Lucas Noah 
8 Smart Marketing Strategies For Small Business
As a small business owner, there are already established businesses in your niche. Businesses that have built and earned customers’ trust over time. But the truth of the matter is, that the sky is big enough for every bird to fly. Your small business can survive. There are customers waiting for you. If 20% of the world population is in your niche, there is about an 80% pool of customers waiting to be sold to.
So, as a business owner, how do you find these customers and establish your online presence as well? This is where small business marketing strategies come into play.
Smart marketing strategies make your business, the fisherman, and your customers, fish. So instead of chasing after the bait, your potential clients come looking for you. Interesting right?
Let’s see how business strategy consulting and a few other smart marketing strategies can make your customers chase after your bait.
Business Strategy Consulting
Marketing as a starter small business owner can be quite difficult. You are often confused about what marketing strategy you can use that’d be more effective. This article explains quite a number of these strategies.
However, you can save yourself a lot of stress by opting for business strategy consulting. This would give you access to experts who can provide your small business with the most effective marketing strategy you need.
Know Your Audience
The first thing you need to define is, who is your audience. Who do you want to sell to? What set of people need your product? How old are they? These are the first questions you need to find answers to, through proper market research.
This is the basis and once you get this first step right, it means you’ve been able to filter out people who would never buy your product. Not because they hate your business, but simply because they don’t and won’t need it.
Knowing your audience leads to the next smart marketing strategy, which is designing the ideal product that will fit your audience’s needs. The ideal product makes your marketing easier.
Create A Unique Product
Here, creating a unique product is like making your bait worth the chase. Oftentimes, most business owners miss this crucial step. This is how most small business owners spend their total start-up time:
- 30% on starting the business,
- 20% to create a product, then
- 50% on publicity.
This is not a bad strategy. However, do you know how this ends? They get the publicity and the audience attention they want. But they make little to zero sales conversions. Do you know why?
The major reason is that their audience is often disappointed by the type of product they find. Instead, they leave their page and go for the better option.
So, as a small business owner, after knowing your audience, your next marketing strategy for success is creating a unique product. Spend time researching what are your potential client’s needs. What do they lack? What can your product offer that other competitors can’t? Why should your product be the better choice?
If you can answer all these questions, use your results to create your product and you are another step ready to execute your smart business strategy.
Run Ads
Now that you know your audience, you’ve created a unique product. The next thing is paying for visibility or running ads. The truth here is that, as a small business, virtually no one knows you exist yet aside from you and your team. But you are not going to make sales to yourself right? So you need to take the advantage of ads as an opportunity to showcase your products or your business.
Here, you’ll combine all the previous facts you’ve gathered during your market research to know your audience. You’ll use this to figure out who your potential clients are, where they are, and the best way to get across to them.
Running ads will level up the playing field for you and the big businesses in your niche. Having created the ideal product your potential customers will want, then your ads present your product to them. And once they click on your ads, if you’ve done your product market research properly, you should be able to land a sale.
However, if this doesn’t work straightforwardly, the coming steps will explain how you can keep building trust and authority. And engage your audience till you land more sales.
Understand SEO
Now, congratulations for coming this far, the marketing strategy you are about to find out now is going to save you a whole lot of money. You’d have to spend less on ads to drive traffic to your site and make more money. The concept here is understanding Search Engine Optimization.
The secret here is that every single day billions of people all over the world pick up their phones to search for specific things on Google. Google brings them the best result that matches their query on the search results page.
So what you want to do now is understand how your potential clients are using Google to search for queries related to your product. You need to do what’s called keyword research.
If this is done properly, you have a chance of ranking and appearing on the Google search results page. This brings you organic traffic. It’s free but requires work.
Engage Them With Quality Content
After proper keyword research, then it’s time to work on writing quality and engaging content that’d keep your audience and site visitors engaged. If you can successfully keep your site visitors engaged, you increase the chance of being able to sell to them and you reduce your overall bounce rate. The lower your bounce rate, the higher your chance of making a sale.
This is a strategy that helps you share your knowledge and build authority in your niche. The more you write quality content, the more Google ranks your website. And, this leads to more organic traffic which eventually fetches you more sales.
Follow Up
As a small business, you need to make sure you find a way to retain your website visitors. This is also an important marketing strategy. You’ll need the consent of your site visitors in order to follow up. You can simply ask them to submit their to get notifications whenever you make a post on your website. You can also ask them to subscribe to your sales letter.
What this strategy gives you is free to access to people who are interested in your product or your blog posts. They are your potential customers. All you need to do is use an email distribution platform of your choice to send a weekly newsletter or post directed to make them buy from you. This marketing strategy is known as email marketing. If you can make good use of it within your small business, you’ll find it’s a potential gold mine.
Build Authority Through Social Media
The only difference between you and the big companies in your niche is that some of these big businesses have been established as an authority in your niche. So, automatically, they are more trusted and customers often do more business with them.
You need for your small business to thrive as well. One of the media you can use for this purpose is social media. Some small business owners shy away from social media. However, you need to embrace social media. It is a key part of your overall business success. Social media marketing doesn’t guarantee you instant success.
However, if you can be consistent, post informative posts regularly. You’ll find an interested audience in your company’s offer. All you need is to answer their questions and clear their doubts. You can do this through credible posts and posting previous reviews of your business get from your previous customers.
Conclusion
In this article, we’ve been able to review the right different smart marketing strategies you can use for your small business. A business strategy consulting service is the most recommended. It saves you a lot of stress. However, other strategies are also effective if you can put in the work required.