5 Essentials of Marketing Your Small Business to Keep You Ahead of the Competition
Small business marketing isn’t for the faint of heart, but if you’ve been in marketing for longer than two seconds, you already know that. Marketing your business is dependent on doing some key factors well and these things can make or break a small business in this dog eat dog world we live in. Competition is fierce and understanding how to make the most out of your web pages is tricky.
Here are five crucial steps to get ahead of the game!
- Create a Marketing Plan – Don’t leave anything to chance. Create a well-thought out, concise plan that maps out every one of your marketing elements along with what you need to do to make it work. Make it as detailed as possible. At the very least fill in the broad strokes.
- Social Media Marketing – 91 percent of experiences social marketers generate improved website traffic and 79 percent generate more quality leads according to MediaBistro.com. How do they do this? They do not waste time with their social media marketing. Map out a strategy for social media an stick to it.
- Build a Mailing List – MarketingProfs.com reported emails averages a ROI (return on investment) of $40 for every $1 spent. This far exceeds keyword ads ($17) and banner ads ($2). Don’t be misled into thinking collecting and building an email list is dead. If you fail to build a list, you’re failing to build your business! You just can’t afford to leave such a large source of potential profits for your competition.
- Video Marketing – Connect to all the local traffic that’s out there trying to find your business. Video marketing in this space is a relatively untapped vein, and having a quick video advertising your wares on page one of Google can result in tons of traffic and authority coming to your web site! According to the research company Forrester, any given video stands about a 50x better chance of appearing on the first page of Google than any given text page.
- Have a Mobile Presence – Be sure your site is optimized for mobile, as more than half of all searches now are originating from some type of mobile device. Microsoft reports that mobile browsing is projected to overtake desktop browsing by 2014. Having your pages mobile optimized can help improve your reach, and also corral impulse buyers.
Don’t Make the Mistake of Going It Alone!
None of us can do it all, particularly when it comes to the constantly changing world of local online marketing. Learn what’s working now, learn from the best you can afford, and hire the very best outsourcing you can get. It’ll pay off handsomely in the long run!
