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.

 

3 Key Tips to Make Your Blog Earn Quick Money

As a business owner, you are no doubt aware that a blog can help your business. The reason you must own a blog if you don’t already have one. Also, a blog in one great way to earn quick money online if you have the skills and follow the rules! You can write a blog just as many businesses do primarily to grow your audience, cultivate valuable relationships with readers, and consequently increase your earnings as a result. There is research evidence that businesses that blog in support of their businesses tend to get many more indexed pages by Search Engines and consequently get more inbound traffic to their websites mostly because of the blog. If your blog sits idle on the internet without sufficient readers, it cannot make money for you. Taking into account a few key tips from expert bloggers is one great way to help your blog to make quick money. However, you may need a lot of patience and time to make money online if your blogging skills are not good enough. 


 
Here are a few key tips to help you along the way if you are desirous to make quick money from your blog.

Make Affiliate Marketing a Priority

Affiliate marketing is one of the easiest and simplest businesses anyone can get involved in to make money online. There are thousands of product merchants out there online looking for affiliates to help them market their products. These merchants pay commissions to affiliates when they make sales attributable to the marketing efforts of such affiliates. All the affiliate needs to do is to promote a product to their blog readership audience using special affiliate links supplied by the product merchants. The affiliate gets paid a commission every time such links are clicked through and a purchase is made. The relationship is a win-win situation for all parties involved and affiliates get paid without delays. Affiliate marketing is thus one credible way to make quick money online.

Market Only to the Right Audience

It makes real business sense to take your business to where it will get patronage. If you build a formidable audience for your blog, it shows the audience identifies with the business niche of your blog. So, by promoting only products related to the business niche of your blog, you are literally putting the product before the right audience. Chances of patronage increase significantly as a consequence. Experienced marketers generally agree that the best and easiest way to offer value is by marketing to the right audience. Your best target market is therefore the group of people your brand specifically caters to from your business niche. It thus makes good business sense to zero in your promotions on the narrowed-down target audience as determined by your business niche. By doing so, you get more business traction, more leads and sales and consequently more revenue.

Build and Use a Credible E-mail List

Building a huge and formidable e-mail list is a very important marketing asset. It takes a bit of time to do though but it is really worth doing at the end of the day. The significance is to have reliable contact e-mails to enable you to easily keep track of your blog-reading audience which you routinely engage and move through your sales funnel. The real reason e-mail list is such a strong marketing asset is because it makes it easy for business promoters to convert subscribers to customers, allows personalized and targeted messages and generally helps to build and maintain very strong business relationships.  E-mail list characteristically helps to easily send promo/marketing messages to very large numbers of recipients with just the touch of a computer key. Building leads and sales and consequently more revenue is greatly and quickly enhanced by the promotional efforts via e-mail lists.