Once you have a steady influx of loyal customers and revenue coming for your small business, the next natural step is to continue its growth.
Succeeding in business is all about using the appropriate marketing strategies to the right audience with the same interests. There's no single right way to do it, but it's essential to review and revise your marketing strategies to make sure they're working at optimum performance to improve your business.
The marketing strategies you choose matter; they're responsible for how content is produced and delivered to potential customers.
Here are four marketing strategies you should use to grow and scale your small business.
1. Social media
Having a few social media channels for your business is a must. It's a direct line of communication between consumer and company, and bridges the gap between them.
According to a Sprout Social survey, 70 percent of people are more likely to use a brand's product or service if the company reaches out to customers on social media. Being active on your business's social media accounts shows sincerity to connect with consumers, help them with their problems and answer their questions.
The social media platform you use should be the same platform popular with your target audience. It's better to actively use one or two channels and gain a steady flow of traffic rather than have five or six that lack activity and exist for no reason.
2. Content marketing
Content marketing is content you create and distribute that's valuable, relevant to your audience, and drives customers to convert. This doesn't mean only blog posts. It could be video, podcasts, e-books, newsletters, infographics and more. There are endless mediums you can use to implement content marketing into your strategy to grow your business.
Though content marketing doesn't usually bring quick results, that doesn't mean you should ignore it. It's essential if you want to rank high in SERPs. Creating useful, data-driven content that gets shared and interacted with steadily brings organic traffic to your site and builds a loyal customer base for your business. Google picks up on these organic leads and favors your content in return.
3. Advertising
Implementing advertising into your marketing strategy works if you already know your designated target and fleshed out a couple buyer personas. The magic is in your audience; the more information you have on them, the better your results will be.
Consider this about your audience when fleshing out your buyer personas:
Their demographics Where they hang out online Their interests and hobbies Their location How they search for products and services similar to yours Facebook Ads
According to Statista, 6 million active businesses use Facebook ads to promote their products and services. Of course, you want to make sure your audience uses Facebook enough that your ads popping up on their newsfeeds becomes a relevant strategy to convert them. With more than 2 billion active monthly users, however, you shouldn't have a problem finding an audience.
The great thing about Facebook ads is they allow you to use advanced targeting to include or exclude specific locations, ages, interests, purchase behaviors, device usage and more. Audience Insights gives you specific, statistical data about who views and clicks on your ads so that you can tailor your content to their needs.
By using ads to target the right people, your business will drive more traffic, bring consumers further down the funnel, and bring in conversions.
4. Email marketing
According to eMarketer, 80 percent of professionals say email marketing is the best tool for customer retention. It's an easy and simple way to communicate with potential customers and subscribers so they're always in the loop about your business. Make sure your emails are always optimized for mobile since 46 percent of emails are opened on a mobile device.
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Email marketing is great for a number of reasons. It's cost-effective; most software out there gives you the first thousand subscribers for free. It can reach anyone in the world at the click of a button. It also has the ability to be automated for organization and time management and requires very little setup.
Statista found that there are more than 280 billion emails sent and received every single day. It'd be a waste not to take advantage of email marketing's huge user base when trying to grow your business.
What works best for you?
When it comes down to it, there are so many different ways you could go about your marketing strategy. You have to decide which methods best suit your business and the people it caters to. Don't be afraid to test different approaches so that you can figure out what grows your business and makes it even more successful.