Starting a new small business can be very tough, stressful, and doesn’t lend itself to a guaranteed success.
Here are some of the most powerful and effective marketing steps you should take when launching a new small business!
Email is cost effective, easy to use, wildly customizable, and successful as a primary method to market a new small business. Just take a quick look at your inbox, you probably have hundreds of sales emails. These companies wouldn’t spend the time and money to create constant email marketing campaigns if they didn’t work.
For a small business starting out, email is literally free or only $20 a month if you want to incorporate more automation and can drive customers to buy from you and deliverable repeatable and profitable business.
As you get ready to launch your new small business, make a list of everyone you know, both friends, family, professional connections, etc and create a grand opening email. Send relevant offers and news at least a couple of times a month out via email and try to collect as many email addresses as you can from potential customers and customers. You’ll start to build a larger email list, that can be segmented and allow message targeting.
A significant portion of your revenue will likely be repeat customers and email marketing is a near-free way to stay in contact with your prior customers and let them know about special offers. You’ll be surprised how well small business email marketing will work.
Social Media
Social media is another very cost-effective marketing channel for small businesses. With social media, you can stay in touch with customers, show off new products, offers, and news, in addition to actually interacting with your audience.
You should post several times a week on social media. Share customer reviews, special offers, use your cell phone to film basic videos. All of these posts will increase your audience’s engagement with your brand and further your brand’s reach.
Website
A website is one of, if not the most important aspect of your business when launching. A massive portion of sales are at least started online as customers search for what they want or businesses search for solution providers to their problems.
If you sell products, you absolutely need to spend the time and money to develop a webstore. E-commerce is growing quicker than ever, and your business will hurt if you don’t allow customers the ability to buy what you sell online.
Creating an online store is quicker and cheaper now than ever before thanks to providers like Shopify.
Around 50% of all web traffic is from mobile devices, this means in effect that if your website doesn’t work well on mobile devices you losing half of your potential customers. Even if it means hiring a professional web designer, you should 100% make sure your website looks nice and works well on mobile. You’ll be glad you did in the long run.
Your website is the digital presence of your brand, so make sure it looks good and reflects on your quality and image. Many potential customers will search both you and your competitors, if your website looks awful and theirs look great, then you probably will lose that sale.
How to Get Customer Reviews for Small Business
Customer reviews are becoming increasingly important for businesses both small and large. Regardless of what you sell, whether B2B or B2C, you should seek to get as many reviews as you can. Once you’ve completed a sale or project, simply ask the customer if they wouldn’t mind giving you a review. Make it as easy as possible for them by providing them a link to your review pages. Depending on your niche and business, you could be asking for google, Facebook, yelp, or trip advisor reviews.
Google reviews in particular are extremely important for SEO ranking, as Google tends to rank local businesses with strong reviews higher than those without reviews or with lower reviews.
You can ask customers for reviews via email, phone, or in person. Many customers that have had a good experience are more than happy to leave you a review and over time you’ll start to build a large number of reviews.
Particularly for new businesses, getting 5-10 reviews as you start off is critically important to developing your sales and SEO. Consumers do more research and cross-shop more than ever now since it is so easy, and they are much more likely to buy from a business that has a lot of great reviews than one that has only a few.
Small Business Sponsorships and PR
Getting PR for a new small business isn’t generally that expensive nor hard, make a few calls or emails to local chamber or commerces, tv stations, radio stations, many will have opportunities to let you speak for a couple minutes or be featured on their social media as a new local business. This is a great way to get your name out there and build a customer base.
Sponsorships cost money of course, but can still be a key way for new small businesses to build their revenue base. If there are local sports teams, fairs, and festivals, any of these can be a great way to let customers get to know your business and put a face with a name. It also will expose your business to new demographic and customer groups. Many local sponsorships cost little. Keep in mind that if you decide to participate in a local festival or fair, you get out of it what you put in, meaning that you should make a point of talking to as many people as possible and be as engaged in it as you can.
Small Business Local Influencer Marketing
Most think of larger Instagram followers or famous YouTubers when they think of influencer marketing, but there’s also lots of much smaller influencers that have a local or regional following, or potentially a niche following if a b2b type of firm.
Consider reaching out to a dozen or so and ask them to explain how they typically handle potential partnerships. Often for a relatively low budget, you can have a project or service featured or reviewed by a local or regional influencer. More than any other small business marketing channel in this article, this one is the most sensitive to the type of business you are. For some types of businesses, this will take more effort to find influencers that have the reach and audience you want than others.
Create a Small business Marketing guide
Building even a basic word doc or PowerPoint with your marketing plan laid out, simply describing the marketing channels you plan to use, notes on what works and what doesn’t, ad copy, logo files, the types of posts you make, and contact info for any marketing partner will make your life so much easier! As a small business owner, you have a million things on your mind, and having a “marketing plan” file will help you stay organized and objective about what is working and what should be changed.
Overtime you will tweak your marketing plan as you learn more about your ideal audience, refine ad targeting and learn more about why customers buy from you. This is also immensely helpful when you hire employees, as you can use your marketing plan as a guide when you want an employee to start helping you make social media posts etc.
Video Marketing for Small Businesses
Would you rather read text and look at photos or watch a video? Study after study has compared static ads with video content, and video content each time is shown to be drastically more effective with Click-Through Rates being anywhere from 50%-300% higher than static ads. This means that your marketing campaigns are that much more effective, and efficient. While video content, including video ads, do cost more money than static ads, improving CTR by several times often means that video is more cost-effective when you include the ad placement costs as well.
Want to know how much video production costs? Take a look!
Videos can be used as explainer videos to show off what your company does, new products or services. It can also be used as quicky 15-50 second social media, email and PPC ads. Often in this way, the videos would be more hard-hitting and focused on a certain product or promotion.
Another effective use of video content is to create case studies or film reviews of your clients. These can be used on social media, your website, and email marketing campaigns. Some of the video customer reviews we’ve created have even be used as tools in sales meetings.
One of the key aspects of video marketing is that a single video can be used over several months and in a wide variety of ways, which helps your overall marketing campaign be more efficient.
Want to learn more about how video can be used in your marketing plan GET IN TOUCH
Our consultations have no obligation and are completely free. We always enjoy learning about different businesses and the challenges you face, we’ll do everything we can to help you realize real ROI on your marketing plan and push your business ahead in 2021.
Volan Media is a top Knoxville, Tennessee video production and marketing agency with years of experience working on a range of projects, everything from 1800s steam railway locomotives to the most cutting edge cancer treatments. If you turn on the tv in East Tennessee, chances are you’ll see one of our ads! We are a top Knoxville, Tennessee video production firm, with projects commonly being used for explainer videos, broadcast/cable tv ads, digital ads, recruitment. Volan Media also is a top Knoxville Tennessee virtual Reality video production firm, having made a large number of 360 videos and VR productions across a range of industries, including various tradeshow VR 360 videos, treatment and branding VR videos, and VR experiences.
