It is time to get your small business marketing kickstarted, but first, is there anything more thrilling than being at the helm of a small business? Whether you’re sitting pretty in the black or panicking in the red, it’s an adventure roughly 28 million Americans experience on a daily basis. That being said, living a daily adventure can be stressful, which is why it’s downright dreamy when things go well and fires that are put out stay that way.
Marketing, in particular, is an almost constant challenge for many small businesses. With more limited resources than the big guys, how is a smaller company ever supposed to meaningfully compete? Getting the most bang for your buck is the obvious answer, and these seven marketing hacks — from employing a better AdWords strategy to creating better content — will help you do just that.
1. Flexible AdWords Bids
Google’s AdWords can be a great marketing tool, so long as you know how to use it well. One of the most effective ways to use it is to enact a flexible AdWords bid strategy. Whether you need to capitalize more on those times of day when your traffic is at its height or you need to maximize conversions, getting detailed about how you’re bidding can be a boon to your ROI without blowing through your marketing budget. While this hack will take some time to implement, it will save you money and increase your conversion rate.
2. Create Valuable, Shareable Content
To say that the internet is a place where people go for information is to miss out on giving potential customers what they’re actually looking for: meaningful, valuable, and shareable content. Investing time, energy, and money in excellent content is a marketing hack that is likely to never go out of style. So give the people something to read or watch that is relevant, educational, or entertaining, and make sure that sharing it via social media or email is easy. The better your content, the more it will be shared, and that kind of organic engagement will drive sales better than almost any other marketing hack you utilize.
3. Improve Your CTA
Calls to action (CTAs) aren’t meant to be rocket science, but for many small business owners, they can seem that way. While almost everyone knows a great landing page needs a solid, clear, and inviting CTA, too few businesses make use of a CTA in the rest of their content. So, refine your content throughout your site. Not only should it be valuable, but it should also include a call to action so that your customers and potential customers have a reason — and an easy, clear path — to do business with you.
4. Go Mobile
While it may be a bit of an investment depending on the current state of your company website, if you haven’t optimized your web presence for mobile use, you’re missing out on business. Regardless of how good the rest of your marketing efforts are, as people increasingly access the internet via smartphones and tablets, they’re looking for sites and apps that cater to their devices. Don’t miss out on this demographic that’s only going to get bigger with each passing day. Make optimizing for mobile an immediate priority, and your sales will show it.
5. Collect Emails
It’s hard to believe, but email has already been around for 25 years. Of course, in the brave, new technological world we find ourselves in, that amount of time is the Digital Age’s equivalent of when dinosaurs roamed the earth. Still, email’s staying power is hard to deny, and since it still boasts an impressive conversion rate — and it’s free — it needs to form a substantial part of your marketing campaigns. Collect email addresses everywhere you can, and be sure to always send content to those email addresses that’s worth opening.
6. Better SEO
Ending up in the number-one spot on Google isn’t just a money game. If you focus on the niche market for which your business is best-suited and get specific with long-tail keywords, you can land near the top of the pile every time someone comes looking for a product or service like yours. Seek out a good SEO tool, and go through the steps of making sure your site is fully optimized for search. All it takes is a little bit of legwork.
7. Google+
If you haven’t already squeezed every last ounce of visibility out of your Google+ profile, get to it as soon as you finish this paragraph. Created to benefit the local searches that drive a lot of search engine results, it can actually boost your site and company even when searches aren’t local. Treat it like you would another company website by uploading fresh content, images, and videos on a regular basis, too. Google — because it owns Google+ — will reward you.
You don’t have to have a multi-million dollar marketing budget to successfully market your small business. With these seven hacks, you can generate new leads and more revenue within the budget you already have.
7 Marketing Hacks For Your Small Business
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