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How To Effectively Market Your Small Business

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By Steph Wells, founder of Formidable Forms, a drag-and-drop form builder for WordPress that empowers freelancers to create form-based solutions.

When your business finally starts to gain traction, you need a plan to streamline your processes and market it effectively. Without proper planning, you risk losing potential customers, reducing conversions and losing revenue. 

Creating a strong online presence is crucial for your brand’s recognition. When people know who you are and continue getting to know your brand and its values, they’ll slowly build your customer base. On top of that, building brand awareness is also important to ensure that you’re marketing to the right audience and getting the best results.

If you want to market your small business and improve its online presence, here are four ways to get started.

1. Know Your Audience

With any marketing strategy, you need to know your audience front to back. If not, you’ll create irrelevant campaigns and products that fail to suit their needs. The way to attract users to your website and convert is by providing them with value suitable to their interests.

You need to research your target market before you can develop ways to market your small business. Your company revolves around the customer, so you need to cater to them as best as possible.

You can send a survey to existing customers to ask for their feedback. Hearing straight from the source gives you some insight you otherwise wouldn’t have access to. You can also "spy on" your competitors and take notes from their audience, such as what they like, their issues and more. 

To consolidate the information on your target market, you can turn it into buyer personas. Buyer personas are customer profiles that outline their interests, demographics, pain points and more. The more you know, the easier it is to create relevant campaigns. 

2. Leverage Email

Getting someone to join your email list means you have direct access to them whenever you want. You don’t need to chase them down or beg them to take a look at your content. They already signed up as subscribers, so now you can focus on your email marketing strategy. 

Email blasts and newsletters are great ways to connect with your subscribers, get to know them and let them know your brand. They’re also perfect opportunities to insert calls to action that drive traffic to your website and increase conversions. 

Through email marketing, you can start a conversation with your audience about what they want from you and how you can deliver. It’s easier to give customers what they want when you hear from them directly, so having this open line of communication is crucial. 

Use email campaigns to promote new products, introduce yourself and ask questions. Use the opportunity to humanize your brand and start a casual conversation with your customers that encourages them to respond. The more they feel like they’re speaking to a person, not a brand, the likelier they are to engage. 

3. Automate Repeat Tasks

A crucial part of marketing your small business is working smarter, not harder. As it expands, you need to be able to keep up with different departments and ensure everything is in order. It’s challenging enough to multitask, so using automation tools to expedite the process is essential.

Marketing automation uses software to perform repetitive tasks that don’t require human assistance, such as posting to social media or sending out emails. It provides an efficient way to streamline your processes so you can focus on other areas of your marketing and increase return on investment.

Some tasks you might want to automate include:

• Sending email newsletters.

• Posting to social media.

• Publishing blog posts.

• Scheduling appointments.

• Backing up data.

Whatever you use marketing automation for, it’s necessary for those who want to grow and market their business.

4. Reward Customer Loyalty

Did you know that it costs five to 25 times more to acquire a new customer than keep an existing one? There’s a lot of value in repeat business. Returning customers are likelier to spend more with brands they’ve already invested in, so you want to keep them around. 

Your marketing efforts don’t end the second a customer makes a purchase. You need to continue marketing to them afterward so they want to return and continue buying from your brand. Putting in that effort shows them you care about them as your consumers and want to cater to their needs.

A great way to reward customer loyalty is by creating a rewards program for repeat business. Repeat customers can reap the benefits of free merchandise, discounts and more. Having a rewards program shows them that you value their investment in your company and convinces them to continue shopping with your brand. 

Over To You

As your small business grows, it requires more attention, focus and productivity. Supply and demand go hand in hand, and if you can’t deliver, your customers will go elsewhere. Marketing your small business means you need to find ways to streamline your processes so you accomplish more in less time. How will you market your small business?