5 Lessons from Top Marketers That Work for Small Businesses
Graham Richardson
You don’t always have to come up with a ground-breaking new marketing strategy to improve your business results. It can be rewarding to look at the efforts of bigger companies and experienced marketers and translate their learnings into your small business. Get inspired by the five tips below from experienced marketers and see how you can implement them in your business.
1. Invest in Paid Digital Advertising
“Your business is picking up and you now have a steady income and some consistent repeat clients, but your reach is small. This is where Google AdWords, Bing Ads, or Facebook ads can help. These platforms can offer targeting that allows you to reach new customers through keywords. Set a monthly budget for investing in certain keywords, and remember to start small. A lot of business owners will invest too much up front, and not yield the results and completely throw away the idea of online advertising. Set a goal for what you want your marketing to drive, then set a realistic budget to achieve that goal.”
Brittni Swenson, Chief Marketing Officer
2. Answer the Questions of Your Users as an Expert in your Industry
“We receive more than 50 queries per week on different aspects of our service, but the vast majority are general questions, where the answer will not only help that specific user, but hundreds or thousands of people who have the same problem.
That is why we dedicate time and effort to give the right answer. And the responses to these questions will also be published on our website as if it were a blog post on our blog. Google or any other search engine indexes this content and new potential customers can Google find our answer.
As the answer was valuable, with very useful information, these new potential customers take your brand as a reference and begin to see (eventually buy) your products. This mechanism of transforming the traditional questions and answers (FAQ) section into a blog, helped us to grow 34.7% in content marketing, which today represents revenue of USD 3.4M per year.”
Cristian Rennella, VP of Marketing & CoFounder
3. Use thought leadership to build your brand
“Thought leadership is a great way to build your brand, increase visibility more broadly, raise your profile and attract more customers. Activities like speaking at a conference, writing articles, building the following on social media, all contribute increasing awareness with potential customers and building credibility with a larger community.
Before trying to start your own blog or newsletter, try contributing regularly to existing, well trafficked blogs in your industry or newsletters of like minded organisations reaching the same target audience as you.
Make sure you put your URL or contact info on it so they can find you and follow up. When your articles or talks become available online, make sure to send them out via social media to all your friends, followers and contacts.
Start small and build as you go. I started speaking at local events and then submitted proposals to speak at industry conferences and trade shows nationally and eventually global events too. Same advice goes for writing. Start with small publications then move up the food chain to reach bigger audiences.”
Paige Arnof-Fenn, Founder & CEO Mavens & Moguls
4. Invest in Your Own Education
Things are constantly changing, and you need to evolve too. Don’t stay the same.
“Continuous learning helps you to open your mind to new and possibly better ways of doing things that can touch all areas of your business from marketing and sales to employee management, and you may be able to offer your customers more cutting edge solutions.”
Rahul Alim, CEO
5. Think Strategically Before Going Tactical.
“Most firms, when they market their business will send a few emails, put an ad in the yellow pages, hand out flyers, things like that. This is tactical marketing.
Strategic, is determining your true target market and ideal client, figuring out the problem that they have but don’t want, and providing a solution they want but don’t have. Then creating messaging around that and putting that message where they will see it.”
Walter Wise, Marketing Strategist & Strategic Business Coach
This blog was written as a guest blog post by Ellen de Beul, Content Marketer at PieSync.com
Let us know your top marketing tips in the comments below or share your thoughts and feedback with us on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn
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