#Collaborative post
Are you one of the many businesses that doesn’t have a marketing plan for the coming year? You are – unfortunately – not alone. Having a marketing plan is not just an essential for your small business to be successful, but it’s essential if you want to figure out ways that your small business can get noticed.
Small businesses crop up all the time, and you want your business to be the one that stands out among the rest. Without a marketing plan, this is going to be much harder than you think. There are marketing ideas out there that can help your brand to grow of course from search engine optimization both on page SEO and off page SEO. There is content like blogging and vlogging and website link building that you can get involved in too. These are not the only marketing ideas out there, so we’ve put together a list of creative marketing ideas that are going to get your small business noticed in the right way, by the right people.
One of the very first things that you should have done when you started your business was develop a marketing plan and create marketing objectives. These objectives and goals are going to guide the rest of the plan, and they will help you to understand exactly what the end game should be. Of course, your business does not have an end game, which means that your marketing plan is always going to be evolving. You have to start by identifying the target market of yours. And this is the target market is whoever you think would be interested in your service or your product. As you build your brand you need to start thinking of your marketing plan that includes colour themes, logos and branding. If you don’t know where to start, why not look into the best logo maker to help get started, once you find a design you love you can build from there.
Once you’ve broken your target market down into the right categories, you can then create a campaign, whether it’s a marketing template or a direct mail marketing strategy, that will be beneficial for your business. Here are some ideas that will help you to get your small business noticed.
- Leverage social media. If you are not using social media for your business right now, then you’re already behind. Social media is one of the easiest ways that you can connect with your customers and drive traffic to your website at the same time. Most people across the globe use some kind of social media, whether that’s Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn, or a combination of all of the above. If you decide to open multiple social media pages, you need to be able to commit to updating those social media pages so that your customers who are following you on each one are always kept up to date. When you choose to use social media, you create content that increases the awareness of your brand. This will then lead to boosted sales and it’s a great way to improve your brand image.
- Lean into content marketing. We already mentioned blogging and videos and webinars, but there is so much more that you can do. Unfortunately, everybody seems to be podcasting right now, but podcasts are a great idea for your business if you have a specific niche that you’d like to talk about. The reason content marketing is vital for your strategy is because it helps to establish yourself as a thought leader. It’s also a great way to develop relationships with your customers and potential future clients. So making sure that you are using content marketing to help can help to answer questions from your audience. This in turn, builds trust.
- Don’t forget the locals. When you are trying to get your business noticed, you need to make sure that you are advertising locally. It’s nice to hit a global audience, but local advertising is going to bring in your local community, which is so important if you want to impress everybody around you. Consider taking out adverts in the local newspapers or using Geo targeted social media. This will then help you to reach a smaller audience.
- Start building up an email list. If you want your customers to notice your business, then you need to make sure that you are inserting yourself in the right way. If they’ve already signed up to a business newsletter or they’ve given you an email address, then building an email list is going to help to get your business the customers that it needs. This only works if it’s done consistently, however, so make sure that you are pushing people to your website and adding links to sign up sheets. No matter where you happen to display what your business is doing, adding sign up options can help. If you want to be fancy, create a QR code and add it to all of your advertising materials so that if it catches anybody’s eye, they can scan the QR code and sign up.
- Make sure that you are using the referrals that you are given. A loyal customer base will always use word of mouth to refer their friends and family to what your website and business can do. It’s so much easier to use referrals when you have a good system to reach more customers, and that’s one of the biggest reasons it’s important to develop great relationships with your customers. If your customers are happy with the products of the service that you are providing, then they will naturally spread the word. And word of mouth is still a powerful marketing tool that you can lean on.
- Don’t skip the trade shows. When was the last time you went to an exhibition or a trade show? If you can’t think of it, it’s time to get signing up. It’s a unique way to make your company much more visible in the local area, and it’s going to help you to display your products and your service, and encourage potential customers to take better action. Perhaps it will push people to follow your business on social media.Community events and trade shows are great options if you want to have local business come on board. Keep the show vibrant and memorable by making your stand visually attractive to those passing by, use your business cards to ensure you are not forgotten about and even consider putting things such as a branded neon sign up, to capture their attention.
- Keep it personal. Developing personal relationships with your customers is actually a very good idea. You want to improve and increase brand loyalty and creating genuine connections for this will help your customers to feel appreciated and recognized. You can do this with thank you notes and making sure that your emails are personal to customers, not just saying dear customer when you send it.
- Network in person as much as possible. Businesses are all about building relationships. Networking in person is a good way to help your business stand out and be memorable. Whether you are handing out doughnuts with a business card or you are simply striking up conversation with like minded people in your industry, you can network in person and build connections that way. Sometimes in business it’s about who you know, not what you know, and this can be very helpful.
Hire somebody to take over your marketing for you. A good way to ensure that your small business gets noticed is to not handle the marketing yourself. Whether you outsource somewhere else or you hire an in-house marketing manager, you can ensure that your business is noticed purely because you are hiring an expert who knows what they’re doing. The experts in marketing know exactly the best practice to offer your results for your business. And when you work with the right agency, they’ll be able to find ways to help you to shine and grow into new customer bases.