Marketing Advice You’ll Want for Your Small Business 18 Jul 2018

When you’re running a small business, it seems like everyone wants to give you advice. From the teller at the bank to your mom and dad. But, some of this advice will be questionable at best or will even hurt your business. It can be overwhelming to figure out what you need to do when studies and articles make you feel like you’re doing everything wrong. Especially when it comes to how you should market your business.

To help you overcome your marketing woes, this article will give you the seven pieces of advice designed to help your small business grow for the rest of the year.

1. Find out What Your Audience Needs from You

You know that consumer habits have changed rapidly in the last few decades, but has your business changed with them? With buying habits changing, you have to make sure your company’s marketing is up to date.

Creating buyer personas or updating the ones you already have is a great way to understand how to keep your marketing relevant and your business strategy on track. For example, if you’ve recently expanded the services you offer, have you updated your buyer personas for those services?

The sales funnel is important when you’re making or updating buyer personas. The sales funnel is the journey your potential customers take on the way to a purchase. Taking funnel position into account will help you decide what type of content to create for specific personas and will help you lead them through the buyer’s journey until they become your clients.

2. Create Content That Is Worthwhile to Your Buyer Personas

Once you’ve figured out who your audience is and what they want from you, you can now create content that interests them. Your content should first and foremost be helpful to your audience. When your customers find real value in your content, they’ll likely continue visiting your site and move further down the buyer’s journey closer to becoming a customer.

Instead of focusing on what you want them to know, focus on what they want to know and build on it. You should also make your content entertaining for your personas so they will continue reading your content and get the most benefit from it.

3. Add Visual Elements to Help Your Personas Learn

With digital content becoming a mainstream way of learning and acquiring information, people expect more from educational content than a solid block of text. In fact, having only a solid block of text may intimidate someone who is looking to answer a simple question. Using visual elements in all of your content will make the content look manageable and help people to understand the topic.

You can add visual aspects to your content with an image that connects to or illustrates a topic, an infographic, or a short video that relates to the content. It will keep people interested in the material and more likely to read to the end of the content piece.

You can also post videos on Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook Live to promote your business. These videos will not only boost your business, but they will also make you and your employees seem more approachable and up to date.

4. Use Social Media Wisely

As new algorithms and federal laws continue to regulate social media, it can be hard to gain customers from merely posting content. Many companies are now using paid advertising to get their content to as many people as possible.

When you couple social media ads and great content, you can gain new readers and leads quickly. This is extremely helpful for companies who want to increase their business from social media.

5. Optimize Your Email List

To optimize your email list for marketing campaigns, pay attention to every aspect of your email. For instance, your email’s content may be fantastic, but if people can’t figure out who sent it, they aren’t going to read it.

Make sure your emails come from a recognizable source and that people can easily see what the main message is. Personalizing your emails is a great way to show your email list that you care about them individually. People often check their emails on their phone or tablet, so make sure your emails are easy to read on a mobile device. Here is a list of 14 email examples you should try to emulate in your next campaign.

6. Use Marketing Automation for Repetitive Tasks

Marketing automation can help save time and money by taking care of repetitive marketing tasks. For example, marketing automation can manage your email marketing campaigns so that you can focus on leads you get from your email list.

You may be wary about using an automated system for marketing because it feels impersonal. Customizing the software to meet your needs is a great way to remove this feeling. Automation isn’t just auto replies and robotic responses. It can also help your team do things faster. For example, tools like HubSpot and MailChimp not only help automate emails, but they also have tools to keep your sales team on track with follow-ups to ensure leads don’t run cold. Other tools like Shopify help you set up an e-commerce store with virtually no experience.

7. Clean Your Data Regularly

You wouldn’t decide what car to buy based on a consumer report from ten years ago, would you? So why are you basing your company’s decisions on old data?

Cleaning your data will get rid of all the inaccurate and corrupt data that can compromise your business decisions. Regularly cleaning your data will keep your marketing strategy current and help you make decisions based on new, reliable information.

Help to Grow Your Business

In this article, we’ve covered how to grow your business by updating your buyer personas, optimizing your email list, and cleaning your data regularly. After you grow your business though, you may need to make some new hires.

Make the hiring process a breeze by downloading our free 11-step hiring checklist. From learning how to create a job description to ensuring your business is legally compliant, this ebook will guide you through the entire hiring process.