your customers is much easier and reliable these days. No matter how tough the times are, it is still very easy and free of cost to send out regular email newsletters with helpful information and tips. It is easy to also provide updates on your business by posting tips on social media at no cost at all.

 

5 Ways Collaboration Helps Your Small Business

Every small business owner always wants results, good results. That is why there is always an endless struggle to make the businesses more efficient, reputable and profitable. From experience, going it alone is at times very difficult but there is always a way around that which is simply by “collaboration.” Any small business owner who manages to engender a collaborative environment can drive better bottom line results. That is great! Here are 5 direct benefits small businesses can derive from collaborative efforts.

01. Access to More and Better Workers

Business collaboration makes available a wider potential pool of employees. You have available for use, outsourced workers, remote workers who may prefer their home environments to work for you and even part-time workers depending on your own business model. That arrangement gives you the flexibility to hire only persons who are best for the job, regardless of their locations. 

02. More Effective Communication

You may be aware that information is only valuable if it’s available to the right people at the right times. And, these are the people who can make use of that information for the sake of your business. Without a true collaboration system for your team, what happens is that your team gets to rely on regular communication methods like phone systems, text chat or email which could fragment such information. Fragmented information hurts your business real time but with systems collaboration, that problem can be resolved.

03. More Efficient Processes

Collaboration in the use of processes engenders efficiency by eliminating duplication of efforts. Duplication of efforts brews avoidable crisis and dissipation of energies resolving crises which would have been avoided in the first place. With crises, projects take longer to finish thereby making customers unhappy. But with better collaboration, employees and systems roles are better clarified leading to reduced crises and increased efficiency.

04. Better Customer Satisfaction

When systems work efficiently and employees stick with their roles, there is always better customer satisfaction. When friction is eliminated, your employees are happier and do give a better account of themselves in getting the work done. Naturally, that translates to better service for the satisfaction of customers. Employees’ collaboration engenders that and many small businesses can now take advantage of online collaboration tools to get things done in a better way.

05. Using Employee Strengths More Efficiently

No small business which is unable to tap into her employee strengths can ever be sufficiently productive. When project managers encourage their employees to work together on projects, they get the benefit of each person being able to work on activities that are most suited to their specific skills/strengths. That way, projects can be divided up more effectively based on proven skills. That is one great way to tap into employee strengths, a consequence of which a better and more effective job gets done. End result is improved productivity.