Marketing has three pillars; inform, educate and entertain. As such, you need to do marketing to get your brand out there. More specifically, what you need to do in the digital space.
If you are a small business owner or are planning to start a small business, digital marketing is your fiercest ally, as you can achieve the most out of your marketing strategies for little to no cost.
What are these strategies you ask? Read on to learn about our best ideas that can really help your business grow!
Table of Contents
What’s Your Identity?
Your brand’s identity is the most key aspect of any marketing strategy. Brand identity is usually associated with logos, tagline, package design, recognizable colours, etc. Having a consistent persona will help you build a loyal audience. “Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.” Consistency becomes important here. Every marketing strategy you come up with has to reflect your brand identity and its values, or it will tank.
Identify Your Niche:
A niche is defined as “a specialized segment of the market for a particular kind of product or service.” This is where most small businesses fail to make the cut. As a small business owner, you need to remember, you cannot be everything to everyone. Yes, big businesses do it but as a small business, most of your revenue will come from your niche. What are you offering that lets you stand out from competitors?
Identifying your niche gives you an audience to start catering towards, it becomes easier to build strategies and identify the pain points of said niche audiences. Narrow down your audience, start from there and work your way up.
Social Media:
Having a social media presence is the fastest way to gain visibility and start building an audience. Creating a brand also becomes much easier with a social media presence. Most of your potential customers spend their time on Facebook and Instagram, why wouldn’t you want to be here? A social media presence gives you direct access to your niche and their pain points, utilize it to the max.
Invest time in planning your social media content. Show off your products and services creatively. Instagram has seen a boost in small businesses recently, use the boom to propel your visibility.
Create A Website:
It’s easy enough to do these days with access to so many free tools on the internet. A sleek, well-designed and optimized website can go a long way to attracting customers. Link it to your social media for that extra traffic. If you want to take it to the next level, hire a designer to do it for you. They’ll be able to identify problem areas and optimize them for your benefit.
While you’re at it, learn SEO and add a blog section to your website. You can utilize it to bring in prospects while catering to the needs of your audiences. It’s also an easy way to answer FAQs about your niche or even your brand. By adding calls to action, you will also be able to build your customer database.
Email Marketing:
Don’t knock it till you try it. You have a customer database from your blog section, now put it to use. Make an email marketing strategy to directly target your audience. Send them discount codes in the email, or alert them about a new offer you have going on. Don’t go overboard though, it will become annoying for your customers and might lead them to unsubscribe.
Hop-On Trends:
Your entire social media feed doesn’t have to be about advertising your products, keep a healthy amount of fun in there too. Social media feeds allow you to be creative, via its many trends. Use it to gain quick visibility.
You want your audience to find relatability in your content so make it informative and funny. Address problem areas in your niche, tell them what you are doing to make it better. Reels on Instagram is a great way to do this. Don’t forget to interact with your audience too.
Work On Quick ROI:
You have long term plans for growth, which is great, but what are you doing to get ROI today? Doing SEO will help you in the long run, but right now it won’t do much. If you find your audience is more on a certain platform and you can gain quick prospects there, go there!
Small-term strategies give you more momentum and allow you to build towards long term ideas. Start small, make goals that are attainable with medium to low effort, if they seem to get you more customers, double down on it until you have a larger audience.
PPC & Paid Promotions:
No one is above some paid promotion every now and then. In association with our previous point, paid promotions and PPCs (pay-per-clicks) are the easiest way to gain customers and analyse on which platform the majority of your audience is.
PPC or pay-per-click is essentially you paying as an advertiser to make sure your ad is placed first on a keyword search. So every time someone clicks on your ad, the platform, in this case, Google or Instagram will receive a set amount. With PPCs, you can use Google Adwords or Instagram’s paid promotion feature to make a listing.
Influencer Marketing:
Find influencers in your niche who have a good amount of followers and can be considered experts in your niche. Reach out to them, ask if they’d be willing to give your company a shout-out. It could even double as a testimony, if they’ve used your product before, ask them if they’re willing to share their experience. This would alert their followers about your company. Your own followers will start trusting you more because an expert is endorsing it.
If you’re willing, send select influencers PR packages with personalized notes. Then send them a message writing what we’ve suggested above. It will be a very necessary boost to your company.
Collaborations:
Find other small businesses in your area that are not your direct competitors but have some common demography. Partner with them and design a campaign that shines on both of your companies. We suggest using social media to do this as it is the best and the most efficient way to do collaborations and partnerships. Consider making a blog about them if you have a blog page, showcase the partnership on your website. Work out a barter system in which both of you make profits.
All of these strategies take time to show effects, some more than others. And most of these don’t even cost you anything. These strategies will help you, even if it is quick due to paid promotions or in the long run from blogs. Take time, plan out every detail and most importantly be patient. If you have the grit and passion, your business will succeed.
About the Author:Hermit Chawla is a Marketing Manager at Sprak Design. He would love to share thoughts on Lifestyle Design, Branding Firm, Exhibition design etc.
This is really helpful…these strategies are promising. I especially love your advice to find other small businesses in my area that are not my direct competitors but have some common demography, partner with them and design a campaign that shines on both companies. Thanks for sharing
Welcome here and thanks for reading our article and sharing your view. This will be very helpful to us to let us motivate to provide you with more awesome and valuable content from a different mind. Thanks again.