For anybody running a small business they will know that you have to be a person who is able to wear many hats and fulfil many duties. Frequently small businesses will run on a very shoestring budget especially in the early days and they will spend a fair bit of time trying to reduce costs thus meaning they will generally have to carry out many exercises ourselves from accountancy to marketing.
Small business marketing is an important key to success if we know best how to use our time and what financial resources we have to throw at it. We now certainly have a wide selection of marketing channels that we can use from leafleting to Facebook ads, there is no shortage of ways we can communicate our businesses to potential new clients, though of course we will also know that we will usually have to compete against many competitors!
So how can we try and shine through the already congested marketing channels and get people to see our content / marketing campaigns?
Become an influencer: I have myself created several brands online to include selling some and this has always been down to me focusing on becoming an influencer within a set business sector. The best way to showcase you are a person that merits being followed, read, emailed, spoken to, watched etc is by sharing educational, engaging and entertaining content pertaining to one set topic that is ideally wrapped around the business service / products you are offering. The likes of having a blog, content writing, explainer videos, surveys photos and more will help increase you being found on line when people search for key words relating to your business sector. As an example, if you are selling your own brand chocolate then think about sharing content on pairing then with wines, videos on how to cook with them, writing content on how the cocoa beans are harvested and by whom, the history of chocolate, surveys on peoples preferred chocolate flavours etc.
Master one Social Media platform: Social media is a wonderful tool for marketing and best of all it is free! Some massive platforms are out there for us to simply register with an email address and be ready to start using straight away with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube and Instagram being some of the most popular. These social media platforms are designed to focus on styles of sharing content such as Youtube for videos and Instagram mainly for images so it is a good thing to consider initially what your type of marketing you are keen to promote is videos, images, text, info-graphics as this can determine which platform will be most suited to you.
Once you have your style of marketing in mind you can decide upon the platform you should focus on. Then it is all about grabbing the best username for your business, correctly completing your profile to include images, descriptions, links. From there it is all about engaging with others on that platform and growing your community of followers and sharing regular and relevant content.
Enter local / industry awards: Some will say awards are brilliant and other will say it is a load of nonsense and only an opportunity for those organising the awards to make money. For myself, owner of several businesses online, I have always been in favour initially of getting involved with awards both on a local basis and also those that are themed on the business I am in. These awards are mostly free to enter and will offer an awards evening that enable you to both network and also the potential to grab great positive PR. Yes you will start to, like myself, build up a shelf somewhere in the office full of certificates and awards then you will one day decide that enough is enough and you have played that scene well that you can now safely say you are a multi award winning business and leave the awards to other businesses under you. And remember to share your successes in your next email drip campaign.