In my opinion as a successful business leader, small businesses should be spending 7-10% of their sales revenue on marketing. In reality, most are spending in the region of 2-3%. Fear erupts around marketing for small businesses, largely because it can seem like an endless endeavour and it’s difficult to know what is effective and what’s not.
While your marketing strategy needs to be unique to your business, I have 5 tops tips which have proven to be worth it, again and again.
1. Make friends on social media
It doesn’t matter what your business is, there’s a social media platform that you need to get on and grow on. Whether you’re a recruitment consultant or lawyer driving connections and authority on LinkedIn, or a holiday company creating a buzz on Instagram, you need to know how to leverage social media to your advantage.
Social media management is complex and has the potential to be inordinately time consuming for little return. As such, it’s important to take a strategic approach to building an audience, developing leads and engaging with potential customers.
2. Network, network and network some more
As a small business owner, you often are the business. As such, you need to get out there and spread the word. Networking can be the marketing snowball for your business. At the end of the day, word of mouth is always more powerful than any other strategy. Get known!
Hint: work with other small businesses and grow together.
3. Be consistent with your brand
Your branding is absolutely critical. Get it right before starting on any other marketing effort. Figure out who you are and how you differ from others then build a brand around this.
With multiple marketing channels and a saturated digital world, you then need to take a consistent and solid approach to your marketing. If you appear jovial and fun on social channels but come across serious and stern on your website, your brand gets diluted and your customer’s confused. Speak with one voice in everything you do.
4. Use email marketing
Print isn’t dead and social content is great, but a humble tool with great power is email marketing. Whether you offer a useful lead magnet to develop a list of contacts, or grow your email base in other ways, email marketing really works. It’s also incredibly low cost and requires minimal effort compared to other marketing techniques.
5. Know your SEO from your PPC
In a digital world, you need to accept that Google is going to feature heavily in your marketing strategy. You need to take a two-pronged approach. Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising helps ensure you are seen in the short term, but can be costly. Using your website to develop fresh content through new landing pages and blogs which are Search Engine Optimised (SEO) will help to improve your Google rankings over time. Do both together and it’s a winning mix.
Not sure how best to market your small business? Unsure how to shape your brand? Through my business coaching I can help you navigate the marketing quagmire and get your business known.
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