Content marketing to engage and empower customers
You know your business better than anyone. Small business digital marketing, however, may not be your forte. This blog will review 5 tips for small business marketing and offer actionable insights on marketing a small business.
Building an online community is vital in today’s business world. Using an omnichannel approach, you can increase brand awareness, elevating your brand to build trust and empower your customers with information and resources to find solutions to their challenges. At the same time, you demonstrate your commitment to a positive experience at each step of the customer journey.
But with so many channels and advertising options, where do you start?
Five key elements of a marketing strategy
Today’s marketing and advertising landscape serves seemingly unlimited opportunities to reach new and returning customers. A brand workshop with an experienced digital marketing strategist can help you solidify your company’s mission and values while creating consistent guidelines for how you and your staff speak and write about your business.
The following are 5 tips for small business marketing for new business owners or those expanding their marketing.
- Build an SEO-friendly website to increase traffic
- Develop and tell your brand story consistently
- Prioritize social media in your strategy
- Craft compelling content and visuals for content marketing
- Incorporate analytics
How to market a small business
1. Build an SEO-friendly website to increase traffic
Your website should work hard for you, but more is needed to build a website than to launch it. Keeping a continuous eye on your website will be critical if you want to reach new customers searching for your industry, products, or services. Blogging is one strategy many companies use to capture more keywords and build SEO success by driving traffic to your website while generating interest in your brand expertise. Your engaging website and high-quality social media content go hand-in-hand to boost your brand.
2. Develop and tell your brand story consistently
Developing your business or professional brand helps build trust in your products and services and creates consistency across communication channels to increase brand awareness. Use storytelling in your content marketing plan to delight customers and followers and engage with them in meaningful ways by building authentic connections.
3. Prioritize social media marketing in your strategy
Social media helps measure public perception of your brand as you interact with your customers. It’s vital to meet people where they are — and people of all ages and demographics increasingly connect on social media. Determine which one or two social media platforms have the best engagement with your specific audience and focus your efforts there while keeping a consistent presence on a few secondary channels.
Practicing customer service online during or after business hours has become the norm. An organized approach will help you succeed. A content calendar can help you plan and keep your company top of mind. A mix of organic and paid social media marketing is an excellent way to learn about customers and followers. Plus, it’s an effective way to build brand awareness and engage people in meaningful ways.
Social media remains a powerful communication tool for brand awareness and reputation management. Social media and an engaging and intuitive website can help you expand your reach while amplifying your brand and winning more customers.
4. Craft compelling content and visuals for content marketing
Think about your reaction to traditional marketing, such as advertisements for products or services. Has your response to ads changed over time? Marketing experts estimate Americans see a whopping 4,000 to 10,000 ads daily. It’s easy for your business to be drowned out in all the noise. That’s where content marketing comes in.
The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as:
“… a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”
A content marketer who is an influential storyteller with an eye for design is worth their weight in gold. We recommend partnering with a consultant who uses a multichannel approach to repurpose your content, stretching it further. Your partnership may include press relations (earned media), pay-per-click (PPC), email marketing and social media marketing.
To learn more about content marketing, check out HubSpot’s The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing in 2023.
5. Incorporate analytics
You can invest in all types of digital marketing, but ultimately, you may be burning through your budget if you are not paying attention to how your content is performing. This includes tracking social media benchmarks and traffic to your website from each source, actions customers take on your website, and other analytics.
Tools such as Google Analytics can help you understand whether you are meeting your key performance indicators (KPIs) and profit goals. Marketing is an art form that takes strategy, flexibility and deep knowledge of the various tools available.
Partnering with Alissa
Paolella Communications offers consultation services for business and nonprofit leaders, with digital marketing workshops, strategy sessions and marketing plan development. Additionally, Alissa is multitalented, with experience building, running and supporting communications and marketing programs for businesses in many industries, including pharmaceutical, health care, academia, printing, retail, manufacturing, automotive, nonprofit, news media and advertising.
To learn more, schedule a free, no-strings, 30-minute consultation to review your business goals and objectives and develop a plan for marketing your small business.
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