Small businesses are the backbone of every healthy economy. In the U.S. they make up 99.7 percent of all businesses and employ around a half of overall workforce. However, around 20 percent of new businesses will fail in their first year, and 50 percent of them won’t survive longer than 5 years. The inability to finance proper marketing strategies present one of the major problems small businesses face and one of the most common reasons why they fail.
Namely, almost a third of small businesses fail because they misjudge their financial capabilities and run out of cash. In addition, 21 percent of small business owners identified finding time and resources for digital marketing as their biggest challenge. Digital marketing does offer new possibilities to promote yourself in cheap and innovative ways, but at the same time sometimes confuses business owners. They’re still not sure how exactly to use digital means of marketing, how to distribute the money they plan to invest in it, as well as how to balance between traditional and digital promotion in order to properly brand their business.
Nevertheless, there are several convenient strategies you can use to give your small business a bit of a boost even when on a tight budget. Choosing the right tactics in the initial stages of your company’s development is crucial and can make a difference between success and failure. Here are a few pieces of advice in this respect.
Use email marketing
To this day, email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to reach your customers. In fact, it still delivers the largest ROI to businesses – a staggering 41 dollars per dollar invested. Its affordability, as well as the mere number of people using email is what makes it so handy and efficient. But the crucial factor responsible for the success of email marketing is, above all, proper targeting.
Your email list needs to be segmented according to your subscribers’ demographics, location, interests and economic factors such as average purchase value or purchase frequency. Then you can come up with highly-focused content and copy and send them only to appropriate segments of your list in order to influence important metrics like CTR, conversion rate or open rate.
Furthermore, try to provide truly valuable and interesting content in these emails instead of just persuading people to buy your stuff. Delivering engaging content, with just a subtle call-to-action button included in the email, will actually affect your revenue better than a salesy, in-your-face approach.
Quality content is also a good way to get people to subscribe in the first place. Try to tease them with just a part of the article or the first video in a series of videos and offer to send them the rest for free via email. Once you have their emails in your database, you can start segmenting the list and creating different content for every segment.
Leverage social media
Not having a business page on some of the most popular social networks is becoming closer and closer to being non-existent in the world of small companies. Not employing social media marketing would be kind of foolish – it’s a simple and affordable way to promote your business and it opens numerous interesting marketing opportunities.
Most importantly, major social networks usually offer very advanced targeting possibilities for paid ads, meaning that you’re able to reach exactly the right audience. This in turn means that you’re not wasting your money on getting to crowds of people that are not likely to care at all about your industry or your product.
Therefore, it’s not surprising to find out that 75 percent of small businesses plan to use social media for promotion in 2018, which makes this the most popular digital marketing strategy employed by these companies. The type of content you’re going to publish depends on your audience. You’ll need to adapt to them in terms of the topics you cover, as well as the voice and language you use. This tends to get tricky at times, so reaching out to a social media marketing agency to help you with analyzing and connecting with your audience is not a bad idea.
The power of content marketing
A great way for a new business to build reputation is using a well-thought content marketing strategy. As it was already mentioned, it can be very effective to offer your audience regular, informative and helpful content related to your industry. It’s a strategy that takes time to pay off, but on the long run it’s a much better approach than openly begging people to buy something from you or paying for a flashy ad nobody’s going to click on.
The success of this strategy comes down to a combination of at least two factors. Firstly, it relies on the concept of reciprocity that says that if you deliver something to people for free, a certain number of them will feel obliged to return a favor, whether by spending their money or by signing up. Secondly, showing your expertise in industry-related topics will surely result in being noticed by your target audience. You just need a bit of patience and determination to keep the good content coming.
Naturally, a constant need to come up with new ideas can lead to exhaustion since it’s not easy to update your content on a regular basis. Whenever this happens, don’t hesitate to repurpose some of your old content. There’s nothing wrong with this – it’s your original content and if you decide to use parts of it in a new manner or to simply repost some of your old posts on social networks, it’s perfectly fine. This can be particularly useful when a topic you covered some time ago becomes hot and gains importance. In general, addressing current events in your posts can significantly increase their impact or even cause them to go viral.
Team up with a related business
Getting a brand from a niche associated to yours to cooperate with you and do some sort of cross-promotion can be a very smart way to boost your brand. Carefully choose who you work with. They shouldn’t be your direct competition, but should be relevant enough for your potential customers. For instance, if you own a car insurance company, connecting with a car repair shop or a car wash means you can create a kind of a synergy by offering recommendations, coupons and discounts for each other’s customers or simply by giving out flyers that promote your associates. This way brands push and boost one another without getting in each other’s way.
Community work
Doing something tangible for your community is a brilliant method to get the word about your brand spread out quickly, especially for local businesses. This doesn’t necessarily mean shameless promotion of your otherwise charitable efforts. If you really come up with a cool way to support your community, you won’t have to brag around about it - people will find out themselves.
For example, if you own a PC or phone repair shop, people probably often come with some tiny issues that you can fix within minutes and that you don’t normally charge for. However, sometimes these people insist on paying out of courtesy, and you can tell them that instead of paying you, they can put the money into the box and you’ll later donate all of it to someone in need. It’s a great way to show that you care about both your customers and your community, while at the same time boosting your brand’s image.
Giveaways and discounts
Claiming that people like free or discounted goods is not really a discovery previously unknown to the human kind. Organizing contests and giving away free stuff might seem like an unnecessary initial expense, but it’s not a bad way to make people try your product or service and make them talk about it for a while.
Loyalty programs can also be effective on the long run, since they motivate the customers to stay with you. At the end of the day, they already invested something to get to the point where they have benefits when buying from you. Encouraging referrals by offering incentives to those who recommend you to a friend can also make your network of customers grow. It won’t happen overnight, but it can bring decent long-term results.
Limited offers
Unlike the previous trick, this one is used when you need quick, short-term results. Namely, it turns out that putting a limit on some of your products can actually increase their sales. You can warn your customers that a product is almost out of stock, or you can put a time limit to accessibility to a certain product or a discount. A simple countdown timer is found to increase conversions by 8 percent. This is due to the scarcity principle that relies on people’s fear of missing out on events, news stories or, in this case, products and services.
Of course, you shouldn’t employ this strategy to deceive your customers nor overuse it, since this could make it counterproductive. But when you really are almost out of certain types of goods, informing people about this will most probably increase the demand for them and speed up their sales.
First things last
To conclude, all these tricks won’t help a lot if the product you offer is below par or if you don’t put enough effort to keep your company financially healthy and stable. This is the true basis of any successful business. When it comes to marketing, posting engaging content regularly across all platforms you use is more important than any particular short-term trick. The key to both – having a good product and effective marketing is listening to the feedback of your customers and your audience. Hard work, genuine expertise and care for people who buy from you are the real keys to success, with everything else coming second.