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8 Effective Strategies To Pull Off A Stellar Small Business Marketing Campaign (And who to call for help)
With a multitude of marketing avenues out there, choosing the right marketing strategies and digital marketing agencies for your small business can seem very daunting, especially when you’re limited on the time and knowledge to figure out all the possible marketing channels that you can tap into. It's that dreaded feeling that all entrepreneurs have experienced at some point in their business. In this blog, we will discuss the actionable steps you can do as a small business owner to scale your brand FAST!
With a multitude of marketing avenues out there, choosing the right marketing strategies and digital marketing agencies for your small business can seem very daunting, especially when you’re limited on the time and knowledge to figure out all the possible marketing channels that you can tap into.
It's that dreaded feeling that all entrepreneurs have experienced at some point in their business.
Is it worth investing in paid ads?
How hard can SEO be?
Which social media platform to post on?? Facebook? Instagram or maybe TikTok?
As a small business owner, you too may have found yourself in this dilemma.
That is why we have gathered the most effective marketing ideas and strategies to help you better understand them and also offer tips on how to leverage them.
Table of Contents:
1. Market and Customer Research
2. Brand Identity and Brand Marketing
3. Website Optimization and Conversion
4. Social Media Marketing
5. SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
6. Email Marketing
7. Content Marketing
8. PPC Marketing
1. Market and Customer Research
Now before you bust out your marketing wallet you first need to ensure that you position yourself for the best chance of success. It all starts with knowing who your customers are, what your market is looking for, and what your competitors are up to.
AKA market and customer research.
Both of them are the essential building blocks for the foundation of your small business. By deeply understanding what your target audience wants and needs, you can tailor your marketing plan to suit your customer’s dreams and desires. The more refined your research is the better you’ll be able to serve and market to them.
Market research is all about using a wider lens and collecting information that provides an insight into your industry, market behaviors, and buying patterns. In addition, market research can also help you monitor market trends and keep an eye on what your competition is doing.
Here are a few quick and easy ways to conduct Market Research:
- Interviews
- Focus Groups
- Polls, Questionnaires, and Surveys
- Public Resources
Customer research (or consumer research) is a set of techniques used to identify the needs, preferences, behaviors, and motivations of your current or potential customers.
A thorough customer research goes beyond demographics and geography. It breaks down their challenges, beliefs, and desires.
2. Brand Identity and Brand Marketing
Vastly different from marketing, branding is all about how your customers perceive you. It includes your brand personality, your values, how you communicate with your customers, including your brand font, colors, and graphics.
All in all, Branding is the differentiating factor that sets your brand apart in a sea of competing products and messaging. It is the memorability factor that your customers perceive throughout your brand journey. That means your branding is at play from the very first touch point that your customer has with your business.
Having a solid brand strategy in place can help you elevate your brand, create lasting relationships with your customers and solidify their trust.
Now, more than ever, consumers are opting to buy from brands whose messaging, and values go beyond the product. They prefer to associate with brand values that align with their personal values. In fact, 88% of consumers say authenticity is important when deciding which brands they like and support.
Therefore having a solid brand strategy in place is extremely crucial to the success of your business.
Who can help you with Brand Marketing?
BRAND MARKETERS
They are the overarching talent who oversee the brand strategy, brand messaging, and design. They play a major role in ensuring that your brand is positioned to attract and retain lifelong customers.
GRAPHIC DESIGNERS
Graphic designers are more than just visual artists. They also need to have a knack for marketing in order to align the branding with the graphics.
Pro-TIP: Branding is a long-term strategy and it takes a long time to bear fruit. But if done well they can pay massive dividends in the long run. This could even be the difference between staying a small business and scaling rapidly as a business sensation.
Want to learn how we helped Anthony scale from "$0 To $1M in 8 Months" Check it out here.
3. Website Optimization and Conversion
Website optimization is the process of optimizing your website for navigation, traffic conversion, and overall user experience.
In the world of digital marketing, the quality of your website often dictates your income. Without a properly optimized website, getting traffic and converting that traffic into actual customers can pose to be a serious dent in your revenue.
With present-day attention spans at excruciatingly low levels, your customers take 50 milliseconds (0.05 seconds) to decide if they want to browse your website or bounce.
So making sure that your website is optimized should be your topmost priority.
Here are a few simple tips to help optimize your website:
- Make sure your website is sized for mobile.
- Review your site structure and navigation flows
- Make sure all your CTA’s are working.
Who can help you with Website Optimization?
Web optimization specialists are experts who analyze web traffic and make targeted recommendations to increase user engagement and conversion. They also help create funnels, web applications, and make suggestions to improve your marketing campaigns.
4. Social Media Marketing
Did you know that an incredible 97% of Gen Zers use social media to get shopping recommendations?
With an estimated 4.2 billion people hanging out on social media, deploying an organic social media strategy is the perfect opportunity for small businesses to build brand presence and foster an engaged community.
Here are a few tips on how to do that:
- Focus on delivering value in terms of education, inspiration, or entertainment.
- Engage with your audience, by listening to their needs and striking up genuine conversations
- Harness user-generated content and branded hashtags
- Follow consistent posting times without giving up on quality.
However, social media algorithms and trends are forever changing, and it can be very difficult to keep up with them.
So instead of trying to spread yourself thin on all social media platforms, try to figure out the social media channel that’s best for your business and focus your efforts there. (Hint: If you’ve nailed your market/customer research this step should be effortless for you.)
For example, if you’re starting your jewelry brand, you might find that Instagram with its emphasis on images and videos may be the right social media platform for you as opposed to Facebook or LinkedIn.
All in all, this doesn’t mean you should ignore other channels, but when you’re just starting out, you might want to focus on a single platform that appeals to your ideal customer.
Who can help you with Social Media Marketing?
Social Media Manager
SMM are managers who map and plan out your social media content, help drive engagement, and ignite conversations. They do the day-to-day posting of content, keep track of key metrics and use it to further determine the content that works for your audience. When you have the right SMM on your side expect to see a community of your most devoted and raving fans rallying behind you.
Social Media Engagement Specialists
These are experts who are proficient in community management. They keep track of when and how people engage with the brand, which type of content gets the most interaction, and how users respond to social media challenges and campaigns. Sometimes they wear many hats by developing strategy, being in charge of customer service, and also tracking social media analytics.
Multimedia Producers
These include the graphic designers and video editors that are responsible for creating the visual assets for any social media channel. From images and graphics to stories and short-form videos, they do it all. With social media giants like Instagram and TikTok doubling down on video, having quality multimedia producers at your beck and call is a must for any small business
5. SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
SEO or search engine optimization is the process of optimizing your website to rank higher in the Google index. It includes various aspects like on-page SEO, off-page SEO, technical SEO domain backlinks, and much much more.
Now, SEO can seem intimidating for any small business owner but there are a few basic tips that you can get started with:
- Do keyword research and discover related terms using free keyword research tools. Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, and Moz to name a few.
- Using these keywords you can then optimize your website and blogs by creating high-quality content. But that doesn't mean you indulge in keyword stuffing. Google bots are highly sensitive to it and can easily pick such sites and penalize them.
- Publishing fresh and relevant content on blogs and websites is one of the best ways to improve your ranking on search engines. Linking posts that are related to one another is an additional way to boost your SEO game.
- When it comes to website ranking your page speed is incredibly important. People spend literally seconds on your website before choosing if they want to stay or bounce. So ensure that your page load time is minimal.
When done right SEO can pay off massively without stretching your marketing budget. Having a killer SEO strategy in place increases organic traffic thus increasing your brand visibility and helping more people discover your business. A Google study states that nearly 53% of US consumers research products using a search engine before deciding whether or not to buy.
Pro-TIP: As a small business owner, the easiest way to dip your toes in SEO is through Youtube.
YES!! That’s right! Compared to Google, YouTube SEO isn’t that competitive and it takes a lot lesser time to rank.
Of course, both have their pros and cons but if you’re looking to get more eyeballs on your business instantly then Youtube is the way to go.
Plus since Google owns Youtube, Google sometimes reserves a good chunk of the first half of the page for Youtube results. That means double the search engine traffic – both on Youtube and Google.
So the next time you receive any amazing testimonials or have a new product launch, head over to YouTube create amazing video content, and put in the keywords in your title, and description.
You may notice that your YouTube rankings skyrocket over time and unlike traditional SEO it doesn’t take long to rank.
With videos being the preferred form of content for viewing and sharing, people are more likely to gravitate towards watching a video over reading an article.
Who can help you with SEO?
SEO Analysts
SEO analysts are experts at ensuring that your website and content rank on the first page of Google through endless amounts of data, keywords, and other tech know-how.
6. Email Marketing
Email-marketing is simply the practice of communicating and nurturing healthy relationships with customers through email. According to Marketing Sherpa, nearly 91% of American consumers WANT to hear from brands through email campaigns. Despite the rapid popularity of social media and SEO, email is still the #1 channel for generating high ROI. With low-cost investment and high return potential, email marketing is an untapped goldmine for small businesses.
But to take advantage of the possibilities of email, the first thing you’ll want to do is build a reliable email list. You can do this through a variety of lead generation strategies like:
- Offering a freebie
- Giving a discount coupon
- Interactive quizzes and consultation
Once you have a solid email list, you can then start using it to your advantage. You might begin by creating a monthly email newsletter or sending out regular messages with special offers, news, and discounts.
Who can help you with Email Marketing?
Email Marketers are strategic marketers who help you with building email lists and nurturing them through campaign strategy. Most often than not they even write the emails themselves. They ensure various aspects like deliverability and segmentation, monitor open rates, click-through rates, and revenue generated.
7. Content Marketing
Content marketing is the process of creating relevant, and informative information for your target audience in order to nurture them and eventually lead them to a conversion. This can be done through a variety of channels like blog posts, Youtube videos, podcasts, and other media.
Here are a few ideas to get your content game churning:
- Identify what your prospects are searching for and answer those questions
- Write guest posts for industry leaders and leverage their audience
- Interview industry experts
- Partner with Influencers
- Highlight your success stories through case studies
If you’re having trouble coming up with topics try asking your customers what they’d like to know, more often than not they’d be glad to share.
Develop a content marketing calendar that fits your goals and stick to it. Keep replenishing your content with fresh and engaging content.
And lastly, don't forget to share it on all your socials and promote your content.
Who can help you with Content Marketing?
The most crucial step of content marketing is deciding on the type of content and the channels that you want to use. To do this you need to start thinking of your audience and customer persona.
SEO Writer
One of the most common types of writers in the marketing world. The ultimate goal of every SEO content writer is to get web pages to rank on the first page of Google search results.
Blog Writers
Blog writers are educational and informative writers that help establish your business as an authority. Their main goal is to build expertise and credibility for your brand and in your industry through creating information-rich blogs.
Script Writers
Script writers are niche writers who specialize in creating scripts for Youtube, podcasts, and social media videos. The main goal of the scriptwriter is to create engaging, hook-worthy viral content that eventually gets people to take some form of action, whether it is to watch a video or listen to a podcast.
Content Marketers
Content marketers are people who are responsible for strategizing, executing, and distributing content in order to lead customers to conversion. The best content marketers are part strategists and part storytellers.
8. PPC Marketing
The term “pay-per-click marketing” refers to an advertising model in which you pay each time someone clicks on your ad.
You only pay for the ads when someone clicks through to your site, which means you don’t waste money on people who aren’t actually interested in your business. PPC ads give you better control of your budget because you even get to set the rate for each click.
PPC ads enable you to quickly get your name in front of a larger customer base. With the right strategy, they’re an excellent way to gain new leads and sales.
Here are a few tips to get started:
- Start small with one campaign and a limited budget.
- Use specific keywords while targeting.
- Include clear CTAs for every ad
- Monitor, track and test your campaign
However, running a successful PPC campaign can elude even the savviest business owner. If you're pressed for time and want to shorten your growth curve consider hiring a professional.
Who can help you with PPC Marketing?
PPC Specialists
PPC Specialists are folks who work across multiple channels like search engines and social media to craft ad campaigns that massively add to the revenue bottom line. They are the best of both — with a creative and analytical mindset overseeing strategy, design, implementation, SEO, and analysis of ad performance.
Conclusion
In this digital era, with abrupt social media blackouts and google algorithms changing by the day, it is incredibly important to diversify your campaigns.
You can’t and shouldn’t rely on only one of the above. Marketing is a cohesive approach where each avenue is equally just as important. Therefore it is necessary to incorporate an omni-channel marketing approach using a variety of connected channels that allow consumers to move through seamlessly creating a consistent brand experience.
But your goal as an entrepreneur is NOT to teach yourself how to do it all. Rather it is to only understand the strategy and assemble the people who can execute it or hire marketing consultants.
At the same time, we also know that searching and hiring the right talent is not an easy task which is why when you partner with us, you’ll get a marketing team that is well-suited to your specific business goals… all in one fell swoop.
At Growthhub, we’re obsessed with helping businesses such as yours get the growth that it deserves. Get in touch with us and we can match you with your new marketing dream team in as little as 24 hrs. We pre-vet the marketers on our platform, so you don’t have to. Book a call with us today!