Contributed by Independent Bank
Is your business familiar with these four tactics?
If you own or operate a small business, you need cost-effective ways to bring customers to you. You can sell an amazing product or service, but people have to know you are selling before they can buy. Fortunately, techniques available today in marketing for small business allow you to compete online with even larger corporations for customers—as long as you know what you are doing. These four tactics, in particular, can lift your marketing to new levels.
Content Marketing
You need a website for your business. Small businesses carve out space in the market through online search results, and your website serves as a point of entry. But just having a space online with your name and address will not cut it. Rather, you need to produce regular, relevant content to support your business. This benefits your efforts not only by letting you present useful information to your potential customers, but by boosting your website’s search engine rankings. You should use a blog or pages on your site to add new information at least every other week to maximize your impact in marketing for small business success.
Claim Your Listings
A simple technique that some people don’t consider is to look for all of the listings available for your business. Local listings of companies and industry-specific listing sites often contain inaccurate information about your name, address, or phone number. If your information is incorrect, customers will not be able to find you as easily. Find the listings and submit any corrections necessary—and if you are not listed, submit your information. This simple step can go a long way toward directing more local search traffic to you.
Facebook Ads
Facebook holds a wealth of data on its users: age, gender, location, interests, and dozens of other data points. This makes marketing for small business through its advertising program something you can target in increasingly granular ways. You can identify exactly what cross-sections of the public should see your ads to maximize the impact of any ads you place. Where companies once placed ads in the yellow pages for everyone to see, this tactic puts your information in front of the people most likely to be interested and act. When you have a good sense of who your customers will be, your marketing goes directly to those people.
Social Media Marketing
Finally, any approach to marketing for small business should include a social media component. You can create presences for your company on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Google Places, and any other site that your customers are likely to use. Link to content on your website and create short posts that your potential customers will find interesting. Focus on items that you find interesting and relate to the business you own or operate. If you think about the commercial posts you see, you undoubtedly know of some that you always enjoy and others that miss the mark. Focus your approach on creating and promoting the content you would like to see; these will be the posts that people like, share, retweet, and otherwise spread across their own social media networks to increase your marketing reach.
Marketing for small business is easier and less expensive than ever. Employing these and other techniques on behalf of your own business will efficiently increase your marketing footprint and let you reach more customers for your business.