As a small business owner or solo entrepreneur, sourcing new customers and clients is far from easy. You may find yourself facing an over saturated market with lots of competition, or simply are struggling to get your name out there. Whatever the issue, finding new business should always be your priority.
It can seem daunting at first, but successfully marketing your business is the best way of bringing in new customers and clients and, ultimately, the best way of making a profit and growing your business.
When all your focus and energy is on the day to day running your business, how do you use marketing strategies to entice in new customers? A lack of time is nothing unusual with small businesses, and knowing where to begin can be overwhelming. Here, to help you, we have put together a few of what we think are the best marketing strategies for time-poor entrepreneurs and small business owners, all of which will have the new clients rolling in no time.
- Build An Email List And Regularly Email Your Subscribers
It can take some time to start building up an email list, but having a group of people who you know are already invested and interested in your business and directly communicating with them is incredibly beneficial. You can send out weekly emails, with a roundup of news, announce exciting and new offers or want to use it as a way of keeping in touch with loyal customers; email marketing is a superb way of ensuring repeat business.
There are various ways to begin building up your email list. You may offer in-store or online discounts for those who subscribe, run a competition which involves them signing up to your mailing list or offering freebies. You will need to give them some incentive to do it and make sure you have all the appropriate permissions when it comes to handling their data. If you are based in the EU, you don’t want to find yourself falling foul of the GDPR guidelines.
Most email automation software, such as MailChimp, allow you to see who has opened emails and what they are clicking, which gives you some valuable insight and data to tailor future emails to customer preferences. If you provide your customers with what they want, they will come flocking!
2. Formulate A Strong Social Media Marketing Strategy
Digital marketing is probably the most prominent form of marketing these days, with social media a front runner for the most popular, and more straightforward and budget-friendly, way of targeting potential customers. However, if you have never used it for business purposes before, it can be quite challenging to get your head around. There are plenty of great tutorials online to help you get set up if you are not already active on them. If you are short on time, the first thing that you need to do is consider who your target audience is and which platform they are most likely to use. If you are looking for younger people, Facebook, Twitter and possibly Instagram are your best bets. If it is a more professional audience that you are after, LinkedIn may be the best place to start. Once you have this sorted, you need to schedule regular and engaging content and interact with followers. Try and remember the 80/20 rule – 80% of your content should be from elsewhere – industry news and the like, and just 20% should be your content. It sounds counter-productive, but if you are constantly forcing your business down peoples throats, they will soon disengage.
3. Consider Having Products or Promotional Merchandise Made
Almost everyone loves a freebie – pens, post-it notes, mugs and key rings are always popular, and they are a fun and effective way of getting your name out there. If you visit a trade show or exhibition, have plenty of these ready to hand out to passers-by – the perfect promotional gimmick could be the difference between sticking in someone’s mind and not.
4. Start a Blog
You no doubt have a website, so make the most of it and add a blog to it. Use this blog to share information, tips, industry news and expert opinions. It can be quite time consuming to do, but it is easy enough and relatively inexpensive to hire a freelance content writer to produce regular content for you. Google ranks websites with good engagement highly, as do Moz, who give blogs a DA rating. DA stands for domain authority and is as it says – how authoritative your domain is. The higher you are in Google and on Moz, the more likely you are to attract traffic to your website, which will hopefully translate to sales. A blog is an excellent way of doing this, as long as it is interesting, engaging and regularly updated.
5. Consider Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.
Think about Google and all of those adverts that you see when you visit websites. They are all Pay Per Click adverts and are directly targeted at you through the use of cookies and your internet browsing history. In this model of advertising, you only pay, usually a very small amount, when someone clicks on your advert. These are a quick and low effort way of directing traffic to your website, and you can hone in on your chosen demographic.
6. Good Old Fashioned Direct Marketing
We have covered digital marketing techniques, but there is a lot to be said for the good old fashioned ways. Leaflet drops, billboards and posters are all still superb ways of catching attention, particularly if you are a local small business. You could also consider sponsoring local community events and schemes – advertising at football grounds or on a youth football strip, or see if your local council allows you to ‘sponsor’ a roundabout, where you can put up signs.
By putting in a little bit of time and effort to your marketing strategy, you will see massive rewards. Try a few out and see those clients come rolling in.
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