How can a small business owner successfully advertise their business in the current business climate? There’s plenty out there nowadays to worry even the most optimistic business person. No matter how well you’ve managed to get your business to grow, there’s always the possibility that it will slow down in the near future, and even as a business owner takes care of their current clients, they also need to take care of finding new clients to replace the current ones once those projects are done. This is where good marketing strategies comes in.
A good marketing strategy must consist of a series of tactics, all of which are implemented together with the intention of attracting clients and consumers. Each tactic can be taken by itself or in combination with others, but it is only when all of them are used in concert that good results can be achieved.
1) Internet Content Marketing
Online content marketing is currently revolutionizing the field of small business marketing. When search engines came onto the scene during the development of the internet, the businesses that were willing and able to provide their visitors with good information that was helpful and interesting found themselves with an instant and recurring audience of people to market to. This was ideal because it did not require massive amounts of cash to market to these audiences, all a business had to do was put out good information that was not available anywhere else and the people would come.
That was back then of course, and a lot has changed; the field of content creation is much more competitive that it was ten, five or even two years ago. Increased competition, as well Google’s algorithm updates that very effectively sort the wheat from the chaff in terms of published information, have made it so that a business needs a much larger effort, and even a sizable budget, to produce enough content that is interesting enough and fresh enough to compete for top spots in search engine rankings.
It does, however, remain a great option to both rise in SEO results and attract natural repeat visitors to your website, where they can be converted into new clients.
2) Social Media and Viral Marketing
An off-shoot of the content marketing phenomenon is viral marketing. Viral marketing refers to a certain type of content that is so unique or elicits such strong emotions among the people who view it, that it spontaneously gets shared among more and more people, until the sharing effect takes the content to be viewed by a similar or greater quantity of people than other publishing methods.
Social media enters the picture in this technique since the whole structure and functionality of social media networks like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest revolve around making it easy and quick to share any type of content that strikes the user’s fancy.
One thing to keep in mind is that for a piece of content to go viral is completely up to the people who view it, and as such it usually requires people who are very highly creative, have an extremely developed and keen sense of current trends, and are very good at eliciting reactions out of people through a marketing piece. Viral content cannot be produced by just anyone.
3) Word-Of-Mouth Publicity
This technique is simply going back to basics: The thing that has served businesses since time immemorial, still continues to work just the same as always. One does need to know how to stimulate and leverage work of mouth online, though. For example, asking for testimonials, and interacting with people online in various ways through both your website, a comments and blog section on your website, and on your social media fan-pages usually can take the place of regular, traditional word of mouth.