7 proven marketing strategies that work for small-medium sized businesses

These strategies are aimed at small to medium sized businesses (SMBs). Here are 7 low cost marketing strategies which will help push your brand while you save.

1. Setting a goal and budget

To correctly market your business, you need to set a goal. What is the vision and endgame for your business? Would you like people to become more aware of your brand? Do you want to strengthen your hold on the local market? Are you looking to expand your company’s reach?

All of these are valid goals. But as you set your goals, you need to consider your budget. It must be practical and in sync with what your goals are.

Your goals probably won’t be relegated to just one or two; it’s likely you’ll have several. Prioritise them and then you can set your sights on the long-term goals that you consider to be the most important.

2. Maximise Google’s local offerings

Google can certainly offer a lot for small-medium sized businesses. Having an online presence is a big boost to any SMB, which in most cases is a local business. If comparing a business found online to one that isn’t, the one online will grow 40% faster.

A Google My Business account can be a powerful tool. You can take charge of the information about your business, including the contact details, website and hours of operation.

It’s also the best place to combine all of your Google platforms: Google reviews, Google Maps profile, etc. Your business becomes more credible and visible to consumers when having a Google My Business account.

3. Choose the top social media channels to focus on

You might have read somewhere that having an account across all social media channels is the way to go. However, we believe in quality over quantity. Choosing just 1-3 social media channels to focus on is wiser than trying to keep up with them all.

Start by thinking about your target customers, and which platforms they are situated on. For us, our target customers are business owners, therefore we are more active on LinkedIn than other platforms. But for something completely different like a bridal business, their target customers will be women, who are likely to spend their time on Facebook and Instagram.

Also analyse your overall presence on social media. Which channels feature the highest number of engagements?

4. Email marketing

Email marketing is another brilliant SMB marketing strategy, to help in establishing a connection with your target audience. Or even beyond that, email marketing is best used to build loyalty.

Instead of just sending out sales promotions, create newsletters too with news and advice, to keep your audience subscribed. Just make sure your campaigns are mobile-friendly, and test out different subject lines, times of day/week, creative templates, and more.

5. Blogging

To keep your website high in search results, Google likes you to keep your website updated. An excellent way of doing this is regularly adding blog posts to your site. If you fill your blog with useful industry information, it also shows your audience that you’re in-the-know. Win-win!

6. SEO

SEO (search engine optimisation) can be a great asset to your SMB marketing strategy. It helps your website rank higher on Google when people search certain words – keywords. When someone searches something on Google that’s relevant to your product or service, you want your website to pop up! So ensure those words or phrases are incorporated throughout your website.

7. Encourage reviews

Getting feedback is a very effective SMB marketing strategy. After a customer buys your product or service, always ask for feedback.

A great way to get reviews is by creating a survey. It’s more encouraging for someone to fill in a survey with quick (but some open-ended) questions, rather than creating their own testimonial for you from scratch. SurveyMonkey is a simple and free tool to use to create your own surveys. Just make sure you ask for permission to use their survey answers as a review/testimonial!

If you’d like further advice or assistance in the above from the real experts, please get in touch. We offer a range of different services from reviewing your current marketing efforts in detail, putting together marketing strategies for your business, to implementing the work ourselves.