SMB’s often struggle with marketing because they have small budgets and not employee hours to spare. That’s why so many of them choose to hire marketing agencies like ourselves who know how to get results from even the smallest budgets.
Growing your SMB online doesn’t need to be expensive, in fact, some of the best methods can be used with only a small budget and a little bit of dedication.
Use Paid Advertising
One of the best ways for SMB’s to grow their online presence is through paid advertising on Google AdWords or directly with website owners. But, isn’t this article about inexpensive methods?
Well, paid advertising isn’t free, but it doesn’t have to be expensive. In fact, you can sometimes find methods where you can get a visitor for an only a couple cents. In this case, the ROI from paid advertising can be substantial.
The key to paid advertising with a limited budget is finding good sources of traffic by looking at keywords that are less competitive and potentially less valuable. These are the keywords that your larger competitors have ignored, but that could still prove profitable.
With paid advertising, it’s best to start out with a budget of a couple of hundred dollars and invest it wisely to generate traffic from reliable sources like Google AdWords and Facebook.
Engage With Your Customers on Social Media
Social media is often thought of as a corporate checkbox for many SMB’s, that is that they do it just so that they can say it is done, often without much thought or planning. However, when it’s well thought out, social media can have a significant impact on the growth of small businesses.
Look at it this way, when you only have a small base of customers, it’s even more important that you keep a personal relationship with those customers. Social media is the modern way to engage with your customers; it keeps them coming back for more and can help you also to reach new customers.
When you engage with existing customers on Facebook, some of their friends will see those posts. This is equivalent to word-of-mouth advertising and can help to spread awareness of your business.
It’s important that you don’t disregard that power of social media, even for B2B businesses that might no see the value in platforms like Facebook or Twitter. Instead, spend some time each day to post on your accounts and engage with people who purchase from you.
Social media costs you nothing other than a little of your time and can result in new paying customers as well as more brand awareness.
Create Content for Other Websites
As a small business, you probably don’t have a huge following on social media or customers that are regularly visiting your blog looking for your next piece of content. However, there is a way that you can leverage the power of another company existing audience.
Guest posting.
Guest posting is when you write an article with the intent of it being published by another company or publication on their website. The goal of this is to score a backlink to your website, which will help with SEO, to gain brand awareness and also to bring in new customers.
When you write an article for another internet site, you’re able to siphon off some of their traffic and hopefully bring them over to your site where you can sell them on your products or services.
Guest posting is relatively straightforward, it costs you nothing, and it doesn’t have to take much time either. If you send just one email each day to an industry-related website, you will likely land at least one guest posting opportunity each week.
Email Marketing
Email is often forgotten about or disregarded as old technology. However, it’s still one of the best ways to communicate with your audience and to bring them back into your shop to make more sales.
In fact, the conversion rate and open rate for email are way higher than it is for social media. Believe it or not, people still read their emails, and they have a special relationship with an email that can often feel much more personal than an ad on their social media.
Most companies can benefit hugely from sending one to two emails each week about new promotions or their latest products. But the real benefit is when you create blog content and then email that to your audience.
The truth is that most people aren’t ready to buy at the exact moment that you send them the email, but they are much more likely to read an interesting blog post. This can help to educate them so that when they are ready to buy, they have your business in their minds.