Marketing Strategies Every Small Business Needs

The first major challenge everyone faces as a small business owner is competition. That gets stiffer by the day. So, if you want your own business to survive, you must always have your thinking cap on. Resolve to think strategically at all times. These here strategies are not one-size-fits-all strategies. You must look at yourself and your business very well to decide what will work for you and what won’t. Here are some of the best marketing strategies that can help you get your business in the right direction now and the years ahead.

If you’ve been around for a while, you may have deployed one, two or more of these here strategies to promote your small business in the past. Exact same strategies that have proven useful to many others around the world! Here's a list of a few proven strategies that are right now helping businesses across the world:

Building an email marketing funnel
Speaking at, sponsoring and or hosting events/seminars/webinars
Offering free business consultations
Traditional media advertising
Advertising on social media, particularly Twitter, Instagram and Facebook
Adding your business profiles on directories such as Google My Business
Investing in content marketing
Writing a column/articles factually, consistently and continuously

More hands-on strategies:

Write about your products/services: You may not know how to write a blog but not to worry. At least you are literate enough to write something. You may not need to worry about blog writing skills if you are literate enough to write something readable. Just write stories and articles about your products and or services and how they help your customers. Even if your platform is social media, so long as you are consistent and factual, you can build a reputation for your brand online and patronage naturally follows.

Create online visibility for your business: What that means is to be sure your business is visible and accessible online 24/7. To be able to do so, you must create your profiles across all available social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and others. You must keep your contact details updated there so that people can drop a message anytime of the day. That is one great way to generate very valuable leads.

Maintain email contact with your customers: You can build a reliable email list from your online visibility. Thereafter, you can regularly send emails to your existing customers and also to potential customers you are targeting. This is one very useful way to promote your content, improve sales and nurture existing leads for the future.

Using word of mouth promo: A satisfied customer is a very big asset to your business. You should encourage your customers to speak about your business to others. You must therefore strive more to satisfy customers than turning a profit. Businesses that enjoy good customer satisfaction not only benefit from good customer retention, they also benefit from good word of mouth promos and customer testimonials on your website and even on social media platforms. The better and more the reviews your business gets, the more customers it continues to attract.  

Why Affiliate Marketing is so Convenient

  Here is the why! As every marketer very well knows, paying for conversions rather than ads is one of the best and safest investments for marketing. In conventional marketing strategies, companies often spend a considerable amount of time on researching, planning and executing marketing campaigns at considerable costs. Some companies may even have fulltime employees carrying out these functions. Affiliate marketing in a way helps to minimize some of these costly activities by taking away a portion of the research and planning work from fulltime employees. Doing so gives them more time to focus more on higher-yield tasks and better productivity as a result. By investing in online affiliate marketing, many small companies do experience a dual financial benefit very conveniently.

As an added advantage, merchants may benefit from potential customers who come to their website or to a product page via an affiliate link because they already have some information about the product. This also allows for potential customers to spend less time on the site. Ultimately, affiliate links are beneficial because there is not an advertising expense associated with each site visitor who does not make a purchase. Site visitors come on their own volition driven mostly by curiosity at no cost to the merchants and or publishers drawing them over. This is another cost-effective and convenient way of reaching potential buyers.

If you factor in ROI, Affiliate Marketing is one fantastic investment for smaller companies with lower budgets. That is because the arrangement allows for bloggers and aspiring influencers to make money in exchange for doing what they love and are passionate about. Smaller businesses are all too often passion projects for individuals who may also be working full time elsewhere. Most of such businesses are actually work from home projects not requiring brick and mortar requirements unlike conventional businesses. That says a lot for convenience as well. In terms of mutually beneficial trust which is vital for every business to grow, supporting bloggers and writers with an online following can help generate the much needed trust between merchants and new potential customers. And, very conveniently too if I may add!