5 Ways To Market Small Businesses More Effectively

While technology has evened up the playing field with businesses regarding customer acquisition, small businesses must use a more personal approach than larger businesses with established brands.

Your marketing strategy will be more effective using Web 3.0 tech like AI and marketing automation to capture customer data and free your marketers to craft personalized experiences that resonate with your desired online audience.

Smarter Ways To Market A Small Business

Focus on what you can control and change, for example, your online assets like your website.

Redesign the Website to Make it Stickier

Websites are the lifeblood of many businesses. It’s the public face. While their Facebook page may get some visitors, it usually doesn’t generate as many as the business website. Facebook users don’t always convert into customers, either. This is where counting the number of followers on social media or social shares becomes metric businesses find difficult to quantify in terms of revenue or bottom-line earnings. However, the website is under your control.

If your website is older than a year or two, it probably requires a redesign or a completely new one. The goal should be to make it easier to use, and stickier so visitors stay longer and buy more. If you’re using a premium WordPress theme, consider getting a custom theme designed. Hire a web designer to create a new design from scratch.

Look at the existing site to see what parts are working well and which are falling flat. Check the analytics to determine which pages are visited the most and have a longer dwell time. Finalize what elements to retain and those to discard. Consider whether parts not working well could be retooled to make them useful. Run through several versions of a site mock-up to narrow down what you want before agreeing on the final design to be produced.

Optimize the Website for CRO

Today, Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a big topic. The idea is to work on your sales pages to improve the number of customers who purchase or carry out the target action, like opting into a newsletter. CRO helps a small business earn considerably more from the same web traffic by adjusting the page layout, imagery, written copy, and more.

Dan Siroker from Optimizely.com wrote “A-B Testing,” an excellent introduction to using A-B testing on your website and to test which marketing campaigns performed best. A CRO specialist can use repeated A-B testing while iterating through different possibilities to find the best images, written copy, or layouts that visitors respond to.

Running tests on a smaller scale as an in-house operation is possible too.  It won’t likely be as effective, but it can help rule out woefully ineffective marketing offers before losing money after their implementation. Google Optimize is a new tool to try out too. Also, landing page software can use A-B versions of pages to test how they perform; email opt-ins, special offers, and discount rates can be adjusted to get the best success rates.

Professional Photography is a Must-Have

The images used on business websites must be suitable. Many people pick generic stock photos with groups posing as executives while holding a prop like a clipboard. It’s totally unconvincing. Everyone knows a stock image when they see it, and it hurts CRO. Visitors often don’t return second time to the site and abandon the brand.

Think about what photos you’ll need and book a professional photoshoot. You may want to use an outdoor venue or book time in a photo studio. The professional photographer should offer client proofing too. Client proofing allows you, the business client, to see the photos that they’ve taken. This can be either through a secure connection on a website or by using an app.

Ensure you get a smooth process when client proofing by using the photography tools from format.com; they have a site builder to create an online portfolio. Their business client can view the images, mark the ones they like, download a sample, and add helpful feedback.

There’s also a free iPhone app available from the App Store used as a website builder to put the photos online and view them conveniently while on the move. The photographer can tweak the images and add filters to adjust the lighting. Once the images are finalized, they’ll be ready to use on the website.

Attend Business or Industry Expos

While the business may not have the budget to place a booking as an exhibitor at a popular business or industry expo, key staff members can still attend. This is particularly useful if the company is focused on business-to-business transactions rather than selling directly to consumers.

Practice the elevator pitch. It’s that 30-second pitch about what the company does and how it helps other businesses. It needs to be well written, easy to remember, and repeat. Record it on a smartphone in case of nerves and faulty memory.

Practice the elevator pitch until it’s memorized. Don’t forget to bring a power bank to ensure your smartphone doesn’t die, as it’ll be needed to add new industry contacts and pull up the pitch recording when required.

Anyone attending this type of event should be well prepared in advance. They need to have enough business cards to not run out, especially when attending over multiple days. It’s helpful to carry some marketing materials that would usually be handed out from an expo booth. This way, the staff member can reach into their messenger bag and pull out suitable material to hand to an interested person at the event.

Just because the company doesn’t have the budget for a booth at every expo doesn’t mean they cannot do some ad hoc marketing!

Use YouTube for Video Marketing

Many companies use video to put a personality and face to the brand.

Either use an internal team responsible for producing creative short videos to upload to a business channel on YouTube or outsource it to a production team like a video production company or an Ad agency. The idea with the videos is not solely to promote your products by filming them in close-up detail. Take the approach of providing guidance to people interested in your industry, products, or services. Find ways to be helpful to viewers by answering their questions and solving their problems.

While you can talk about your products or services, it doesn’t hurt to recommend those of other companies. While this may seem like a bad idea, today’s reality is that people know when they’re being sold to. Other businesses and consumers are far more innovative about marketing techniques than in years past. They don’t appreciate a sell-sell-sell approach. Mix it up.

Summing Up

The recommended marketing solutions above aren’t that costly. Depending on how significant your website visitor traffic is or how much your YouTube channel grows in the first year, there’s the potential to expand the customer base and sales volume. The focus of the ideas is based on cost-efficiency over flashiness.

Small businesses cannot usually afford a big splashy event to promote a product launch; they must focus on perfecting minor details and getting more creative. That is until they become a big brand that can afford more extensive marketing campaigns targeting a more significant market share. For now, one step at a time.

We have many articles on marketing, including how to market your business during an economic downtown.