Every business has to start somewhere and so when it comes to new startups and small businesses cropping up on the market, it’s important to acknowledge that it’s not easy to succeed. Success doesn’t happen overnight and unfortunately, not every brand or business is fortunate to go viral overnight.
The right marketing strategies and tools in place can help push the company’s efforts of being successful. However, this knowledge of what marketing strategies to use or what tools to invest in, isn’t always known.
In this guide, you’ll understand the importance of marketing for your business and a variety of marketing strategies and tools worth using in 2022. As a small business, everything and anything can help in growing a business further.
The Importance of Marketing for a Business
Marketing is an effective practice that any businesses will recommend using to build a small brand from scratch. With so much competition to compete with, the right marketing strategies can help get your business noticed. Here are some of the benefits that come with marketing your business.
It builds a brand or business’s reputation
A business and brand’s reputation is one that’s highly influential to the success of the company. If it’s being noticed by the right people, then word of mouth can spread the company name. Marketing contributes to that effort and with the right strategies and tools in play, a business can build its brand reputation a lot quicker.
Boosts your sales
Allocating a budget for marketing is something that will certainly present you with a high ROI. An automated email template in email marketing tends to be the most effective form of marketing with every dollar spent on an automated email template getting an ROI of $40. For many businesses, utilizing a range of marketing methods can lead to a boost in sales.
Builds relationships with customers and clients
When it comes to business and customer relationships, it’s imperative to do what you can to build them up. It’s not just about acquiring a single transaction but instead finding ways of getting those same customers to return again and again.
Marketing helps build connections and can lead to the creation of a community who not only repurchases from the brand but spreads the word about the business.
Keeps the business relevant
Lastly, marketing efforts continue to keep the business relevant. With all the noise online and offline when it comes to businesses, it’s easy for some to get left behind. Marketing helps keep a business in the spotlight or in the presence of its target audience.
8 Effective Marketing Strategies and Tools for Your Small Business
With the help of marketing strategies and tools, your small business can garner the same success that any big business might have. It’s all about getting the right formula to make each product or service promotion a success every time. To help your small business find success in 2022, here are eight effective marketing strategies and tools worth exploring.
Understand and know how to target your audience.
Not all of your audience are going to be the same. You may have different target audience personas depending on the product or service you’re selling. With that in mind, it’s important t o understand who your target market is and to segment these where possible for your marketing efforts.
There are a variety of tools to help understand your audience such as Google Analytics for traffic on your website to a CRM if that’s something you already have in place. If you don’t, then it’s a good time to get it whilst you’re gaining new customers.
Use Pitch for templates when pitching your clients.
As a business, there will be plenty of opportunities to pitch to new clients. It means that you’ll need a marketing tool to help with producing the best-looking presentations possible.
With a small business, you may be limited on in-house help, so Pitch can be a great tool for pitching new ideas to your clients or stakeholders responsible for the company’s next product idea.
With Pitch, you start with a template for your presentation and tailor it to suit your company’s branding. It helps save the effort and finances that come with outsourcing to a design team or hiring someone internally to create these digital pitches.
Leverage email marketing through your subscribers.
Email marketing is considered to be one of the best when it comes to advertising your business, especially if you’ve garnered quite the email subscriber list already. As a marketing strategy, leveraging email marketing can be useful when you want to target your customers or potential customers, with the right content.
If you are unsure how to set effective email marketing strategies, make sure to consult with a startup marketing agency.
With MailChimp for example, the email marketing platform allows you to segment your email subscribers depending on where they are in the sales funnel. For example, some email subscribers might not have bought anything from your business yet but may be swayed by a discount code via your email marketing.
Other customers might benefit from product launch reminders or to continue purchasing something they left in their basket.
Use influencers to build awareness.
Building awareness of your brand or business can be done effectively with influencers. The influencer era is one that has grown since the early days of social media and now has helped hundreds and thousands of everyday individuals become celebrities online.
For businesses, influencer marketing is certainly that – influential. In fact, 70% of teens choose to trust influencers now more than traditional celebrities. We’ve even seen celebrities trying to make use of these online influencers for their own marketing efforts.
Pre-schedule social media content to save time.
Social media content is king and should be utilized to the fullest regarding marketing. However, not every small business is capable of keeping up with creating content and distributing it every single day.
Thankfully, there are a lot of tools that small businesses can use to make this easier to achieve, including Hootsuite. Hootsuite covers a variety of social media channels to help your social media team pre-schedule all content.
Whether it’s for a day or two ahead, to weeks in advance. Being able to automate the content ahead of time will allow your employees to get on with more pressing matters at hand.
Monitor brand mentions to communicate with customers.
On the subject of social media, keeping up with everything that happens online gets more complex the bigger your company gets. Even for those businesses that may have a few thousand followers, their brand mentions may become so frequent that critical comments and messages are missed.
There are many more tools now that help track brand mentions online so that your social media team can communicate with your customers more efficiently. A good tool suggestion would be Mention. It’s one of the top tools for tracking brand activity online and can help keep an eye on how well your brand is performing online in general.
Newspoint – comprehensive media monitoring tool, which collects publications and comments from the Internet, social media platforms, press, radio and television. It provides worldwide coverage: 75 languages, 170 countries of the world and one of the largest ranges of sources.
Make use of your blog or create one.
If you have a website that features a blog already, make use of it. Otherwise, it’s a good idea to create a blog for your site so that you can start churning out some blog content.
Blogs are a great way to market your business and make some serious returns on your marketing budget» says Harry Johns White, Marketing Specialist at NBAblast.
With your own blog, you can post about what you want, when you want. You can also collaborate with other sites in order to gain some backlinks to your own website. This can be majorly helpful in boosting your site’s presence online and more importantly, ranking it higher on search engines like Google.
Mix up your advertising with paid and organic content.
When it comes to marketing, don’t just funnel all of your money into paid content. It’s important that you have some organic content thrown into the mix too. As a marketing strategy, paid and organic content go hand in hand. It’s beneficial to make use of both advertising methods in order to build your business.
When it comes to SEO and improving your site’s ranking online, Google likes to see organic content, as well as the paid advertising that you might do for your site pages.
Use the Right Marketing Strategies and Tools for Your Business Needs in 2022
If you’ve been looking at effective ways to market your small business in 2022, be sure to use all of the tips mentioned above. This only scratches the surface of what marketing strategies and tools are out there for your business.
Not all of them may work as efficiently as others, so it’s good to test out your marketing efforts and to adjust them accordingly to meet your business needs.
