Top Marketing Strategies For Small Businesses You Can Use!
As a business owner, knowing the top marketing strategies for small businesses mean only one thing to you – profitability! I know that any business owner will do what it takes to get their business up and running, as well as keep it ‘afloat’!
Here are some valuable top marketing strategies for small companies outlined in this contributed article to help you on your journey to success.
How Can SEO Benefit Your Small Business?
Nowadays, the majority of small businesses are embracing the world of E-commerce. There’s a good reason for this!
After all, online commerce has skyrocketed in popularity over the past decade or so. In fact, some of the world’s most successful businesses operate solely online. If you want an example, just take a look at Amazon!
This retail giant has actually put many traditional high street retailers out of business! So, what is it that has encouraged the success of businesses operating online?
Well, when it comes to the consumer market, convenience seems to reign supreme in the average consumer’s list of priorities. In the past, we would head to brick and mortar stores to get a hold of whatever products we wanted to purchase. However, this meant having to fit shopping around our already hectic work and social schedules.
Nine times out of ten, we’d just not bother and businesses would lose out on seemingly endless sales. Nowadays, if a business operates online, consumers can simply visit their website and make purchases from the comfort of their own home.
They can even receive their goods the next day (or now, the same day) if the retailer has these delivery options on offer.
On top of convenience, operating online has other benefits that are mutual for both retailer and customer. The reduced costs of running things through a website means that the products can be offered to the consumer at a lower cost.
Think about it, if you’re not having to fork out for commercial property rent, overheads such as bills, or extra staff to monitor the shop floor, you don’t have to add these costs to the price tag of your products.
This gives you an automatic edge over your competition. So, bearing all the benefits in mind, it’s not all too surprising that you might be considering taking your small business online or setting up online if you haven’t started trading yet.
However, to make the most of your website, you’re going to have to pick up a few different business tips and tricks. Perhaps the most important area to get to grips with is SEO. Here’s everything you need to know about the practice and how to make the most of its benefits.
What Actually Is SEO?
So, seeing as the term SEO is thrown about so much in business, what actually is it?
SEO stands for “search engine optimization” and is a business practice which focuses on getting as many search engine users to make their way to your website as possible. You might have the best products on the market and the highest quality website design, but if nobody actually reaches your page, what use is it?
Every small business requires as much traffic as possible to pass through their web page in order to boost brand exposure and process as many sales as possible. So how do search engines come into play?
Well, when you’re looking for a certain product online, what do you do? Hardly anyone will directly type in a brand’s website address into the search bar. The majority aren’t quite sure where to look for what they want, so input keywords or phrases into a search engine.
When they browse the results, consumers generally limit their search to the results that appear on the first (or at a push the second) page. Think about it – when’s the last time you browsed more than two pages of search results. It’s a very rare occurrence, right?
So, you really do need your website to appear as high in the results as possible to get the most visitors to your site as possible. This is where search engine optimization comes into play. Now, every search engine will operate in its own unique way and have different means of ordering results.
However, we’d advise that you focus your efforts on Google to start with. This is because Google is the most popular search engine and is the go-to option for most web users. 1.7 billion people use it, so you should focus on what the majority of the market is using. Once you’ve got to grips with Google, you can then start to focus on Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines.
Getting Your Site To The Top Of The Results
So, now you know the benefits of SEO, let’s take a moment to look at steps you can take to get your SEO campaign started. These are the top marketing strategies for small businesses that once effectively employed, it will make a world of difference for your business.
Content Creation
Search engines love genuine content and legitimate posts. The more people talk about a brand online, the higher it will appear in results. So, consider engaging with blogging. The more bloggers who link to your website and mention your brand, the more frequently it will flag up on search engines’ radars. To learn more about SEO oriented content creation, click here.
Keyword Optimization
If you want to make the most of SEO, you need to understand keyword optimization. You need to identify, research, analyze, and make use of the best keywords to use in your web page content to drive traffic towards your page effectively. When users are searching for the type of products you are providing, chances are that the majority will type in similar search words.
Unfortunately, most search engines will not reveal the most searched for words in any given field. However, you can get a good idea of what people will search for by using your common sense as well as market research.
Market research will entail engaging with your target audience or demographic directly, questioning what kind of search words they use, and highlighting common answers that arise time and time again.
Once you’ve identified the most used keywords, try to incorporate them into your website as frequently as possible. Try slipping them into page URLs, product titles and product descriptions, blog posts, and FAQ pages. Let’s take a look at an example to make sure we’re all completely clear with this concept and process.
So, if people are looking for reusable diapers for infants, they might search “environmentally friendly diapers”, “eco friendly diapers”, or “green diapers”. If you provide these products but simply list your product as “reusable diapers”, you could slip through the search results that these people are drawing up.
If you change your product title to include “Reusable eco-friendly diapers” and describe them as “green, environmentally friendly diapers” in their product description, your webpage will be drawn up for any of the aforementioned searches.
As you can see, SEO can appear relatively complex to start with, but once you get to grips with the basic premises, you should be able to engage with it effectively and use it to your advantage! Yes, running a business – whether online or offline, you want visibility.
I hope you will use these top marketing strategies for small businesses to your advantage and help increase your profitability
Images courtesy of Pixabay and Pexels.
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