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.

Effective Small Business Social Media Marketing Techniques

These days, irrespective your brand or industry, you cannot afford not to have social media as part of your small business marketing strategy. That is unless you want your small business to stagnate. As a marketer, depending on your experience, your brand and even your temperament, you have the option of using many marketing techniques for your marketing campaigns, but social media marketing should always be a sure choice. You have the option of exploring several social media marketing strategies among which are:

Influencer Marketing

If you have a massive following in your social media handles, you can become an influencer for brands. First, you must grow your audience to a reasonable size for it to be effective for influencer marketing. If you do not have that sort of following yet particularly on the most popular platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and the likes, you can partner with micro-influencers to get your brand in front of your niche audiences. Most Micro-influencers tend to have 10-100 thousand followers and often come off as more relatable and approachable for partnership arrangements than the big celebrity influencers.

Messenger Marketing

If you need quick one-on-one messaging, you can use social messaging platforms like Whatsapp, Facebook messenger, AI-powered chatbots and Skype. Feedback in instant and reliable and you can market any product/service through these messaging apps. Aside customer support and resolving customer problems instantly, messenger marketing is very effective using these apps. Through the instant messages, you make product/service suggestions to customers to help solve their problems. Promos, discounts and new products arrivals can be better announced using these instant messaging apps.

Employee Advocacy Programs

Smart marketers can deliberately turn their employees into extensions of their social media programs. That way, you can easily start an employee advocacy program. There are online platforms like GaggleAMP and Dynamic Signal that encourage employees to share content on their social network in exchange for points, prizes, and internal recognition. If your employees take advantage of these platforms to share your content on the platforms, a combination of their collective following in addition to yours can help give a much wider exposure to your marketing content than if you relied on yours alone. There is always a very big difference in the reach of your business through employee advocacy programs.

Organic Social Media Marketing

Do you know you can actually do practically anything and even advertise on social media for free? Great if you do! But, in case you don’t, be informed that you can do organic social media marketing for free just as other free social media activities. Some of these free activities include, publishing marketing content, publishing posts, commenting on articles/content, inviting users to like/share your page, engaging with reviews, and actively interacting in social media groups. Most marketers know that it is hugely challenging to grow a large and engaging following particularly on pay-to-play networks without spending money, but you can still do a great deal of marketing on social media without expending a dime. That is done by way of organic marketing.

 

Social Media Advertising

Many social media marketers find social media advertising intimidating, but it is incredibly lucrative if you know what you are doing.  Once you learn the ropes and do what is expected, getting the right results is a given. Through social media advertising, you get access to tons of metrics. Through such metrics, it is possible to know if the strategy you are using is earning you profits or helping you to make losses. Whichever it turns out, you can always at any time adjust your strategy to get the best results. The most result-oriented social media advertising you should be using at any point includes techniques like Facebook ads, sponsored posts, YouTube ads, and LinkedIn InMail.

Live Streaming

Live streaming is a great way to showcase your products and engage with your customers in a more personal way. Live streaming because it is real time, manages to turn talk-at-you marketing into back-and-forth mutually beneficial conversations. It still promises to get more personal as internet technology tends to deepen marketing activities by the day. Such experiences can make the difference between a one-off purchase and a life-long customer. Smart marketers always explore viable ways to Host a webinar or go behind the scenes of a product launch to build trust and relationships with the audience particularly through live streaming.