A good product or service will only reach half its maximum potential revenue unless good marketing strategies are practiced. Using a whole gamut of tactics, when properly applied, will get more reach thus increasing the size and potential of your business.
What kind of website do you need to build? Do you have to make video posts? Should you leverage email marketing? We’ll consider all those.
Here are 10 proven marketing strategies you can test out for your small business. By the end of this post, you’ll have a good idea about which marketing direction your business should take if you want it to get the best results in 2022.
It involves a whole lot of things from setting analytics for research work, understanding your audience, and figuring out where they usually hang out online.
If you want to sell your products and services and scale your small business to greater heights by taking advantage of proven digital strategies, this post is for you. So let’s get right to it.
Strategy 1: Take Advantage Of Google
Google comes with various marketing tools you can utilize for your small business, in this section we’ll cover the most effective ones you should put in place for your business today.
Google My Business
Google My Business is an online tool you can use to create, manage, and optimize your business’s online presence. Rather than driving around to look for a store that sells or offers a certain product, people now go online and do a quick Google search for it. By setting up GMB, you’re sure that you’ll come up as an option when consumers look for a product or service you offer.
Listing your business on this platform is best when you’re targeting local markets. It’ll give local consumers a description of your business, its operating hours, location, and many more making it convenient for local consumers to locate. Best of all, it appears on the top half of the search results, so it’s one of the first things people will see after hitting search.
But the catch is, your listing should be part of the top 3 because Google only affords limited real estate for local listing results, 3 on average.
An important reminder when creating your business profile is to make sure to optimize it. It includes getting citations for your small business and some reviews from past and current customers to enhance your brand’s online reputation.
Here’s a good example of a Google Business profile from Flexiple, a platform for hiring React JS developers.
Google Local Services Ads
If you have money to spend on ads, you can also take advantage of Google’s local services ads. It’s a type of paid advertising, as the name suggests, targeted to the local market.
While your Google My Business listing appears on the first half of the search results, Google’s local services ads position above it so it’s the first thing searchers will see on the results.
Then you can connect your local ads to your Google My Business profile for better results. The latter’s customer reviews will appear for the local services ads helping it rank better in the results.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics will make your marketing campaigns data-driven, getting you more accurate results. When you create a website for your small business (more on the website creation strategies later), connect the site to Google Analytics early on. It’ll get you rich insight regarding your audience, their behavior on the site, and their conversion rates among others.
You can add its metrics as part of your Key Performance Indicators to track if you’re hitting your goals or not so you can address them accordingly.
New Google Business Features
Google continues to optimize its services to get the ultimate user experience for people and stay ahead of the competition. Hence, it’s more important to be regularly updated with new features and functionalities you can take advantage of.
According to 2022 marketing statistics, lead messaging is showing great potential for converting leads to paying customers. Google makes it convenient for its users by adding this to the list of features they offer. Take advantage of this tool to improve how you can find and talk to your leads online.
While it’s rolled out in 2021, it continues to build up great functionalities for businesses to use in 2022. Keep tabs on those as well as with other features they’ll roll out shortly.
Strategy 2: Build An SEO-Friendly Website
Building a website for your business lets people online know about your business along with the products and services you offer. More than that, if you can optimize this website for search engines, you’ll get free brand awareness, leads, and conversions.
When deciding to build a website, SEO tactics are one of the first marketing tactics you should invest in. It’s more efficient and cost-effective in the long run compared to spending on ads. When doing so, here are some things you should consider:
- Use keyword research tools: to create quality content that People Also Search For (PASF), People Also Ask (PAA), this step is a must-do. It’ll help you rank higher on search engines and help you come up with trending topics you can create content around (more on content marketing later)
- Incorporate seed keywords or primary keywords as others call them into page titles, meta descriptions, landing page text, blog content, and other areas within your website that come with text.
- For better search result rankings, use structured data
- To get a targeted audience, focus on local SEO and long-tail keywords
- Workout the technical SEO aspects like the website design and page load speed
To make some SEO aspects faster to do, you can use a SERP simulator to get detailed information on title tags, meta descriptions, and URLs as they appear on the search page to see if it’s visible enough to get clicks.
There are a lot more tips on website SEO you can explore, however, these are the basics you can get started with.
Tell Your Brand Story
One way to build rapport and get connected to your target audience is to form a clear-cut brand image. You can do so by sharing your brand’s story in a remarkable and effective way.
People love stories, and when you share your business’s story with them, it marks a lasting and memorable impression. Simply said, if you want to get remembered, share your brand story.
You can incorporate this in the “About Us” section but others also find it effective to have a separate page to tell about their brand story. This can include pictures of how the business started out, stories about the founders’ major milestones and history, as well as anything that makes the narrative memorable and distinct.
Improve Customer Experience
Nobody likes a clunky site with poor functionality and images. They’d bounce right off the second they see the page load up. What keeps visitors on the page is not only the product but also the experience you offer them when visiting your site.
Just take this product page of a Valentine’s Day lingerie eCommerce store, for example, they use quality images of each product and display it with the product name and price, things a customer will want to see right off the bat when looking for a product.
Even Apple put time and effort into crafting their product boxes for a remarkable unboxing experience for their customers. This clearly shows a customer’s experience matters.
Keep in mind that a good experience will not only move a visitor to convert but also be happy to tell others about your business. This can then be word-of-mouth marketing, a cost-effective strategy that only comes when you can provide a good user experience.
So what can you do?
- Avoid unnecessary features and pop-ups on the site
- Work out the page load time
- Use quality media that’s light but doesn’t compromise quality
- Make buttons and other directions easily recognizable
- Make the text easily readable
- Make it easy for them to find what they want on the site
- Directly explain features and benefits on the product pages
- Make the checkout process seamless
- Implement a customer feedback system to find areas of improvement you address
- Checkout competitor reviews as well so you avoid their mistakes and know what other areas to improve on
You can use Google Analytics to track visitor behavior on the site as well as average time on page and bounce rates. These will give you good ideas about which pages need working on. You can also take advantage of heatmaps like Hotjar to track their clicks, movements, and scroll to further optimize the page layout.
Add A Web Chat Feature
While you should avoid unnecessary pop ups, having a web chat feature makes it easy and fast for customers to reach out to you for any concerns and questions. Being readily available to answer their queries improves user experience and also increases conversion rates.
You can make it less intrusive by just adding an icon to a section of the page and giving the user the choice to open the chat feature or not just like what you’ll see in Aura’s Bqool Alternatives blog.
Strategy 3: Build On Content Marketing
Content marketing involves producing written or media content that promotes your brand, your product, and services, or just something to teach people about areas of your niche.
Creating relevant written SEO content will also help your website be more visible online. By showcasing your brand’s values and resolving your target market’s problems and concerns, you’ll position yourself as a thought leader they can trust. When they trust what you say, it’s easier for them to trust what you promote.
As an example, for a brand selling lotions, you can create ”best of” type of blogs like 5+ Best Lotions blog. Another idea would be a “how-to” type of blog to explain how a tool works like this “How To Hold Effective Meetings” blog by Workast.
Written content can also be repurposed and used for video content. This allows you to have content on various channels like Youtube and other social media sites, platforms that also drive visitors to your business site.
Other types of content you can utilize are podcasts, online courses, and infographics (incorporated on blogs or shared on social sites).
Keep in mind that creating content will need some patience when it comes to seeing results. But as said at the outset, the traffic results from SEO or organic content is way more. Also, before diving into content marketing, formulate a strategy that’s fit for your business.
For example, you can create a blog first. When that’s published, you can share it on social sites or promote it through email. If the blog is seeing good results, you can then create a podcast or a Youtube video. For remarkable results, you can offer online courses and extended versions of the blog content you just made.
Create Explainer Videos
More than just brand awareness, people need to know how your product or services work. Creating explainer videos will greatly help with that. This is especially the case if the product you offer is innovative in a manner.
It’ll be challenging for innovative products to grab the interest and trust of the public unless they have a level of knowledge about it. Hence, having an explainer video will make your product shine and make it more credible.
Strategy 4: Facebook Ads
Aside from Google Ads, you can also take advantage of Facebook Ads to reach out to your target market. It’s an inexpensive platform you can use to connect with people. With it, you can specify your target by location, demographics, and even interest helping you direct your campaigns to people who have more chances of converting.
A few tips when making Facebook Ads:
- Make the thumbnail eye-catching so they’ll be moved to watch more of the ad
- Touch their pain points within the first 3 seconds and directly follow it up with your main USP, or the promise you make to solve their pain points
- Keep the ad around 30 seconds long
- Test 2-3 creatives at a time to see which works best
Creating ads isn’t overwhelming as long as you know a good copy sequence to work around. Research your target market thoroughly and identify what makes them tick then solve their problems for them using your product.
It can take a few trials and error rounds but as you explore this platform, you’ll be able to create a well-converting ad in the long run. Just remember that ad fatigue is possible, or the longer a certain ad runs, the less interest it gains. So make sure to have a steady creation of new ads you can run and test out.
Strategy 5: Partner With Other Brands
Another proven marketing strategy for small businesses is to collaborate with other brands. This method increases your market circle and that of your partner. You can find brands in the same niche but those that don’t have direct product competition. You might even find brands with products that complement yours.
For example, if you’re selling car detailing equipment, you can find brands selling car detailing cleaning products like shampoos or car wax. You can also partner with people who directly use your product. In the example above, you can work with well-known car detailers.
Doing won’t just help both you and them increase your audience circle, you’ll also help each one establish credibility, given that the brand you work with is trustworthy of course.
Strategy 6: Social Media Marketing
Other than utilizing ad platforms in social media platforms, you can also make free accounts and pages in them as well, it’s one of the cheapest strategies to tap into. Many consumers turn to social media for customer support so you should have an online presence with major social media channels like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Tiktok.
Devote time to grow your following and interact with your audience as well. It creates more brand awareness as their network sees your interaction with them. This also allows you to gather a list of potential influencers to work with later on. The main point here is to build your social media presence.
Here are some tips when leveraging social media:
- Identify your brand voice and consistently stick to it
- Select the right platforms, explore where your niche target audience usually hangs out
- Better yet, create accounts and pages on all main social media platforms
- Regularly post content on each site, you can even promote blogs and video content from other channels in these channels
- Make content visuals eye-catching and informative so they’ll be moved to share it with others
- When appropriate, take advantage of popular memes as well
- Mention your website link and all other social media account links in your bio
- Take advantage of popular and relevant hashtags
- Create branded hashtags to help with campaign tracking
- Respond to queries and concerns in social media pages promptly
Strategy 7: Email Marketing
Email marketing allows you to reach your audience on a more personal level. It also allows you to retarget previous social media and website visitors so you can turn a non-converting visitor around.
This strategy also allows you to address any apprehensions they have with your product, whether it’s the quality, the pricing, or something else. You can provide them with additional information to convince them in making a purchase decision.
To gather an email list, offer them something with enticing value. It can either be a seat in a webinar, a discount coupon, a free download, free consultation, a free trial, or early access to new products.
It’s also important to use catchy subject lines to get high open rates for your emails, here’s where you can get effective subject lines for abandoned cart emails.
Strategy 8: Send Review Requests
Gather contact information on your paying customers and ask them for a review in exchange for an incentive like a discount on their next purchase. This will allow you to gather enough social proof to convince others of your brand’s credibility.
You can even reach out to influencers, ask them for a product review in exchange for sending them a sample of your product they can keep for free. You don’t just get social proof, you also tap into their audience to grow your reach.
You can then display these reviews on your website like what Axonify did and post them as content on your social channels.
Strategy 9: Establish Expertise
Creating blogs and explainer videos are some of the first things you can do to establish expertise. After that, you can also leverage HARO (Help A Reporter Out) and answer journalist questions around your niche. These will then get published in reputable sites when approved by the asking journalist.
You can also join social media groups and answer questions members post there. Do the same with community forums like Quora and Reddit as well.
If you have the resources, you can also host webinars on relevant topics. You can invite famous experts in the field to get more reach and credibility.
Strategy 10: Offer Employee Incentives
Employees know more about your products and services than outsiders do. Leverage this knowledge they have to campaign your products to their networks by offering them incentives to do so. “Make sure to let them know about this during the employee onboarding process so that the new team members are aware of what to expect.”
For instance, you can offer gift cards or financial incentives if they bring in a converting customer to your business.
Conclusion
The strategies outlined above are relatively easy to do. If you’re low on the budget, you can start out with cost-effective strategies first like creating social sites and making content, leveraging Google marketing tools, engaging in community forums, and email marketing.
If you have enough budget, you can then proceed to create an SEO-friendly website, Google Ads and Facebook ads, as well as influencer partnerships.
Do one strategy at a time, when you’ve established and mastered one, you can then explore another. The important thing is you dedicate time and energy to research and work out these strategies. In no time, you’ll see your brand presence increase, driving more converting clients thus scaling your business to greater heights.
Business Development Manager with a demonstrated history of working in the Media and Digital marketing sector, Passionate about innovation and bringing the future into new business solutions.
