Marketing for Micro business and Small business
Taking the time to understand the foundations of marketing and lead generation can be daunting for the typical small business store. An entrepreneur wants to focus on their customers and their product, their profits and their expenses, so where will they find time to learn the Facebook ads manager or keyword analysis? At times it can feel like a lost cause, quickly realizing it requires a significant amount of technical understanding, graphic design, copywriting, and more.
We're here to tell you that you can have a significant increase in your marketing effectiveness with some simple steps and understanding. While understanding SEO, advertising, and complex email automations can certainly be useful, it can help to make some simple improvements now while you figure those things out over time.
Why should a micro business care about marketing best practices?
The internet has enabled buyers to find you in an instant. This means they can find your competitors just as quickly. Without a well presented brand, a potential customer could make the decision not to buy in an instant, and they can find a list of your competitors to choose from in even less time. This means if your brand isn't presentable and comprehensive, the likelihood that your target audience will go with a different option is as high as its ever been.
Beyond this, the odds of getting new organic clients is low without a proper marketing framework. Without a targetable audience of buyers, it is difficult to expose your brand and products in a way that will motivate people to buy. Without a basic content strategy, it's difficult to be found on search engines.
Last, without hosted content on your site, it will be difficult to drive traffic for reasons other than to purchase. If people only go to your website to purchase products, it can no longer be used as a marketing tool, only a point-of-sale. You want your website to be a marketing tool, where people come for various reasons like to learn, to be entertained, to receive rewards, etc. From there, you can funnel through the buyers to your products and services.
What can you do right now to improve your marketing effectiveness?
Theres a lot of things any business owner can do to start marketing more effectively. If you want a more comprehensive marketing solution, I'll shameless plug our company, 10x Network. Anyways, on to the list...
1. Find a targetable audience of potential buyers
Many businesses we work with know what type of person wants their products. But where they lack is how to target them. Just because you know what types of problems your products and services solve doesn't mean you have a way to target people with that problem. A better strategy is to craft your target audience and content strategy around the best ways to target them. A company which sells tractors is most likely looking to target people who need a new tractor... However, how do you know if someone needs a new tractor? How do you target those people? Sure, there are some ways, but none too reliable. The company may find it a better strategy to find people who own farms and are in high income brackets, then target them with content convincing them to buy a new tractor. This is a great example of crafting your entire marketing strategy around a targetable audience, rather than finding ways to target the audience you have in your head.
Another shameless plug, 10x Network will help you with this part for FREE. Just book a call with us here and we'll spend an hour helping you do it.
2. Develop a keyword strategy
Many people are led to believe developing a keyword strategy involves a bunch of technical know-how, but it isn't true. You don't need to know all the analytics around keywords to use them because you know your market. You just have to be clever.
Let's use an online jewelry store as an example. If people look up "wedding rings," the results are obviously going to be the biggest online jewelry stores in the country. But a jeweler knows the nitty gritty of the jewelry business. They know their audience is centered around weddings, and want to target people who need wedding bands. So they use a more specific keyword strategy targeting the same audience, like "bridesmaid gifts." Might still not be specific enough. You're an online store though right? Which means you can ship anywhere anyways. How about "bridesmaid gifts in Seattle." Not in Seattle? Doesn't matter, you're an online store. You're just using the geolocation as a way to target a smaller audience.
This works on social media as well as search engines. A core aspect of social media as sharing, and significant portion of people's followers have the same geolocation as themselves. So if you target people with content in Seattle, naturally a lot of the people who see the content they share will also be in Seattle.
3. Use social media and SEO simultaneously
When people see something they like on social media, they often google it to learn more about it, or go to Amazon to see how much it costs. Use this to your advantage by using the exact same wording in both web content and social media content. People will see your post and google the thing you say. If you're specific enough, your link should be the first to pop up.
If you're talking about how great vegan subscription boxes for pets are, you absolutely need a page on your website talking about how great vegan subscription boxes for pets are. That should literally be the title of the page. Not only will people google similar phrases, but I'll give you a little insight on tech platforms that you probably already knew. They share data. So if people see a post on how great vegan subscription boxes for pets are on instagram, Google will naturally use that information to recommend them something similar. AKA your beautifully written article on the exact same topic. Get clever with your keywords, talk about them in content, then drive them to the website with the same keywords. It's like magic but real.
Interested in learning more about how to improve your marketing capabilities? Book a FREE 1 hour call with us where we'll give you real recommendations catered to your business on how to target your audience.