The marketing challenges of today go far beyond traditional methods of merely advertising in local or national media, be it television, radio or print formats, or the standard business cards pass-out and elevator pitch. Long-standing methods such as bulk mailers or public marketing events are costly and may not offer an immediate return on investment. Today’s marketing avenues include establishing a social media presence, developing websites with online search optimization, community involvement and public relations. Regardless of what is going on in the market, potential customers need to know about you for your small business to be successful.
For small businesses though, challenges such as limited budgets, difficulty attracting and retaining customers, inadequate digital marketing skills and keeping up with trends, can make effective marketing difficult to navigate. Resource limitations may be the most obvious difference between small businesses and larger companies in establishing an effective marketing strategy. Operating costs seem to dominate your cash flow, leaving less resources to invest in marketing. But there are opportunities to be creative and stay efficient in tackling these challenges.
Marketing requires an investment of time, even if you are using the low-cost options that social media offer. Time spent on marketing efforts is time divested away from other roles and responsibilities. Thus, it is important to have a structured marketing plan in place. According to research, 47% of small business owners handle their own marketing efforts, and struggle to track their own strategy and the return on their investment. Even without spending money on outside help, time is money, and marketing does consume a substantial amount of time, even in the digital age. Considering outsourcing your marketing needs–if your budget allows–is a good idea. For instance, social media marketers use audience building techniques, work to increase engagement rates, and watch top performing content to create campaigns that convert. Email marketers test content, understand email privacy regulations and monitor site traffic to ensure these efforts lead to greater sales. It’s difficult to manage all these avenues of one’s own volition, thus outsourcing these tasks to qualified talent can lead to a greater ROI over time.
Before venturing into digital avenues or other options, it is important to create a simple marketing plan. Focus on 5 key elements to make your plan straightforward:
- Who do you want to work with and what do they need? Directing your marketing efforts to a specific market increases your clarity of message and heightens your visibility.
- What makes you better, different, or more valuable than your competitors? The key here is to identify what your potential clients really want, and how you can deliver it better than anyone else.
- What are your marketing goals? Select 1-to-3 of the most important goals for your business and work toward achieving them. Without setting goals, it will be difficult to evaluate progress and adjust your marketing plan as necessary, leading to ineffectiveness and a drain on your resources.
- Establish what strategies and tactics you will use. Determine the best channels and associated activities that will best lead to your projected goals.
- How will you measure your marketing effectiveness against your goals? Common measurements include cost per lead, or sales revenue, “click-through” rates, form conversion rates and e-mail opens. Keeping an eye on these key performance indicators will help keep you focused on what is working and not wasting resources on unproductive efforts.
Creating a marketing plan should include goals and key performance indicators (KPI); an overview of your target audience; analysis of your key competitors; an analysis of your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT); an outline of where and how you plan to implement your marketing campaign.
It is important to define what customers you would like to reach, and if online resources are the better option in which to do so, as opposed to direct mailers or traditional print methods. Your website is the first order of business in the electronic medium. But the best way to maximize your opportunities is to focus on low-cost, high impact marketing options, particularly those attainable through social media platforms. These will offer more immediate and quick hit action.
You will need to create content that is useful, helpful or entertaining to your customers. Content can be articles, blog posts, photography, videos or webinars. If content creation is not your strong suit, consider outsourcing the task, or task in-house talent with the responsibility, if such individuals are available. If you are hiring a freelancer, either use a reputable marketing hub, or be sure to properly vet any applicants to demonstrate their skills.
Building up a following and engaging your audience can build brand awareness and drive traffic to your business’s website. Implementing an “SEO” (search engine optimization) can generate organic traffic to your website with minimal financial investment. An SEO is the process in which you make your business more visible on search engines without paying for ads. Whatever you post on your website, or articles on your blog will find your target market quickly and easily. To establish an SEO strategy, be sure to include the following four elements:
- Keyword research: find out what your target audience is searching for.
- On page SEO: optimizing webpages and their content.
- Off page SEO: getting other sites to link to your site, which can boost its reputation.
- Technical SEO: improving your website’s overall performance and accessibility.
SEOs are subsets of SEMs (search engine marketing), as it focuses on organic results that you don’t have to pay the search engine for. This is also distinct from a ‘pay per click’ marketing that involves setting up ad campaigns, paying to run them and generating traffic. Paid results do not always appear on search engine results pages. When they do, they are usually at the top with a “sponsored” or “Ad” label attached to them. The attached image demonstrates an obvious example of this:
Pay per click can give you immediate visibility through high value keywords, but organic results tend to have higher “click through” rates, since users tend to trust them more than ads. SEO is very important as it helps you capitalize on organic brand awareness and the traffic that search engines generate. If you do not use an SEO, you are unlikely to rank prominently for relative terms. This limits your ability to generate new views and prospects.
There are numerous digital marketing tools which can help you streamline your efforts, automate processes, and save time and money. Social media management platforms such as Semrush.com allow you to quickly and easily schedule posts to major platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, all in one place. Semrush also allows you SEO tools such as Keyword Magic Tool, which generates keyword ideas and provides you with helpful metrics like difficulty, search volume and search intent.
Consistency is key in building brand awareness and maintaining it. Investment of time, set-up and know-how are key to marketing success, and that ROI does not materialize overnight. Many businesses owners struggle because they cannot immediately tie marketing efforts back to sales and thus shelve their marketing plans. A marketing person or freelancer may be better able to track and optimize your efforts, again if your budget allows.
Identifying your target audience will help you understand their needs and ensure that your marketing efforts resonate with them, yielding better results. One of the best ways to find your target audience is to research your competitors’ audience. Use of various platforms will feature tools, allowing you to target demographics and socio-economic groups that are likely to be your core audience.
The one2target tool on semrush https://www.semrush.com/analytics/one2target/ is one option that will help you understand and define your target audience, as it offers demographic and socio-economic breakdowns and data. Monday.com (https://monday.com/) also offers free to use tools for target marketing, event planning and management, calendar and content creation and marketing strategy.
The process of generating leads and driving conversions is always more challenging for small businesses. Finding and engaging potential customers is always tough, but even more so for companies with limited resources. To drive leads rather than just make immediate sales, you need to use “lead generation ads”. These are online ads specifically designed to generate leads. These leads can be converted into customers through other channels, such as telephone or email. Popular platforms such as Google Ads are useful and allow you to create ads specifically for lead generation. Optimize your landing pages to get visitors to enter their email or phone number. This information can be useful for small businesses in their early stages that may not have many customers yet.
Converting those visitors to customers is key and optimizing your website to attract visitors and make them want to act will help achieve that. Make sure your website is user friendly, mobile responsive and has clear calls to action (CTAs). Keep your CTAs straightforward by adhering to the following tips:
- Keep them consistent: don’t ask visitors to do too many tasks or they will lose interest and drop out; keep the preferred action to one item per page, such as adding an email address, or adding an item to a cart, or checkout feature.
- Place them strategically: close to an image of the product or alongside reviews or testimonials to emphasize credibility.
- Make them stand out: use high levels of contrast to make your CTAs stand out on the page. Use clear fonts and the appropriate size for each device.
It is essential to stay consistent in your marketing efforts. For too many DIY’ers, when other demands pop up, marketing tasks get pushed to the back burner, which inevitably makes sense from the perspective of the business owner. But for potential customers, consistency is vital to building brand awareness. If prospects only receive emails at unpredictable intervals, do not see new posts on followed social media sites, or never see your brand name pop up again, it will be hard for them to remember and trust you. This is why building out a promotional calendar and incorporating marketing automation or automated updating will help sustain your message when time gets circumvented by other demands.
Again, you cannot do it all yourself. Outsourcing or relying on trusted marketing specialists will help you see results a lot faster. And as you grow, your marketing needs will become larger and more complex and require a greater investment of time. But with the advent of the new marketing tools mentioned above, and others that are easily vetted, you can begin to build your brand and establish an identity that will resonate with others and help you better reach your revenue goals.
