5 Small Business Advertising Trends to Amplify Your Reach
The ideas that we’re going to discuss in this blog post have worked incredibly well for small business marketing in Kansas City. Most of these methods should be viable in helping your business grow.
However, with that being said, there is no magic bullet marketing strategy. In the end, it’s all about connecting your business’s value proposition to the correct customer base. The concept is simple but can take on many different forms.
To know which of these strategies will help you amplify your reach, you must have answers to the following questions:
- What are the demographics of your target audience? Where do they live?
- What places does your target audience like to congregate online?
- What process does your target audience engage in to find products in your niche?
- Who are the online authorities they follow when it comes to making purchasing decisions related to your product/niche?
These strategies are:
Let’s get started with the elephant in the room – Facebook marketing!
1. Facebook Marketing
There is a good reason why over 2 million+ small businesses are advertising on Facebook; it’s relatively cheap and effective at marketing to almost any audience on the planet.
Facebook ads work incredibly well at advanced targeting. For example, you can target users based on their interests, sex, age, behavior online, and of course, their location.
Making a Facebook ad is very simple. All you need is a good headline, some descriptive words, an image, and a hyperlink.
Facebook Ads Manager also makes it pretty easy to test several different ad sets, which lets you discover the winning formula for yourself and become profitable, with no advanced technical skills required.
2. Google My Business
Ranking a Google My Business (GMB) listing is incredibly impactful for any business.
And, if you have a local business serving local clients, GMB will probably work best for you.
In many cases, when someone searches for something on Google, they will find a paid ad, followed by a few GMB listings, and then followed by the organic search results. So, as you can see, being above the organic results while not being a paid ad (which many people have learned to avoid) has plenty of potential to pull in traffic. And the best part is you won’t have to spend any money on advertising.
But just what is a Google My Business profile? Simply put, it’s a platform/central hub that combines all of your Google accounts (Google+, Google Maps, Google Reviews, data from Google Analytics/Google Insights).
Also, if your brand name is unique, you should be able to have a large display for your name in the search results.
Thanks to all of the above, your business will automatically get more visibility and credibility. If you’re a local business, getting your GMB set up should be your #1 priority.
When it comes to ranking your GMB listing, it’s really not that difficult either. It starts with making sure that your profile is optimized, and then you gather reviews and make sure to post to your GMB profile at least once a week. This helps Google see that your business is relevant and regularly updated, similar to a website.
3. Content Marketing
Content marketing means making and distributing good content to capture and retain your target audience, with the follow-up goal of driving profitable actions. Good content is defined as these three things: relevant, consistent, and valuable.
Content marketing emphasizes long-term results in contrast to paid advertising, which focuses on the short term. This means that the short-term payoff of content marketing tends to be lower. Still, the long-term growth of customers, visitors, and leads can make a business successful.
However, content marketing isn’t an easy thing to do, and a lot goes into it besides having a creative mind for writing content:
- valuable content
- topic relevance
- SEO
- Optimized with the target audience in mind
- Consistency in content publishing and promotion
Content doesn’t just mean writing some blog posts and calling it a day. No, it also means videos, online classes, podcasting, and plenty of other mediums where people like to consume content.
If you’re thinking about pursuing this strategy for your business, then be sure that you have the time and money needed to keep things going with no expectations of initial ROI. Then you must actually create quality content and get it out there. Unfortunately, there’s tons of bad content out there that ends up seeing little to no payoff in both the short and long term.
4. Social Media
For almost any business today, having a presence on social media is pretty much mandatory.
67% of consumers get customer support from social media. And furthermore, 33% of consumers prefer to contact customer support from social media instead of through the phone. These people will look for your business on their preferred social media websites. If they can’t find you, they’ll fall into the arms of your competitors.
The question isn’t whether or not your business should be on social media. Nowadays, the important question is what platforms should you focus on, and how much money and time should you be putting into them?
For example, you may want to spend a lot on organic social media growth, depending on your business.
However, for any business, it’s key to first discover where your customers like to hang out online. Then, you should know how they want to be approached. For example, does a pushy approach work, or is a more subtle approach required? Do they follow influencers, or like being a part of a community?
5. Email Marketing
Email marketing still works as a reliable way of getting leads, contact information and nurturing those leads over time. This is one of the best ways to sell products, hands down, which is why it’s among the best marketing channels for conversions.
Terms that you should be familiar with if you’re into email marketing are “marketing funnel” and “lead magnet.” The marketing funnel is your email marketing process. The lead magnet is a compelling offer that the visitor will receive in exchange for their email address. Some options for lead magnets are free trials, free downloads, website membership, coupons, webinar “seats,” and so much more.