1. Know Your Businesses Target Market

One of the biggest mistakes your business can make is believing that “anyone” can be your buyer.

Larger businesses may be able to survive when appealing to a wider audience but when it comes to a marketing strategy for a smaller company, it is crucial to narrow your focus to a particular niche.

By understanding your ideal customer and their decision journey, and then developing strategies that are focused on this buyer niche, you will reach more people who are likely to be interested in what you have on offer.

Don’t know where to start? Here are some tips for finding and targeting your ideal audience effectively:

• Start by taking a step back and inspecting your existing customers. Find exactly whom you want to work with.

• Define your niche, the group of individuals that have a specific set of needs you can satisfy with your product or service.

• Invest time in researching the competition. This not only gives you information on your potential customers, but it will also help you understand differentiators, create a tactical sales approach, inspire new ideas and allow you to keep your offering competitively priced.

• Create your buyer persona and try to get inside the mind of your target client.

• Use available demographic data and insights to back up your research.

• Segment your audience in order to deliver a more tailored experience and build stronger connections.

• Personalize your message.

• And lastly, don’t forget about offline marketing, it’s still important!

2. Boost Value with your Content

As you can imagine, for many businesses, customer value still boils down to price. However, it’s important to remember that customers give your company more than just what’s charged at the checkout. Time, energy, and emotional costs that customers also take into account when making a buying decision must be evaluated too.

Ask yourself, what do you have to offer your customers?

Always have this question at the forefront of your mind when implementing your business’s marketing strategies.

Encourage participation. Try to be the first to the mark. Tell your audience a story. Adding these things to your content proves that you understand their unique situation, challenges, or needs, and have the resources and abilities to help them. Your clients will then be more likely to engage with your brand.

3. Build an Email Marketing List to Nurture Leads

Email marketing is a critical, scalable, and rather a cheap strategy you should have in your marketing toolkit.

In fact, 73% of millennials prefer communication from businesses that comes through email, and building up your mailing list isn’t hard.

Employ a digital marketing professional or even take on the task yourself, it doesn’t take much time or any special skills to do, and once it’s done, you will save heaps of time in the future.

Here are some recommendations for assembling your initial newsletter subscribers:

• Experiment with different newsletter styles that show off your new blog posts or your current promotions.

• Offer something valuable and memorable (and preferably free) like a new customer discount or coupon code for joining your mailing list.

• Prompt those who complete certain forms on your website to opt-in to receive regular updates from you via email.

• Use your social media platforms to share your excitement about the launch of new products and services and nudge them to sign up for them through links that lead directly to the sign-up form.

• Include a sign-up form on every one of your website pages and blog posts.

• Know that while promotions are important, they aren’t everything. The heart of your email is to establish healthy relationships with your customer. Keep them regular, stay relevant, and be personal.

4. Promote yourself on Social Media & Use Influencer Marketing

There is a measurable performance difference between having and not having a social media marketing strategy in place.

Billions of potential customers use various social media platforms every day, so why wouldn’t you market where you are most likely to be seen?

And these days, when marketing your small business, you can’t afford to overlook the power influencers hold.

Influencers are individuals with a large online following whose recommendations have the ability to sway the opinions and purchasing decisions of hundreds of their followers as a result of their authority, knowledge, position or relationship with their audience. In other words, if you employ an influencer to promote your product or service, their followers are likely to take notice, greatly increasing your brand awareness. Using this strategy also saves your business time, is relatively inexpensive, and will enhance your credibility while also guaranteeing a boost in sales and ROI.

There are a couple of ways for your business to work with influencers, you can:

• Reach out to them directly and ask them to promote your product or service.

• Partner with an influencer marketing or a digital marketing agency that can connect you with influencers who are a good fit for your brand.

5. Blog About Topics Related to your Business Niche

Blogging is one of the simplest ways to direct organic traffic to your website, particularly to those customers who haven’t reached the purchasing decision stage just yet.

Writing relevant and regular posts about the latest trends and events also creates content for your social media, improves your SEO, establishes your credibility and positions you as a leader to your target audience.

There are many ways to kick off your blog, but what is most important is that you make it your own. Even if you only publish once every two or three weeks, blogging will improve your website’s visibility online and help educate your potential customers on why they should believe in your company.

Once you begin writing, adding a call-to-action within your posts for visitors to subscribe to your blog or join the newsletter will increase your customer engagement even further.

This is a great way to start converting traffic to leads and offer potential customers a way to get more information if they aren’t ready to buy from your business yet.

So basically, blogs will help you generate the best traffic-to-lead conversions.

And to be very clear for anyone unfamiliar with how traffic-to-lead conversions work, it’s as simple as this:

• Visitors come to your website
• Visitors see a call-to-action for a free offer/discount
• Visitors click the call-to-action and move to a landing page, which contains a form for them to fill in with their information
• Visitors fill out the form, submit information, and receive the free offer
• Result: More brand engagement for you!

6. Get Personal

It’s as simple as this, 74% of consumers report that word-of-mouth recommendations significantly influence what they choose to purchase, so, you need to create some chatter around your business.

You can do this by getting personal, and from there you will:

• Gain Name recognition: Everyone knows who Apple, Zara or Ford are and what they do just from hearing the name or seeing the logo. Wouldn’t it be nice for people to hear your business name and not have to explain what you do and what makes you so great? Most people go on Google and type in exactly what brand they’re looking for. Creating a strong personal brand will drive your target audience directly to your website or social media simply because they recognize your name and know what you do best.

• Be memorable: Be strategic when presenting yourself to the world. Your audience will remember you for what makes you valuable and unique. If you’ve nothing unique to offer, there’s really no point in trying to create a brand in the first place.

• Control how people view you: Personal branding gives you the full power to create any brand you want with any style and message. When you don’t have a personal brand, people tend to create their own perceptions making it harder for you to build a relationship with them, so how do you want to be perceived? What story do you want to tell?

7. Invest in your Ads

When it comes to advertising your business, there are several strategies that you can implement. However, not all of these strategies will be effective for your business, and some of them come cheap like email marketing.

To find the best advertising strategies for your business, you will need to do some research, invest generously and trial a few different tactics. You could try out:

• Google Ads are perfect if you have your target audience locked in and know they are already searching the web for your product or solution.

• Social Media advertising uses the likes of Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and LinkedIn to promote your business which allows you to create ads targeting specific demographics, or you can simply post information about your business on your social media pages.

• Another popular marketing strategy is search engine optimization (SEO). This involves optimizing your website so that it will appear higher on search engine results pages. SEO will take time but it’s worth every penny.

• Or, if you’re on a more limited budget, it may be worth considering using online marketing tools such as Google AdWords or Facebook Ads. These tools will allow you to target narrower audiences with your ads, which will help you save money on advertising costs.

8. Commit to the Techniques that Work for You

Trial and error is all part of the process…

Once you have your initiatives running and you’ve experimented with a few things, pay attention to the conceivable data. This will inform you of what’s working and what you should cut out.

As you begin to scale, it’s a good idea to double down on the proven methods that are generating the most revenue.

Looking for more help with your marketing strategy and how it can help your business? Or maybe you need help ranking your website? We are s professional digital marketing agency that helps businesses grow online by increasing their leads and sales. For a free consultation, Give us a shout at [email protected]