One thing small business owners don’t think about enough is marketing. They may assume that highly detailed marketing plans are something only corporations and big chains should be concerned with. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Marketing is necessary for a business of any size to achieve long term success. There are plenty of ways to advertise your small business’s products and services in today’s marketing landscape. Below are just some of the forms of marketing you should consider for your small business.
Quick Links
Social Media Marketing
One thing that can help level the playing field for small businesses in terms of marketing is the internet. In regards to the internet, social media is an extremely powerful tool to wield for marketing purposes. According to statistics, almost 80 percent of the population of the United States uses social media on a regular basis. As such, the possible reach for social media marketing for a small business is truly massive.
One thing social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram can do is give you a direct line to the people most likely to consume your products. If someone follows you on social media, there is a very good chance they are already interested in what you are selling. Due to this fact, you get a big bang for your buck in regards to your social media posts’ conversion rates. Better yet, using these platforms is completely free. The same certainly can’t be said for other advertising platforms.
Localized SEO
In today’s mobile internet age, having high visibility in search engine results is more important than ever before. However, small businesses should utilize search engine optimization strategies a bit differently than larger national companies do. Instead, you need to focus your SEO efforts on localization.
Many small businesses either have a single brick and mortar location or cater to a specific local market. If that is true for your business, you need to integrate keywords relevant to your local community into your SEO. Doing so will allow users from your market to find your business more easily in search results. Your localization efforts should also include getting your business listed on all online map services. Obtaining listings on websites like Google My Business and Trip Advisor can give you more visibility as well. Overall, your goal should be reaching the people most likely to buy your products. A generalized SEO strategy that does not include localization cannot accomplish this for many small businesses.
Video Marketing
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. However, using that measure, a video must be worth far more than that in regards to marketing. Traditionally, video marketing was out of the reach of most small businesses due to extremely high expense of running commercials on television. This is no longer the case. Today, you can run video advertisements for free on platforms like YouTube that are frequented by millions of users daily.
However, despite how easy it is to now disseminate video for marketing purposes, you still need to obtain a decent level of production quality to attract an audience. Consider partnering with a firm that produces marketing videos for a small business to create a well polished product. Make sure the video provides something extra to the viewers in addition to informing them of your products and services. Grabbing the attention of consumers is more difficult than ever in the age of the smartphone.
Content Marketing
In regards to providing consumers with something extra in terms of marketing, content marketing is a strategy completely centered on that philosophy. People are inundated with advertisements constantly. As such, they begin to train themselves to ignore them. One way that businesses, including small businesses, can get around consumers mentally blocking out ads is to entice them with content that has value on its own.
Think, for example, of a company that produces retail grocery products. Such a company can publish recipes online that provide value to the reader while also subtly advertising their products as ingredients. It’s this kind of clever online marketing that can have the ability to draw in more eyes to your product line. Content marketing is also looked upon more favorably by search engines like Google that tend to punish blatant advertisements in search results.
Final Thoughts
Small businesses have many more options for marketing their products today than in the past. The internet, for all intents and purposes, has leveled the playing field. It’s not only huge corporations that can now afford marketing campaigns with real reach, small businesses that only cater to local markets can also use the same internet platforms to reach many more new customers than would be possible without these tools. It truly is a new age for small business marketing.