Marketing Strategies For Small Business – Between paying employees and other operating expenses, small businesses often have a limited budget for marketing. If you are in the same situation and do not have much space in the budget for marketing activities, do not despair: all is not lost! This is the nature of starting a business from scratch, especially when it comes to a smaller sized business.
At the same time, every marketing activity requires some investment, whether it is content marketing, pay-per-click advertising or social media. Don’t believe the many ‘free digital marketing’ articles that label video content or organic SEO as low-cost activities. If you haven’t experienced it yourself, rest assured – creating content takes both time and effort (read:
Marketing Strategies For Small Business
However, having a tight budget doesn’t mean you can’t market your small business. There are some sensible marketing strategies that can help your company boost this.
Easy Digital Marketing Strategies For Small Business
In this article, we’ll look at two bulletproof strategies – partnership marketing and social proof marketing. These tactics bring you traffic for free and, at the same time, help boost website conversion. What could be better?
A great way to boost your marketing effectiveness is to work with other small (or even large) businesses or entrepreneurs on a short or long term basis. That’s called marketing cooperation, or affiliate marketing. In short, it is about promoting your products or services through partners (affiliates) who get a certain percentage as a reward from you. (Read more about affiliate strategy)
Of course, the revenue share can vary in different industries. For example, it is around 20 percent in the SaaS world while it is significantly lower in the e-commerce industry.
Where to get some inspiration and understand the true power of collaborative marketing? Look at ecommerce retail giant Amazon. Amazon is probably the biggest player in the market that uses affiliate marketing.
Which Marketing Strategies Work Best For Small Business
Why do super-successful companies like Amazon use this type of marketing partnership? Mainly because they only pay after the conversion takes place without any initial investment from their side, so it’s a low-risk activity. Translated to a small company, this makes affiliate marketing one of the most ROI positive ways to market online. What’s more, there are some other bold benefits that your small business can enjoy using affiliate marketing:
Almost every affiliate marketing campaign offers real-time tracking. This allows you to know how many times the affiliate link was clicked and how many leads you received from the partner website. Everything is trackable, and you can clearly understand the effectiveness of your marketing cooperation campaigns.
If you have an upcoming product launch or a special sale, provide that information to your marketing partners so they can spread the word to their audience.
In affiliate marketing activities, you only pay your partners when a conversion or sale occurs. You only pay for what you get.
The 16 Best Marketing Strategies For Small Businesses
Arousing interest? Now, let’s cut to the chase and learn the marketing partnership process. Simply put, affiliate marketing is choosing to work with other businesses that can help sell your products and send traffic to your site. The process looks like this:
Once you’ve determined your small business needs and goals, now you need to find influencers that operate within your market. Sometimes, other small businesses will seek you out, but the most reliable way is to take the plunge and identify potential business partners on your own.
Find businesses related to your industry (but not direct competitors). In other words, look for companies that sell an affiliate product or service. By doing this, you can be introduced to a whole new audience related to your niche, for free! It goes without saying that a good partner is one that has a good reputation within your business.
Partnership marketing can take many different forms. Boosting each other’s social media shares, co-hosting an event, placing each other’s advertising banners on your websites, and everything in between.
Small Business Marketing Ideas
Affiliate marketing activity accounts for 16 percent of all online orders. If you’re not using this cheap and productive way to increase revenue for your small business, you’re leaving money on the table. Take the help of some trusted marketing partners and get ready for more closed deals with a strong return on investment.
Driving users to your website is not enough. If they just leave, you get nothing in return. You need to take it to the next step and convert them into leads or even customers.
Why should your website visitors believe that your small (and likely unknown) business can solve their problems and challenges? Prospective customers need confidence that you are delivering real value. A great way to do this is by using social proof as a marketing strategy through some of these methods: reviews, testimonials, star ratings, opt-ins, referral discounts, and other methods that gives website visitors the opportunity to connect with your existing customers.
Social proof plays into our natural inclinations and human inclinations. When booking a hotel room online, the words ‘125 people are looking at it now’ prompt us to book quickly and not miss out. When a product has a negative review, we naturally hesitate to buy it.
Affordable Marketing Strategies For Your Small Business
Multiple case studies reveal that personalized messages are 10-15% more impactful than impersonal messages. This statement was also confirmed by psychology and marketing professor Robert Cialdini. As Cialdini says, when people aren’t sure what to do, they look around for guidance and tend to take the word of the people most like them.
Other scientists have identified the so-called loss aversion effect. According to this theory, people value avoiding a loss more than accessing an equivalent gain. For example, you can inject a drop of loss prevention into your marketing strategy by offering a limited trial period. This way, you allow potential prospects to feel the loss of not owning your product once the trial is over.
Also, loss prevention in marketing happens when you create sales copy that emphasizes what your clients will lose if they don’t buy or upgrade.
Social proof marketing is also based on scarcity messaging. For example, have you ever seen a statement on an ecommerce site, such as ‘Only five items left at this price!’? Scarcity is a psychological principle that says the rarer the product, the more valuable it is. Scarcity marketing can be summed up as FOMO (fear of missing out).
Small Business Promotional Tactics
Black Friday sales, with their deeply discounted and attractive offers, are the perfect example of scarcity in action. Because there is nothing more disappointing than missing out on a great opportunity. For inspiration, check out online clothing stores known for using this sense of urgency in their campaigns.
How to apply these principles to your marketing strategy? The best way to encourage your prospects to take action is to say that other people in the same situation have done it and gotten successful results.
In other words, draw similarities between your prospective clients and existing customers with the help of social proof. According to the concept of social proof, users will use the actions of a group of people they like or trust. After all, if people you know and trust are happy with a particular product, why shouldn’t you be too?
There is a wide selection of social proof software tools available that you can use to boost your website. And you don’t have to be a tech guru to do it.
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The two surefire marketing strategies for small businesses – cooperation marketing and social proof – are designed to get you for less: maximum traffic and customers, at minimal cost.
Social proof marketing leverages your existing customers through reviews, testimonials, ratings and more, to create awareness and confidence about your brand among potential customers, and to generate more leads and conversions . The best way to automate these activities is to adopt a comprehensive social proof platform.
But, by combining the above mentioned cheap marketing ideas with your business, you can get closer to the perfect growth hacking strategy.
Carsten Schaefer is the founder and CEO at crowdy.ai, an easy-to-use platform that combines social proof and notification tools to maximize conversions and sales. Inspired by the principles and mechanisms of social proof, Carsten is currently on his way to help businesses become trustworthy and thrive in the digital landscape. Feel free to connect with him on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. In a previous article, we revealed that using push and pull marketing together can be an effective advertising strategy for your business. Leveraging the strengths of both strategies is an important way to get the most bang for your advertising buck. A marketing budget today covers several areas, including social, search, email and mobile. According to a recent article published on Entrepreneur.com, digital advertising now accounts for 35% of all marketing dollars typically spent for companies, and businesses are shifting more of their budget to digital because of its return on investment (ROI).
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Potential customers passively use the internet and content comes to them. For example, you check your Facebook page and information is pushed from user to user
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