5 Marketing Tips For Small Businesses

• Date: 16 July 2019
• reading time: 5 Minutes
• Blogger: Francisca Zimmermann
• E-mail: [email protected]

Every business starts small. Most entrepreneurs and business owners have big ideas but start with small resources. Fitting in a marketing budget and time to actually follow through with marketing plans can be challenging.

The same often goes for more experienced owners or small business. If you are running a company by yourself (or with a few coworkers), you most probably can't spend your full work week on just marketing work.

In this blog, we will give a few tips for new or small business owners to keep in mind while working on a marketing strategy.

Tell your story

People love genuineness. While managing social media accounts and implementing marketing strategies for many years, we noticed that sharing a story or a company has the best effects. And luckily, this is not hard at all.

Are you starting up your business? Then it may be a great idea to document all the important steps of the first stages of your business. Milestones like signing the registration of your company, producing the first product or service or making the first sale are great examples or used to share your company's story with the world.

And interestingly, even doubts or mistakes can be worth a share. With limits or course, you want to show your business in a positive light. Think of for instance 'Great news! We have improved our packaging. We figured out the previous packaging was bad for the environment. We feel awful about that, but we created a beautiful 100% recyclable packaging now '.

Experiences like these can be shared on social media, in a newsletter or website or blog.

The more you share what is going on in your company, the more connected people will feel about you and your product.

Show yourself

Our next tip is closely linked to the first one. Besides being transparent about the story of your company, showing the person behind the company creates sympathy among followers and potential customers.

If you are active on social media, make sure to show a picture of yourself once in a while. Pictures of you at your workplace, you on a business trip, or you on any other child or business-related activity can work great.

Showing yourself can be done in many different ways. You can get as creative as you like here. Think of Instagram stories, videos on YouTube, webinars, Instagram or Facebook live sessions, or behind the scenes pictures on social media and/or on your website.

Be consistent

A lot of small business owners tend to have their marketing moments. Moments where the motivation is there, time is made, and then after a while, other priorities take over again. This is completely normal. No one can focus on a full 100% on everything, all the time.

However, certain marketing efforts need 100% attention to work. Think of, for instance, social media. To really grow a social media account, you need to post regularly. Followers need to get to know you. They need to know what to expect from you, and they need to be interested in seeing more of what you share. If you share a lot of content for a few weeks and stop sharing for a month after that, followers won't get to know you. They will most likely not see a reason to follow 'that inactive account' and will most likely unfollow you again.

It is therefore essential to decide, before starting to implement your strategy, how much time you can assign to your marketing work. Remember that the goal of your marketing campaign is getting known. If your efforts are going to be irregular and people might forget about you in between your posts, shares, newsletters or updates, these efforts won't take you anywhere. If you can't keep up with consistency, simply don't do it.

Focus

Our next tip follows up on the last one. We can't be everywhere at the same time. It's simply not possible to use every possible social media channel, send newsletters, create videos, webinars and whatever else you can think of.

In order to do it right, you need to make choices. And the more limited you are in resources and manpower, the more you need to limit your focus. Many business owners have the feeling that they have everything to do, which results in them doing everything half. This is a shame since messy work and inconsistent social media - or community management can actually have a negative impact on a business. Doing too much can result in mistakes, or messy looking work, which can push people away from your business.

We suggest that before starting to implement a marketing strategy, you carefully calculate how much time and money you are going to spend on marketing. This will keep you focused and consistent.

Collaborate

Our last tip can, in our opinion, save you a lot of time and effort. Just like you, there are many more small business owners who are trying to market their business. Most probably, all of them have some following on social media and a network of (potential customers). By collaborating with them, you can share your network with them and use theirs too. This can mean an easy and free extension of brand awareness.

How to do this? There are many different ways in which you can choose to collaborate with others. Think of, for instance, a contest on social media. By collaborating with one or two other companies, you can ask followers to follow you and the two other accounts to be able to participate in a contest. If the other accounts do the same, this can mean a large growth in your following. Of course, you need to make sure that the businesses you collaborate with have a target market similar to yours.

Other great ways of collaborating are guest posts on each other's website (mostly great for SEO purposes) or just simple shout outs on each other's business on social media.

Need help?

Are you a small business owner looking for help marketing your product or service? We would love to help you out. We are specialized in social media marketing, social media advertising, and online sales funnels. Are you interested in working with us? Feel free to contact us for a FREE strategy call, so we can discuss what we can do for you.

If you are interested in learning more about social media management and digital marketing, take a look at our Social Media Gids Community. Here you can join the conversation with all our social media students and experts and learn from the high-class training material we have available for you. What about a Social Marketing class or a class on Social Selling to help you get started?

Want to post a comment? Join the conversation in our community.

• Blogger: Francisca Zimmermann
• E-mail: [email protected]
• Social media manager & content creator at Social Media Gids
• Francisca Zimmermann is a social media expert with a background in research and a love for learning new things. She travels the world looking for beautiful places and interesting cultures, while she dives into the world of her clients to be able to write about them and their interests as a real 'insider'.
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