When a small business is looking for a marketing advantage, it’s all about giving them information they can use to grow their business. Who better to help you with this than an ad agency – only we make our services available to any business, free of charge. Let us give you a hand up today!
Whether at a trade show, networking event, or even while visiting fellow business owners and potential clients, if you’re a small business owner, you know how important it is to be ready to answer questions and engage with people.
Create a free Google My Business account
For local businesses especially, a Google Business Profile has become one of the most effective free marketing strategies available. This free listing allows your business to show up on Google Maps, the local section of Google Search, and the right-side Knowledge Panel for branded searches.
An example of a Google Business Profile Accessed from Google Maps
But in order for your Business Profile to show up higher on Google Maps or local results, you need to optimize your Business Profile, and in order to optimize it, you need to have verified ownership of it—which is done through your Google My Business account.
Tag people (and brands) on social media
Tagging your loyal customers, brand evangelists, or even neighboring companies and vendors on social media can broaden the organic reach of your business to a new potential audience, help you grow your following, and potentially even attain more clients. You should also encourage your followers to tag your social media handle or business location in their posts. More about user-generated content here.
You can also tag happy customers in your own posts, exposing your business to that customer’s network (provided you have their permission).
Don’t sleep on LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a major social media site that is often under-utilized. Don’t just add network connections and sign out; enter into dialogue with the connections you make, share your blog posts and offers, join and contribute to forums, and share others’ quality content.
By enabling other professionals to grow and educating your potential customers, you can build your brand and earn trust and respect in your industry. Also, encourage all your employees to get active on the platform too!
Do some local SEO
The best part about Google’s algorithm is that it is designed to serve up the most accurate, high-quality, and relevant content for any given search query. It’s not pay to play, so this levels the playing field and enables small businesses to compete with large competitors for page one real estate.
Local SEO is free, but it can take some time, so start now and keep working; the benefits over time can be huge. Here are some local SEO must-dos:
- Add location-based keywords (think: “Portland bakery”) to the titles, headings, and body content of your main website pages.
- Get listed in online directories, making sure your information is identical across platforms.
- Publish pages or blog posts specific to the neighborhoods you serve.
Good Local SEO can get you on Google’s 3-Pack as shown above.
Create data-rich infographics
Infographics are insanely powerful as marketing tools. They’re visual eye candy, easy to digest, and people love to share them, so they’re a great way to drive up referral traffic and links.
Hiring a designer to make you an A+ infographic can hit your wallet hard, but you can make your own on the cheap with free tools like Canva, Adobe’s free vector kits, or our personal favorite, Visme, that provide all the elements needed to make a clever, sharable infographic. Not sure where to start? Check out Visual.ly for inspiration. They have beginner and advanced examples for you to browse through.
If you don’t have any original, proprietary data to use in an infographic, you can find existing data and breathe new life into it. For government data, check out data.gov or The Census Bureau. Global statistics can be found through UNICEF and the World Health Organization. Ultimately, you’ll have to find source data that relates to your industry and audience interests. But there’s a ton of freely available data out there!
Ask your customers for testimonials
On the topic of reviews, be sure to generate as many testimonials and (positive) reviews as possible.
Whether it’s via Google, TrustPilot or for a dedicated testimonials section on your website, people trust other people. You’ll have to ask your customers for these, as people don’t very often give them naturally. Just a gentle prompt will do the trick.
Review Google AdWords
Google AdWords is not free. In fact, it’s incredibly expensive. But if you are already running a PPC campaign then it’s worth taking some time to review your strategy. Try rewriting some of the ads and improving your quality score to generate better results.
Sparing a little time reviewing your campaign could save you lots of money. For most of us AdWords will cost, but if you are a charity you can apply for a Google Grant of up to £10,000 to spend on AdWords!
Contribute to forums, blogs and discussions
Part of marketing your business online is to establish yourself as a reliable industry expert and a voice of authority. In order to build this authority, take the time to contribute to relevant forums, blogs and social media discussions.
Offer genuinely helpful insight and answer questions that are being asked. People will appreciate your input and, with any luck, will convert into a customer.
Town Planner
This platform mostly serves smaller towns and communities. It serves as a catchall calendar for news, events, holidays of all sorts, and other promotions. Not every town uses Town Planner, but if your organization is tied to one that does, this could serve as a great way to share information and promote your website.
WikiHow
You’ve more than likely used WikiHow to learn how to accomplish something at least once. It’s one of the internet’s biggest resources for tutorials and how-to guides. For businesses that create a product that solves a specific problem or set of problems, WikiHow can be a great place to promote your website. Simply create WikiHow pages that address the problem your target audience has, and then show how to solve that problem using your service.
Conclusion
Marketing is the often-overlooked lifeline to sales success. Every company needs to advertise, promote, and publicize their products, services, and brand in order to break through the clutter of other business noise.