Email 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!

In today’s world, email marketing has proven to have stood the test of time. After seeing many a digital and traditional marketing trend come and go, email has remained stable. Developing your marketing strategy with email in mind is absolutely vital. The facts are:

– People send and receive 281 million emails every single day (2018)

– 95% of professionals use email as their focal communication tool

– Consumers sign up to an average up 14 mailing lists on their personal accounts

This being said, that doesn’t mean that you can just send out email and expect a return on investment. Your promotional emails being sent is one thing, but getting them opened is another. Think about your own inbox, how many of them are marketing emails? You really only open a select few that capture your attention from the get go. As a business, you don’t want to join the pile of binned emails because of irrelevant or ‘spammy’ marketing tactics.

It’s important that you develop a well-thought and objective driven strategy for your email marketing. There must be a catchy subject – and once users have clicked in, you must be giving them valuable content.

It’s useful to note that there is a huge list of words that could trigger your email straight to the junk box. Due to the number of viruses and hackers that attempt to gain users details, if an email contains a certain number of  trigger words, it will be deflected from your targets inbox for their safety.

A useful link for these words is:

https://prospect.io/blog/455-email-spam-trigger-words-avoid-2018/

In today’s age, email is still as successful as it has ever been, but to achieve this success you have to be much more strategic in your communications via email.

If you’d like some help with developing your email strategy and defining your objectives, get in touch and we can work together.