Sep 9, 2024 | Marketing, Small Business Marketing Strategy
Small Business Marketing Tips for a Poor Economy
Whatever you do, don’t stop marketing when the economic conditions aren’t favorable. The economy will improve at some point and you’ll be ahead of the game once it does. Keep your small business presence in your market. It also provides your target market with the confidence that your business is still thriving and healthy.
• Be strategic with your marketing and advertising efforts. This is where a marketing plan will be helpful. A marketing plan is a roadmap to your destination to keep you from getting lost and wasting precious time and money.
• Focus on your existing customer base and reward their loyalty with a loyalty plan or referral program.
• Create content that is informative and valuable that will help your target market. For example, a landscaping company might consider creating a calendar with gardening tips or advice to give to their loyal customers.
• Use data insights to show the value of your marketing and increase profitability.
• Remain agile and ready to pivot at any time. Read the book “Who Moved my Cheese?” for the reason why being open to change in your business is important.
• Consider doing videos and podcasts, to attract and build trust with customers.
• Improve the affordability of your offerings.
If you’ve never done a marketing plan, now is the time. With the New Year coming up, this is great time to review your marketing strategies to determine what has worked, what needs to be changed, and what new strategies can you add.
Download a Marketing Plan Template
You can download a marketing plan template HERE. If you need help in determining new strategies, we would be happy to help you. Just fill out the contact form at the bottom of the page and we will contact you.
Mar 1, 2024 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Small Business Marketing Strategy
If you operate a small business or practice it can be difficult to determine a cost effective way to stand out among the larger businesses or firms. The goal of our weekly newsletter is to provide you with back to basics marketing strategies and website trends and ideas specifically aimed at helping small businesses and professional practices become more visible among all the “voices” competing for your prospects.
Consider your website. While it is your most important marketing asset; driving prospects to your website can be challenging. With a 1) plan and 2) persistence, you can successfully use your website as your primary marketing tool. We will be discussing this in more detail next week.
Consider your marketing strategy. Trying to fit into a one size fits all marketing strategy; one that seems to work well for other businesses, is a recipe for failure. It’s so easy to be tempted to spend money on digital marketing strategies that promise a good ROI. Not that this is not a viable option but you have to make sure it’s right for you! Your strategy should reflect your business objectives and “personality” (a reflection of you as owner or principal).
Consider the SWOT analysis. This chart will help you evaluate your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats and it will help you plot your marketing road map. You likely completed a SWOT analysis when you started your business or practice. Now, take a step back and reevaluate your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in terms of marketing.
Consider this. There are many forms of digital marketing and they can be implemented singly or as a unit to determine which one works best for you. Just because certain marketing strategies are promoted and it seems like all the other businesses are using the same strategies, doesn’t mean they are the strategies you should be using. You have your own special area of expertise and sometimes, in order to stand out you have to NOT do what everyone else is doing! We know that sounds counterintuitive but that’s how we end up getting lost in the crowd.
“Smart brands don’t just ride trend shifts. They start them.” – Ann Handley
Mar 1, 2024 | Blog, Content Marketing, Marketing, Small Business Marketing Strategy, Social media marketing, Web Design
Creating Good Content for Your Website and Why it’s Important
Often, in conversation, it’s not what you say, but how you say it that can make all the difference in the world. The same principal can be said for your website content. There are many ways content can be presented, and how it’s presented might make the difference between increasing customer interaction and a customer closing down your website as soon as it’s opened.
Video
Videos provide an entertaining way of presenting content in a short period of time. Because it allows for movement, videos can invoke more impact through motion graphics, visual effects, and musical scoring. Videos can be used to communicate different types of information such as how-tos, demonstrations, testimonials, facts, and statistics.
Charts and Graphs
These have been used for years for visually presenting data. They have their place particularly when providing data in business meetings or research. Statistics add more credibility to your content, but reading them in textual form make them hard to grasp. Turing text into a visualization like a chart or graph makes it easier for people to see why those figures are important.
Infographic
Being a designer, this is my favorite. Infographics have been around alot longer than we think.
Infographics are a great way to present study findings, statistics, and complex information in a way that users can easily grasp and understand. So instead of going through long texts, infographics presents all that essential information at a glance.
You might ask, how are these forms of content used in your marketing. The great news is that once you have them, they can be repurposed in many ways. For example, this article started as an email. The email is created like an outline; snippets of information so as not to force the reader to read through paragraphs of text.
For this blog article, we added a bit more text to the email format. After publishing it here, we post it to various social media platforms. Finally, fleshing out the “outline” more, we use the same content for our newsletter. Developing this process even further, you can create a series of articles on one topic, turn it into an e-book and offer it on your website for people to purchase and download.
As an example of “it’s not what you say, but how you say it,” I created an infographic based on the three forms of content mentioned at the beginning of this article. Which is more interesting to view? Which helps you grasp the data easier? Which takes less time to read?
