content marketing
Advertising your small business is stressful – with so many choices and, usually, so little budget how do you choose which channels to use and where to spend your money? It is important to find the answers, as knowing how to promote your small business in the best possible way sets you on the path to growing your market and expanding your reach. Reaching the right audience, in the right way, at the right time is the key to successful marketing, and it is different for every business, but there are some general things that can help.
Here are 4 free and 3 paid ways to advertise your small business in a crowded market.
Free Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses
Social Media Marketing
LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok – the list of social media platforms goes on, with Wikipedia estimating that there are over 130 different ones to choose from now! The key to using social media to advertise your small business is choosing the platform that your customers are using most, and then updating your page regularly. The only cost to a successful social media marketing campaign is your time investment.
Email Marketing
If you have a list of customer (or potential customer) email addresses, using them wisely is a great way to market your small business. Send out helpful articles, sales messages, and rewards to those who sign up and you will create a faithful following that will convert as well as your social media audience, or even better!
Website Marketing
Don’t overlook your website. If you are doing all this work to drive people to your website, you need to make sure it converts them into leads. Make the most of your data and analytics to ensure that it is working as hard as you are. Search Engine Optimisation is another great way to make your website do more for your business. By optimising your website to be found in the search engines you can increase the number of visitors, and with no direct costs, your only investment is time and energy.
Content marketing
Another fantastic way to market your business is by creating valuable content. This could be blog posts, videos, and even podcasts. It is a great way to express your brand’s personality and help you to find new customers. It can also support your social media and SEO work, so it’s a great option to use in combination with the other free marketing ideas we’ve suggested above.
Paid Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses
Paid Advertising on Search Engines
PPC (Pay-Per-Click) marketing is a really effective way to market your business as it allows you to send your message to a highly targeted audience and set a tight budget. Google Ads and Bing Ads are the most common, and each gives you a chance to test multiple adverts and campaigns to see which performs best for your goals.
Social Media Advertising
Instead of relying on organic growth in your social media profiles and pages, you can create very visual social media adverts and display them to a highly targeted audience. As well as giving you the opportunity to reach a wide number of people for a small budget, the advertising options on these channels give you access to a huge range of in-depth data which can help you to make future advertising decisions.
Remarketing Campaigns
If you already have a bank of customer data or have run successful paid campaigns in the past, then remarketing is a great option. Remarketing is usually a cheaper option than other paid marketing options, and has a higher conversion rate.
Whatever your budget, whatever time you have to invest, there is a marketing solution for your small business. Take your time, make a plan and good luck!
If you’d like to speak to one of our team about how we could help you attract new customers with catchy and clever advertising tactics, you can get in touch here. Alternatively, pick up the phone and call us on 01600 891525 – we’d love to hear from you!
Constantly coming up with new content ideas for marketing can be tough, especially if your brand is in a niche market without huge scope for diversity of topics. However, if the content you are promoting is useful, popular and insightful, it would be a shame to let it fade to the back!
One way to get the most out of ideas is through repurposing content. The idea of repurposing is to target different segments of your target market by presenting your valuable information in ways in which they will engage with and respond to.
Why should you repurpose content?
Reach new audiences
Some people will respond better to visual infographics, while others might engage with the same content written in blog form. Some people prefer to listen to a podcast, others a video. Repurposing your content to adhere to these different preferences will give you a better chance of widening your reach and enhancing engagement.
Refresh old content
Bringing previously successful content back to the forefront of your marketing could be a way of reigniting popular content, ensuring that those golden nuggets aren’t forgotten!
Get the most out of every idea
Rather than racking your brain for new concepts and running dry, utilise every idea and create a number of content pieces from it. One topic could be turned into a podcast, whitepaper, infographic and blog article!
Boost your SEO
Having various types of content around a certain subject can give you more opportunities to target a particular keyword or phrase. This will increase the chances of ranking highly when it comes to search engine results.
Ways to repurpose content?
-Take an old blog article and create a podcast around the topic
-Split an infographic up into individual Twitter posts
-Transform your popular content into an email series
-Convert testimonials into content
-Simply re-share and re-post popular content on social media
Here at LimeGreen Marketing, we can develop strategies that not only come up with new content, but utilise it to reach your target market in ways that make them respond. Get in touch today to get started.
If you haven’t used GIF’s in your communication before now, then there’s no doubt that you’ve seen them around. GIF’s have grown in popularity so much that you can even search for GIF’s quickly with a shortcut on many smartphone keyboards and on most social media platforms.
What exactly is a GIF? A Graphics Interchange Format is, in official terms, a bitmap image format for files that supports both animated and static images. In layman’s terms, it is, in essence, a digital flip book of images going around in a loop.
The popularity of the GIF is quite ironic, because GIFs were actually invented before the internet itself! The first GIF was created in 1987 by Steve Wilhite.
Twitter introduced GIF search back in 2016 in a bid to keep moving forward with culture. David Macintosh, CEO and co-founder of Riffsy, a GIF library platform, expressed his feelings towards the move; “So much can be expressed with GIFs, and the key is to find just the right one in the moment that quickly and efficiently expresses your emotions.”
Now, Riffsy has been re-branded as Tenor, and Google bought the popular GIF platform so that users can even search for them in Google Images. Our digital culture has GIFs ingrained in it as part of the language, and the marketing industry is jumping on the bandwagon more and more.
Why? Unsurprisingly, marketeers aren’t just using GIFs because they’re fun (but that is a bonus), GIFs make for much higher engagement rates and allow brands to express a lot in just one image.
Here’s just a few reasons that GIFs work so well for marketing:
They’re Easy to Consume
With our attention spans getting shorter and shorter, conveying a message that’s easy to consume is more important than ever. You can convey a message to users without them even having to stop scrolling with a GIF.
The internet likes GIFs
The file size of a GIF is significantly smaller than that of a video, so upload time is much quicker than it would be for a video. The internet reads it as an image, whilst we get the benefits of a video.
They’re cheap and easy
The design and creation of GIFs is miles easier than video. It takes less time and less money, the two most crucial elements of a marketing strategy.
GIFs Add Personality to your Brand
People are much less receptive to traditional methods of marketing than they used to be, and they crave creativity and personality. GIFs are a great way to feed this need and can encourage more sharing and engagement.
We could go on with the list of benefits of GIFs, but we’ll just leave you with this:
If you’d like some help with your marketing strategy and the integration of modern trends, then please contact us and we’ll see how we can help.