“How do I market my small business?” It’s perhaps the most common question among business owners ask right after they’ve developed a product or service. They want to tell the world about it but their knowledge of best-practice marketing strategies and tactics may be limited at best. Simply put, many don’t know where to begin.
At Marketing Nice Guys, we suggest starting with our PATIO marketing framework that helps any business or organization walk through its promotion efforts from planning and strategy through implementation and optimization. The framework covers a number of basics that all businesses need to consider when it comes to marketing:
- Knowing your audience / determining your buyer personas
- Understanding and stating your value proposition
- Determining your brand identity and voice
- Focusing on a full-funnel marketing plan and approach
- Determining your budget and resources and identifying marketing channels
But then what? We know small businesses often need strategic help, but they also want to be able to execute quick marketing wins they can implement now. That’s why we’ve created this quick list of 5 marketing tips for small businesses on a budget.
Small Business Marketing Tip No. 1: Use Google My Business
For the purposes of this post, we’re assuming most small businesses have a website. (If you don’t, we’re happy to help you build a website at a low cost.) But once you do have one, we suggest thinking about your business as a local business first. What we mean by that is that, even if you have broader ambitions for worldwide sales, think first about becoming the master of local search, which encompasses about 46 percent of all searches on Google right now.
That’s where Google My Business comes in. Google My Business is a listing service offered by Google so your current and potential customers can more easily find you. Enter in your hours of operation, your physical address, services, website URL, a few other details, and you’re ready to go. We list this as number one as many small businesses don’t utilize this service or realize how it affects local SEO rankings. And don’t just stop there, get your business listed in the Yellow Pages, or other online directories with a link pointing to your site for helpful SEO.
Small Business Marketing Tip No. 2: Video Development on a Budget
Most small business owners know the role video plays in marketing having seen the impact of ads from television or watching brands produce video for YouTube or other social channels. But doing high-quality video is not only technically challenging, but also cost-prohibitive in many cases. So why do we suggest video? Depending on the type of business, there are lots of low-cost options for video creation. For example, iPhones and other mobile phone cameras have such high resolution now that the video will look great with the right lighting and sound. iPhones, for example, work really well for product demos or selfie-style videos with you or one of your staff as the main focal subject. For you iPhone videos, it will help to have a few things:
- A good strong “key” light that is generally on the focal subject. (See below: A ring light will work.)
- Quality audio – your phone can record quality sound if you’re close enough)
- A phone holder or stabilizer of some kind. We recommend a simple ring light with a phone holder or a Smoove stabilizer if you find yourself in motion shooting video.
- Some knowledge of simple editing tactics on iMovie or another editing software you can download to your phone.
Alternatively, with the pandemic making virtual meetings and discussions the norm, you can certainly create great video from your laptop via a Zoom call that you record. Think about interviewing a subject matter expert on topics your customers care about. Or, creating a presentation on a topic that drives your thought leadership in the space. Similarly, the factors above apply: light, audio, and high-quality resolution will impact your video quality here. To get what you need, we’d suggest the ring light above, as well as the following:
- A good webcam — we like the Logitech Brio (and use a good backdrop behind you)
- A Blue Yeti USB microphone for quality sound
- A good, high-speed internet connection, which will improve the quality of your connection and recording on Zoom or other meetings software.
From there, it’s really up to you to create the content and then distribute it. And don’t worry, if you’re not comfortable doing video just yet, you have other low-cost content outlets, including writing blogs, articles, whitepapers, ebooks, or even recording simple audio interviews. Whatever you choose, make sure the content fits the strategy you’ve chosen – whether that’s distributing your brand with as much reach as possible or helping provide information that makes a customer convert.
Small Business Marketing Tip No. 3: Utilize Your Existing Audience for Testimonials and Reviews
There’s a reason for the old adage that “word of mouth is the best form of marketing.” But many small businesses often forget the power and potential for existing customers to become advocates for their brand. What does it take? Call up or email some existing customers and ask them if they’d be willing to provide a testimonial that you can post on the website. Ask them also for a picture you can use, which humanizes the testimonial for other customers.
But don’t stop there: If you allow for ratings or reviews (which you should generally try to do), ask your customers to provide those as well. And not just on your website – but also on Yelp or other sites where products-and-services reviews for small businesses are aggregated. Having a volume of reviews or ratings is more important than the actual rating itself as it helps improve your visibility on those external sites as well.
Small Business Marketing Tip No. 4: Personalize Your Emails
Over the last several years, marketing email open rates have steadily declined, if only due to the volume of email the average individual receives. Throw in more spam emails and other clutter, it’s really hard to break through to a customer. But one proven way is to personalize emails to the audience. The best way to do this is to connect your CRM to your marketing automation / email platform – so these processes can be automated. Here are a few small things that make a difference in engaging the customers or prospective customers on your email list:
- Sending a birthday message or one based on their anniversary of signing up with you.
- Sending reminders of upcoming appointments, or reminders to schedule a yearly / monthly follow up, or even checking in with customers based on their last interaction with you.
- Tailoring subject lines based on the individual’s name (which makes a huge difference in open rates), or simply stating their name in the body copy (which improves engagement).
- Developing a newsletter or personalizing a section of it based on what the customer has indicated about their preferences.
- Providing loyalty discounts based on who they are (how long they’ve been a customer or after their first year with you.)
Whatever method you choose, it’s going to be important to automate this as much as possible as you wouldn’t want to manually do this for each of your customers by hand.
Small Business Marketing Tip No. 5: Optimize Your Website
For many small businesses, the website is the centerpiece around which much of the marketing activity revolves. In some cases, small business may use the website to make people aware of their products and services. In others, it’s main driver of revenue and conversions. Yet, interestingly, once a site is built, many don’t small business owners don’t think about optimizing it or want to optimize it but don’t quite know how. Here are a few things we see with small business websites in particular that can be easily addressed with a little effort:
- Website Page Speed. If customers can’t open a page on your website within the first couple seconds, it’s a big problem because many won’t stick around. Having a “fast” website is crucial not only for customer experience, but also for page ranking in Google. Google will penalize slow-loading websites in search results. A quick tool you can use to evaluate how fast your site loads is Google PageSpeed Insights, which provides a rating for how fast your page is currently loading in mobile and desktop – and issues that are causing any slowdowns. The other tool some developers use is GTmetrix, which aggregates various evaluation programs such PageSpeed Insights and YSlow into one rating. Typically, most website speed issues revolve around excessive javascript or non-optimized images, which a developer can help solve pretty quickly. You might also check your hosting platform as shared hosting services can sometimes cause a slowdown.
- Site Color Contrast and Color Issues. One aspect we often see that impacts the website user experience is the lack of color contrast and poor color or UX choices. Examples might include:
- White text headlines running over lighter-colored images or black headlines on darker images, rendering them unreadable.
- Barely legible fonts or too many different fonts on a page, which create a chaotic experience. You can check for different fonts on your website by downloading WhatFont, a Chrome extension.
- A barrage of colors overwhelming the site visitor. (A limited color palette is always more preferable.) You can tell the number of colors on your website by downloading an extension for Chrome called ColorZilla.
Rest assured, all of these are easily remedied with a little development and design assistance. But helping to identify the issues upfront will certainly save the time for your development team.
- Simple On-Page SEO Improvements. A lot of digital marketing is simply attention to detail. So, going through a sweep of your website pages and optimizing them for particular keywords is critical to drawing relevant customers to your website. It starts with the title tag on the page, and making sure it reflects what users are most looking for, using keywords they would use. It also includes making sure headlines, URLs, image alt text, linked text, or anything typographically emphasized includes those same valuable keyword terms. For more about what you can do on-page, download our free One-Page SEO Checklist for Copywriters.
Conclusion
These are just a few ideas you can do as a small business right now to help boost your marketing. For more on this you can also go to:
- Hubspot: 26 Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses
- Wordstream: 23 Low-Budget Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses
- Sprout Social: Small Business Marketing Guide
Good luck! At Marketing Nice Guys, our mission is to help you excel at digital marketing. Learn more about our marketing agency consulting services for small businesses today.