Most small businesses, particularly new ones, usually work with a limited and strict marketing budget. These small enterprises have to maximize their tight pockets while competing with larger and more prominent companies for their target audience’s attention, and that’s never an easy task.
So how does your small business stay afloat and navigate in the ultra-competitive digital marketing ocean while working within a limited budget?
There’s no single particular marketing strategy that works for every small enterprise. However, there have been several distinctive marketing strategies for small businesses that have proven to be efficient in accomplishing that goal.
These smart marketing strategies for small businesses allow you to achieve a lot more with a relatively small budget because they provide an incredibly high return on the initial investment, no matter what industry your business is in.
Nowadays, promoting a particular brand on the Internet is relatively easy. That also means that there is a lot of competition to reach your target audience. With the adequate tools and proper knowledge, you can create a low-cost marketing strategy for your business that requires only a small team to work and achieve huge returns in reach and business awareness.
Without further ado, here are the top five marketing strategies for small businesses and some practical advice on how to utilize them to achieve company growth.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Do you know that one of the most effective ways of bringing constant visibility to your small business doesn’t cost money? No paid ad can be as strong as having your website, product, service, or content at the top results when a potential buyer googles a related keyword. Being well positioned in search engines (Google, Bing, etc.) is the best way of getting traffic and trust-building because it’s the very first contact a potential customer has with your brand and business. The techniques, actions, and tools that can make your brand climb the search engines’ ladder are search engine optimization or SEO. SEO’s primary goal is to make Google and other software systems designed to carry out web searches recognize value and significance in what you have to offer, and favor your business’s website when consumers search for particular keywords. Please make no mistake; SEO is a must when it comes to digital marketing for small businesses.
This powerful marketing strategy is essential for small business owners because prospective customers who are browsing for local businesses to buy from often do that on their mobile device to locate nearby locations. If you decide to optimize your website and content for local SEO, chances are, your business will appear in those local search results and reach more of your targeted audience.
Additionally, create a Google My Business profile to further boost your brand awareness in your local area. However, to do all this, make sure that your website is mobile-responsive and can be effortlessly accessed and navigated through a device.
How can you improve SEO for your small enterprise? Well, it’s always a good idea to start with a site audit. It doesn’t matter if you will conduct the audit yourself or hire a renowned SEO agency; this initial step will help you better understand where your website stands in terms of search engine optimization. The audit will check out your on-page SEO to discover your site’s strengths and weaknesses that need to be addressed, and it should include both site structure and content.
If you don’t have a specialized in-house team that knows how to optimize your website for search engines, don’t hesitate to reach out and recruit an outsourced SEO marketing agency to help you with the deed.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is the cornerstone of nearly all marketing strategies for small businesses and is always a vital part of every excellent SEO strategy. In short, it’s the process of creating and publishing content of very high quality, content that’s highly relevant to your intended audience, and content that provides value for its readers or viewers.
The key to developing a superior content marketing strategy is knowing what your target audience cares about: their needs, desires, and challenges. By producing useful, relevant, and attractive content, you will undoubtedly help your business build brand identity, authority, and personality. Content marketing is all about planning, writing (or recording), and sharing articles, posts, news, videos, and any other kind of subject that talks straight to your audience.
How do you do it? For small companies with a tight marketing budget, the content marketing strategy’s center should be the blog. Use it to share informative blog posts, tips on a subject matter, how-to-guides, ebooks, videos, and more.
Periodicity is very important, so always try to have at least 3-4 blog posts a week. Use your social media channels to promote your content’s reach further and mix reposts with new pieces to keep your persona engaged. However, the main thing you should strive for with your content marketing strategy is staying honest and offering trustworthy information that helps your readers.
Content marketing may be a long-term strategy, but when a business begins to become an authority in a particular field, it sticks to the audience’s mind. For instance, this blog post that you’re reading right now is a tiny part of NameSilo‘s comprehensive content marketing strategy, which we build step-by-step and is initially focused on long-term success.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is a highly effective digital marketing strategy of sending emails to customers and prospects. Back from when the first email marketing blast was sent in 1978, email marketing remains one of the most utilized marketing strategies for small businesses up to this day. That’s because most consumers aren’t going to buy from your business the first time they visit your website, and it’s crucial to find a way to maintain contact after they leave. Once you have their contact information, it’s time to nurture your leads, and email marketing is an excellent tool for this.
However, before you can start designing and implementing various email marketing campaigns, you need to find a way to obtain your audience’s contact information. A foolproof way to do this is with a “lead magnet,” which is essentially a persuasive offer to website visitors in exchange for their email addresses.
Once you have a list of subscribers, start working on targeted email campaigns that will allow you to constitute authority and nourish relationships with leads and customers. To achieve the best results, segment your email lists even further so that you can send more offers and targeted content to your subscribers. For example, create a sub-list for subscribers who find themselves in the same step of the buyer’s journey or leads with similar characteristics.
There are numerous types of messaging you can offer to your email subscribers list in terms of the content. You can use this marketing strategy to get sales and promotion details through email, or you can use it to deliver valuable content like your blog posts, infographics, videos, and any other types of content you’ve created.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Pay-per-click or PPC advertising is a marketing strategy that enables small companies to display their ads to people who search online for specific products and services. This strategy works just like it sounds; the business pays each time a potential client clicks on their ad content. So how exactly do PPC ads work on different search engines?
Advertisers bid on specific keywords that are connected and relevant to their product and service offering. After that, the search engine uses a unique algorithm to decide which ads will appear on the engine’s results page based on quality, validity, and relevance. Similar to SEO, keyword research plays a vital role in PPC campaigns as advertisers bid on keywords that would likely be used by relevant leads.
The most popular PPC advertising platform is Google Ads. Since most consumers are using Google to search for information about products and services, Google is a fantastic place to start with your pay-per-click advertising.
The first phase of developing a PPC ad campaign is conducting thorough keyword research. Keep in mind that your entire PPC campaign will eventually be built around the keywords you’ve selected. Ensure that you conduct comprehensive and exhaustive keyword research to include both general often-searched keywords and other less competitive long-tail keywords. Search trends are continually evolving, so it’s vital to continue to extend and polish your PPC keyword lists after some time to get the best possible return on your investment for PPC ad campaigns.
Same as with the SEO marketing strategy, if you don’t have a workforce experienced in creating and managing Google Ads and PPC campaigns, we highly recommend hiring a PPC management agency to help you develop an up-to-date PPC strategy.
Social Media Marketing
We previously mentioned social media as an amplifier for promoting your SEO and content marketing efforts. Still, social media channels shouldn’t be used only to share and occasionally boost post visibility. Businesses of all sizes embrace social media platforms to build and nurture relationships with their respected customers, and so should your small enterprise.
As social media marketing (SMM) is solely focused on your brand’s personification, you should be available for your clients to answer questions and interact with people and subjects in the same niche as your business. Depending on your business’s nature, you can opt to run a fan page on Facebook, start a profile on Instagram, build a Twitter profile that highlights your business, TikTok, Pinterest, etc.
For building a robust social media online presence and running social media ad campaigns, it’s always a good idea to have someone 100% dedicated to this role in your company. Social networks require persistent interactions and knowledge of recent trends, so make sure you have somebody on your payroll that can focus on this fundamental marketing strategy.
Even if you work on a small marketing budget, social media marketing is the perfect place to spend it. Social media ad campaigns are attractive, engaging, and can help boost your lead generation.
In Conclusion
Just because you run a small business and operate on a tight marketing budget doesn’t mean that you can’t and shouldn’t take advantage of these five powerful marketing strategies for small businesses. Develop a comprehensive marketing plan and keep in mind how each of the five strategies mentioned above can benefit your business. With the right approach and a lot of hard work, you will drive competent leads and boost your business revenue.