Marketing is meant to raise brand awareness and build a pipeline of qualified leads that turn into sales. With a small business, getting the word out can be challenging due to less visibility and lack of resources (like budget or time). However, there are key strategies that can help scale small businesses’ marketing efforts.
Emphasize your value proposition.
If there’s no difference between a person and his competition, there’s no reason why a buyer would be compelled to work with him. The value proposition is what will differentiate one person from others in his space and make up prospects’ minds that he is the provider to go with.
Organic Social Media
Using social media for business is really a non-negotiable. 67% of consumers use social media for customer support, and 33% prefer using social media instead of the telephone. If people can’t find the business via social media, they will look for the competitors who ARE present on preferred social channels.
Promote A Free Consultation
When it comes to professional services, people want access to expertise. A lot of service providers worry about disclosing too much info in a free consultation. They feel like potential clients will just take the info and run. In reality, the exact opposite is true. While freeloader types might grab and go, they were never going to buy anyway.
Leverage influencers
Want to get the word out there and boost the visibility on social media without taking years to build an audience? Then certainly leverage influencers. But the key is to find the right influencer. Just don’t go with influencers with millions of followers. Just opt for micro-influencers with tens of thousands or even a hundred thousand followers.
Email Customers and Potential Customers
There are many advantages of using email as a marketing strategy. It is easy to do, can be automated, provides instantaneous communication, costs very little, and can reach a large number of potential customers.
Get Listed on Google
A useful tool for local businesses with local customer bases is Google My Business. When people in the same area as a company search on Google for a product or service the company provides, the company will appear in the top searches.
Referral Programs
A referral program is an umbrella term used to describe the systematic approach companies take to incentivize people to tell others about their products or services. Implementing specific affiliate programs, customer referral programs, and partner programs within a marketing plan structure are meant to offer the instant credibility of existing customers to grow a customer base. “Referral programs” is often used synonymously with “referral marketing.”
Advertise In Niche Print Media
While much of the world has moved online, print media still exists, and in some niches, it still thrives.
In fact, as recently as 2014, retail consumers cited printed materials as the chief sources of information behind their purchasing decisions.
Direct Mail Marketing
Like print media, direct mail marketing is not dead.
As online channels become more and more saturated with content, fewer companies look to direct mail, and that means great opportunities ahead.