Marketing Know-How For Small Business Owners
It is always a good time for small business owners to be thinking about the things that are going to help their business and give it a boost. And marketing for your small business is going to be one of the things that can really have an impact.
Don’t get stuck in a rut marketing your small business
Do you feel like you have been doing something a certain way for a while now? Maybe your marketing messages don’t seem to be doing as well as they have in the past?
Perhaps it could be that what you are doing seems a little stagnant and isn’t really achieving any of your marketing goals. The good news is that no matter how long you have been in business for, there is always plenty of room for improvement.
So with that in mind, here are some of the things that your small business can be doing to up your game. With these tips, it can give you the competitive edge that you need to keep going forward. iEven f you have some experience marketing for small businesses, pay attention as you may be making some of the mistakes below.
Regular Data Cleaning
Data cleaning isn’t something that should happen only once a year or every so often. Doing so much more regularly is going to help you to keep up to date with the data that you have as a business and the database that you have been building.
If you feel like you have been neglecting to look at your data for a while, then your marketing strategy could be a little off. This can happen simply because you don’t have the right to up to date information on what you need.
It was even found recently that over seventy percent of companies felt like the data, or quality of data that they have, can have an impact on trust from your customers and also their perception of you as a business. So it is something worth spending a lot of time on and then you can go from there.
Why Cleaning Out Data Matters For Small Business Owners
But why spend time regularly cleaning out the data that you have? Successful marketing does rely on decision making that is driven by the data that you have. If you aren’t using data for your decisions, then you could be literally stabbing in the dark to just see what fits or what works well, which isn’t going to be a fun idea.
Plus, if your data is inaccurate at all, your decisions will end up being inaccurate too. So what you need to do as a small business owner is to make sure that your marketing strategy is targeted and relevant to your customers, their needs, and your business. Make the time for regular data cleaning and you’ll be well on your way to data that you can trust and can then use in your marketing plan.
Be sure to check out my post on a simple 5 step marketing plan to grow your business.
Use Your Emails To Market Your Small Business
There will be people that you have signed up to receive your emails, whether it was because they chose to sign up, or ended up signed up as a result of a previous purchase. But no matter how they got signed up, there is no getting away from the fact that these people will get a lot of emails to their inbox.
That being said, a lot of customers, the majority in fact, do still prefer to be contacted through emails, rather than other methods. So to sum it up, emails are still going to be around for a while to come. They are effective and it helps you to get your brand name right their in people’s palms as they look on their smartphone.
Using email marketing for a small business is something that is really important, but it can also be tricky to manage. You want people to open the emails that you send, so they can read and hear about your latest deals or product launches. But having great content isn’t always enough to help to make it work.
You could try some of the following to help you to improve audience engagement with your emails, improve how many people open them, and then measure the conversion rates as a result.
Tips for More Effective Email Marketing
- To start off with, make sure that your emails are coming from a recognizable sender name. Naturally, that is likely to be your business name. But if it does look unknown, then it isn’t likely to be as trusted, let alone opened.
- Does the subject line of your emails tell the recipient what is coming next? Is what is in the email going to be worth clicking for them? Worth their precious time? If the answer to these questions is no, then it can be a good idea to rethink what you send in your emails that will make the content more engaging.
- The look of your emails will play a part as well. For starters, is the content laid out in a way that looks good and is easily accessible? Do you have email formats that are able to be viewed on tablets and phones? If you don’t, then that is definitely something to consider as people will click off if they only have tiny text or an unhelpful layout. Make sure it looks good too with images or video.
- In the modern and digital world that we live in, you are likely to be hearing all about a call to action. But does your email have a call to action in it? Would it be easy for them to click through to your site or to complete your survey? You have to create easy ways of doing things, otherwise, customers simply won’t do it.
- Check out my post on How to grow an email list fast for more email marketing tips!
Consider Outsourcing
Outsourcing for small businesses can be great in many ways. You can spend a little money to get a lot more back in time, as you pass on certain aspects of the business to an individual or a company that can do it for you.
And if all of this talk or email marketing and internet marketing leaves your head in a spin, then it could be worth looking at a company like the internet marketing company, Teknicks, for example, as they offer things like search engine optimization, analytics, and conversion rate optimization as well.
When someone can do these aspects of particular things for you, it leaves you more time to get on with the larger business decisions, rather than the day to day tasks.
If you’d like to learn more about outsourcing effectively in your business, I’d recommend checking out this book Clockwork. You can pick up a copy on Amazon here.
Boost Social Media
Being on social media channels for your small business is a must, as it can be used for general content, as well as showcasing promotions and new products. But the thing with social media channels is that they are always evolving, as well as their pesky algorithms.
Often, these changes can mean that is it harder to gain interaction in an organic way. But the more interaction that you get, the more potential customers your posts will reach.
Which is why for many social channels (think of Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram especially), paid advertisements and boosting posts can help you to get more and to level the playing field with your competitors.
When you break it down, paid ads on social channels are expected to generate over $18 billion in revenue in 2019; pretty huge, right? Plus, with many companies that have used these ads in recent years have reported, the success rate, or effectiveness rate, is always over half, so it is something that can be worth looking into, for sure.
At the same time jumping into paid advertising on social media can be a bit overwhelming when you are just getting started. For this reason, I’d highly recommend going through an advertising course first.
Check out this free Facebook ads guide to get you started!
Marketing Automation For Small Business Owners
No matter what you do, it isn’t going to be possible to do all things for your small business, all of the time. It can be tiring to run a business and there are many responsibilities that can feel downright overwhelming. But these kinds of tasks are the kind of things that can be delegated, outsourced, or even automated to help your business improve its efficiency.
So if you have noticed that your business does start to suffer, then it might be worth looking at what you can do to reassess how you do things or look at your marketing plan again.
If automation for this kind of thing comes as a bit of a surprise to you, then it is a good idea to remember that you are not alone; more businesses are using automation than aren’t, and this number is expected to grow and grow.
Making your marketing automated can help you make the most of every interaction with a customer, for example. So this means being able to identify leads, putting sales-ready leads on to help them to become a conversion, as well as following up with efficiency. And the good news is that this will be done all automatically for you.
Tools to start automating your marketing online
Automating your business is great, but there are a few tools you’ll want to make your life a whole lot easier. A couple of the foundation tools are a sales funnel system, email autoresponder, and CRM.
Now the foundation is a sales funnel system. With this in place, you can use this to both generate leads for your business on autopilot and even start to bring in sales automatically. Certainly, you’ll want to actually talk to your leads on the phone to increase the signup rate or to close larger sales, but some will come in automatically.
From there as you start to generate leads through your sales funnel system you’ll want to put them into your email autoresponder. With this set up you can automatically deliver your lead magnet and have an email drip campaign in place.
This is basically a series of emails that go out, typically 5-7. In each of these emails, you’ll continue to provide value and sell your product or business further. Again this can be set up to work on autopilot, so as you have content promoting your lead magnets in your sales funnel system it can generate leads and sales 24/7 for your business.
Follow up with your automated leads to increase sales
I mentioned it earlier, but if you follow up with your leads by calling them or doing a zoom call your signup ratio will greatly increase. At the same time if you are trying to manually sort through leads and keep track of each prospect manually it can waste a lot of your time.
A much better way to do this follow-up process is with a CRM, or customer relationship manager. When you have a CRM in place it can track and sort your leads that come in.
Most people struggle in their business because they spend too much time with the wrong people. Having a CRM can allow you to track and sort your prospects and get better results talking to less people.
Hopefully, these marketing ideas and tips for small businesses have given you some ideas to take away and help your business get in the best shape yet. Of course, this list is not exhaustive and there are other options to try out too. But when you keep thinking about your business and put your customers first, it can help your business to grow and evolve. You will be able to find new ways to improve the customer experience, as well as helping your profits at the end of the day.
Did This Blog Help You? If so, I would greatly appreciate if you could comment below and share on Facebook
Facebook: facebook.com/coachmikemacdonald
Email: [email protected]
Considering Starting a Home Business? Apply For A Free Coaching Call Here
“I help coachable and teachable professionals become Financially Free and Live Full Time! Helping you create a better tomorrow through a better you!”
P.S. Want to ATTRACT MORE LEADS & MAKE MORE SALES in YOUR Business? Download My FREE 37-Page E-Book Exposes The ‘Marketing Framework’ To Attract A Never-Ending Flood of BUYERS for ANY Business Fast! GET INSTANT ACCESS HERE
If you enjoyed this post on Marketing Know-How For Small Business Owners, please retweet and comment below
