If you’re a small business owner, you probably want to do marketing but don’t have much of a budget to spend on it. And you’re probably brilliant at the thing you’ve set your business up to do, but you have zero training in marketing.
It’s a challenge for you to create and run successful marketing campaign.
Especially for you, I’ve rounded up 5 of my top marketing tactics for small business owners
Email marketing
Email marketing has never been easier! And free on-line software makes it really accessible. Learn how to do it properly and it works. There are plenty of email marketing courses out there like this one – https://itmoon.co.uk/email-marketing-wizardry/
You can have welcome sequences for when you add people to your list, so they start getting to know you better. You can have regular newsletters and updates to thrill and excite your readers. You can even have automations set up as responses to actions that your prospects and clients take.
Follow the rules, don’t spam people and don’t just add them to your list without checking with them first, and you’ll be able to start building a relationship with them, prompt sales and generally stay in the front of their minds.
Webinars
Do you sell something that is a bit of an investment, but also takes a bit of explaining? Why not run a webinar. Pick a topic that you know is a problem (or a potential solution) for lots of people, and deliver a webinar on it.
For your prospects, they get to find out more about you and see whether you are someone that they could imagine working with, see how credible you are and ask plenty of questions.
For you, it’s a great way of getting people in to your pipeline! You have that opportunity to demonstrate your abilities and credibility and to get in front of the people who need your services.
People who sign up to your webinar also get on to your email list, so you have the ongoing opportunity to build those relationships and continue upselling your services for the long term.
Networking
I find that people fall in to two camps when it comes to networking. There are those who absolutely love it, and those who would rather stab themselves in the eye than walk into a room full of strangers and start talking to them about their businesses.
The trick is to remember that when you go networking, it’s not about trying to find the person in the room you can sell to. It’s about who can you build a relationship with. It’s usually not about the people IN the room as much as being about the people that they know. And it’s a two way street. Can you spot opportunities for you to make introductions for other people in the room? People like to give back when they can. It’s no surprise that one major networking group’s strapline is “Giver’s Gain”.
Done right, networking is a major source of leads for many small businesses.
Social Media
Who doesn’t love a bit of social media?! But it’s important to make sure that the social media platform you choose is the right one. You want to be posting on the platform that your clients are going to be engaging with.
But if you’re going to be doing your social media, you need to be interesting. Remember, you’re still building a relationship, it’s just another channel in which to build that relationship. Mix it up. Sales posts, personal posts, information posts, useful posts etc.
And you can use your social media to push people into your webinars, so they get in to your email list which will allow you to do more outbound upselling etc.
Follow Up
It doesn’t matter what other tactic you’re working on, the magic happens during the follow up process. Create some kind of question or contact opportunity in your emails. If people respond then get in touch with them to further that conversation. Create opportunities for people to speak to you after the webinar and potentially book in a sales call. Book in the follow up 121s with the people you meet at networking. Find out more about them and how you can help each other. And keep in touch because you never know when a referral opportunity might happen. Even social media is an opportunity to build a relationship. Like, share and comment on other people’s posts. You can’t build a relationship if you’re the only one talking!
Consistency
Now this might not sound like a tactic in itself, but it’s actually one of the most important things that you can do. There’s little point doing any of the other tactics if you’re not going to them consistently. It’s the regular, repeated actions that will get you the marketing results that you want.
And finally – Measure!!
You need to know what’s working for you. So when you get an enquiry, ask them where they heard about you. And double check it when you make the sale. If you’re getting loads of enquiries off the back of a marketing tactic, but not converting them into sales, there’s a disconnect somewhere. But if you’re constantly measuring your activity and your results, you can tweak things until you do get the results you want. And when you know which specific marketing tactic is working best for you, you know what you might want to do more of or assign more budget to.
