Setting-up a small, independent business is an exciting time but knowing where to focus your marketing efforts can be a daunting prospect, especially if you have minimal experience. To be successful, your business needs to get across its USP in order to attract new business, but it also needs to ensure it has a robust digital marketing strategy for it to stand out from the crowd.
Without clear, measurable marketing goals in place, you run the risk of going unnoticed and failing to attract new clientele so spending time ensuring you create a plan is essential.
The great thing about marketing is that it doesn’t need to be complicated. In fact, you can be incredibly creative with it if you want to be!
There are plenty of great ways that your small business can promote itself, including:
Table Of Contents
SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
It’s one thing to have a website and a USP, but it’s another thing for search engines to promote your business. To rank highly on search engines like Google and Bing you need to ensure that your website is optimised for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). SEO is the process of upgrading your website and its content, structure and more so that it can easily be picked up by ranking algorithms in search engines.
When you rank higher in search engine results, your business can reach new people searching for your product or services and with 80% of shoppers starting their purchasing journey by using search engines, it’s hard to deny the value that SEO can hold for your business.
If you are unsure how to get started with SEO, an SEO consultant can help you with all your SEO services including:
- Optimising your pages with targeted keywords
- Creating relevant and click-worthy copy
- Generating backlinks with other websites
- Optimising your webpage
Animated Social Media Ads
Animated social media adverts are a great way to get potential customers to stop scrolling as they allow you to show your business or product message in an entertaining and engaging way. The great thing about animated social media ads is that they allow you to explain complex messages in simplistic, easy to digest formats. This makes animated videos particularly effective for financial, educational and healthcare industries where the average consumer doesn’t have specialist knowledge.
Customer Testimonial Videos
Digital marketing is so much more than just captivating your audience with stunning visuals. It has now evolved to include emotional connection between brands and their consumers. What better way to do that than through customer testimonial videos?
Customer testimonial videos are one of the best marketing tools you can use. In fact, studies have shown that when existing customers talk about their experience with your product or services, it helps to build trust and credibility for your brand with new customers. They are also incredibly effective with generating sales, with over three quarters of customers saying that testimonial videos from existing customers make them trust a company more and in-turn make them more likely to buy from you.
Company story video
Storytelling has always been an effective way to win the hearts of new consumers. It allows your business to boost your brand’s popularity by diving into the details of it. By communicating what your brand stands for and how your products and services reign supreme, it helps to form an emotional connection with your consumers and turns them into paying customers much more than a lengthy blog post as it’s easier to digest.
Email Campaigns
You might not think it, but email marketing is one of the most effective tools for marketing your small business. In fact, over 40% of businesses state that email marketing is the most important to their campaign’s success, while over 70% of millennials have mentioned that email communication is their preferred method of marketing.
The impressive thing about email marketing campaigns is that you can quickly measure your results as it allows you to see who has opened your mail and clicked on the links or offers within it. This allows you to track how well that campaign is doing with regards to engagement, sales and ROI.
Conclusion
There are plenty of effective and measurable ways that your small business can promote its products and services to prospective consumers – many of which are incredibly effective and won’t break the bank either.
If you are unsure where to begin, a digital marketing specialist can help you decide the best course of action for your brand and its goals.
