The field of content marketing can seem daunting to small businesses, and it's no surprise. Content requires an impressive amount of investment, labor and time. Even for an owner of a large company, it can cost a fortune. Therefore, small businesses often bypass content marketing, preferring more traditional ways of promoting them.
However, one should not reject such a promising direction as content marketing, having on hand even a modest budget. Small business entrepreneurs can take advantage of content promotion, as hundreds of small companies around the world have done.
The secret of successful marketing lies in customer knowledge. The effectiveness of a marketing strategy depends on knowing the topics, formats and channels preferred by your potential customers. In fact, you do not need a large budget or a large team to build successful content marketing, you need the right tactics in the first place.
Internet marketing Strategies for small businesses
1: contact customers via text messages
If you work in an industry that involves meetings, beta tests or other events, SMS can be a great tool for you. However, you need to be able to use this tool. Messages should be sent at a suitable time, when people can read it immediately without losing your letter in bulk (for example, a good time before lunch). You should also distribute your short number from which you are sending messages through marketing materials. Finally, the SMS itself should be about 160 characters long.
2: Use Paid advertising
In addition to the context advertising already mentioned, there is still a traditional method of advertising on other sites. Banner advertising on quality sites and blogs in your market niche that offer advertising space, is able to attract a fairly large number of new customers.
The biggest mistake that people make when it comes to buying advertising on other websites is the lack of measuring the return on investment. In other words, you need to know what users are interested in when they click on your ads, how much time they will spend on your website, which pages they will visit, what actions they will take and how many of them will make a purchase from you (convert your investment into income). When you have all this information, you can decide whether or not to continue displaying your ads on the ad site.
3: Do not be afraid to reuse content
In order to maximize the return on your investment in content, you can not let it go to waste. A blog post can be turned into a video, a book into a series of podcasts, and fragments of these materials will find their place in social media. The secret to the diversity of channels is the distribution of content. Of course, if you want to diversify your marketing strategy, you will have to take into account the specifics of this or that platform, which will have a key impact on the format of presentation of even "related" material. I think it is obvious that the Instagram format is not similar to YouTube, and Telegram - to Twitter.
4: Invest in video marketing
A good solution for your business would be to wisely invest in video marketing. Reasonable primarily because the video format initially involves a large investment compared to, for example, with the text distribution or creation of a banner. The main thing here is to determine the marketing strategy and send the resulting material through the most effective distribution channels. Content creation work can be entrusted to freelancers or an agency. This way you can experiment with the video format, preventing unnecessary spending.
5: SEO is all ours
Optimization for search engines is the key to hugely improving the efficiency of your marketing efforts.
As a first step, explore how to use keywords more effectively. You will find several SEO tools that are worth using every day:
SEMrush
Moz
HubSpot
Google Analytics
Monitor Backlinks
First of all, these tools will help you consistently increase "organic" traffic, or the influx of live users (read, potential customers), to a resource.
6: Use email at the most.
Email is still an excellent marketing tool. You can achieve the greatest efficiency from this direction if you use the following tactics:
Segment your list
Gather feedback.
Use Sequence and Work Subsection Builder Tools
Configure automatic answers
Keep your message list clean and on time
Email offers a wide range of marketing opportunities. You have to invest money and effort in continuous testing and optimization.
7: Use marketing teams on a full scale.
In a growth-oriented design (Growth-Driven Design), the transfer phase follows. The point is that after the launch and start receiving information about the behavior of your customers, you will share this information with other departments. This approach can be used for any market research such as insight from your sales teams and marketing departments.
If you have information on your most frequently asked questions, areas of concern and customer preferences at hand, you can use it for any of your initiatives. It also makes sense to invest in the professional development of analytical teams (certificates, webinars, training, etc.). The more your specialists know about marketing and sales trends, the more effective materials they will create for your brand.
Don't forget about reporting and testing!
Any good strategy contains concrete and measurable goals. Already based on these goals, you will be able to establish a system of testing and reporting. In this way, you will be able to learn the business from the practical side directly in the course of the business. Most importantly, you will be able to assess the effectiveness of your content and choose the most promising areas. Google Analytics, Cyfe, Supermetrics, HubSpot and other proven tools will help you.