7 Best Marketing Ideas for Small Business

You started a small business, invested your savings for your startup business, and spent many valuable hours. You have a proper long-term plan on how to grow your business. So, what next? You most likely missed one important component: your customers. All the countless hours and money will be wasted without gaining customers. Here are a few approaches to promote your business to reach prospective customers, generate leads, and ultimately convert leads to customers.

Connect with the People

Find key opportunities to reach out to local churches, community centers, and school and social gatherings. These are good places to meet with prospective clients and promote your product to potential consumers. As many times as you meet the same people, you will be gain their trust and you find more leads. Invest your time to come up with attractive flyers and posters. People will remember something if you engage all of their senses rather than only hearing about the product description. A great example of this is to simply hand out flyers to your customer that they can refer to. Talk to Schools, churches, and community center authorities if they allow you to post your product detail on their hallway board where many people gather. You need to try to continuously build relationships with people. People mostly purchase your product when they trust you. As such, don’t ignore anyone to build trust; the person standing in front of you may not be your prospective client but he may refer your name to his/her friend, or relative who may become your customer someday. Your customer can bring you a new customer, always treat your existing customer in a good manner. Read Customer Retention Strategies

Quantity rather Quality, Volume and consistency

As human nature, we tend to trust a person whom we see more frequently. One of the most effective ways to grow your customer relations is by building trust and making them feel more comfortable. In other words, the longer you retain relationships, the longer consumers gain an understanding of your products. Try to meet with the same people at the same places. You don’t necessarily have to speak about your product every time— rather just talk in general about something interesting for your customer.

Do repeated digital marketing like using email and repetitive posts on social media. You have to keep posting even though you feel no one is responding to your post. You must maintain consistency. Volume is a key resource to social media organic search growth.

Although the quantity matters most, you should not ignore the quality. You need to think from a Customer perspective and write content that is somehow going to help customers. It is better to be deep thinking content rather than broad.

Inventory Tracking Solution

If you are selling products irrespective of small scale or large scale, you should not ignore the need to automate inventory tracking using applications like AlnicoSoft . Find every opportunity to sell the product directly to your customer like in a fair, open-air market. You will look more professional using a point-of-sale like AlnicoSoft in front of your customer which in turn will build trust. If you are selling products irrespective of small scale or large scale, you should automate inventory tracking using applications like AlnicoSoft . Find every opportunity to sell the product directly to your customer like in a fair, open-air market. Increased professionalism using an Point-Of-Sale such as AlnicoSoft in front of your customer will build stronger trust.

Take an attractive brochure with you. To be a little aggressive, put a signboard on the side of the road near your store if local law permits you.

Build Website for Business

If you started a business, then you should open a website. Your website is the main place where people can find you online, know your product, its features, and how your product is going to fulfill their needs. The website is the first place where prospective clients can leave their feedback, in turn, generate leads.

Nowadays, it is not difficult to build a basic website. You can use tools such as Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress to build a simple web page and use a hosting site like Hostgator, or Godaddy to host your page. It is always suggested to find an available domain first and then decide your company name. The company name and URL should match each other. Once you have started with a simple website and slowly updated the website with high-quality content and photos, you can grow faster. You can also hire freelancers to build more professional looking websites if you desire.

Your web page should have your product details, types of products, and contact details.

Use Search Engine Optimization

You build a fantastic product, and are confident that there must be some customers desperately looking for a product similar to your own. Now, who will make that connection between you and the person looking for your product? SEO, Search Engine Optimization, is a technique that enables your web page to be visible on Google search pages and any other search engine, like Bing and Yahoo. Here are basic few steps to be followed to optimize your web page – a) do keyword research related to your industry and make sure those keywords exist on your web page. For keyword research, you may use a free tool like Google AdWords or paid tools like Aherfs. b) complete on-page optimization, using keywords in h1, h2, and h3 tags, enter all metatags correctly, title contain the major keywords, etc. Try using a tool like Yoast to validate on-page optimization. c) Repeat the previous process numerous times. It usually takes more than six months to observe the increase in traffic to your page.

Marketing Funnel

Marketing funnel is the process or journey where you bring your brand/product to your prospective customer. The individual may show some interest in your product and ultimately become your customer. The stages are brand awareness, brand consideration, and conversion, and the post-purchase stages are brand Loyalty and promoters.

Awareness

In this stage, you try to improve your brand value and increase the exposure of your product in the market. This is the step where you make sure that the customer knows that you developed something useful. The product should be available in the market or soon to be available.

Consideration

This is the stage where you track the percentage of customers who are considering your product while evaluating their purchase options.

Conversion

This is the stage where your prospective customer purchases your products.

Brand Loyalty

Now you have a customer who is actually using your product. However, your marketing journey is still not over. You must continue to build a strong relationship with the respective customer. The consequence will be they will repeat the purchase or bring new customers to you.

The basic concept here is that a marketing person can’t move to the next step without fulfilling the previous step of the marketing funnel. Also, as you keep track throughout the marketing funnel, you can determine which steps need to be improved.

Don’t Give Up Early

By now, you may have developed web pages and met with numerous people, but you are not seeing any improvement in the growth of your sales. In any case, go back to your blackboard, list all the marketing opportunities that are still missing and not applied, and start working on those missing steps. Marketing is a time-consuming and repetitive job. If your product has potential market value, then, it may be possible that your important customers are still unaware of your product. Also, it is not advisable to wait for too long to see the growth in the sale and not come up with better ideas. As of now, you gain a lot of knowledge about the business start-up process and market conditions, and customer expectations. a

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