7 Awesome Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

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7 Awesome Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

BY ERROL D. CROCKETT

Today I’m going to share with you 7 awesome marketing strategies that you can use to effectively market your small business, but before I start I’d like to take a look at what marketing is.

The Definition of Marketing

According to the American Marketing Association, marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.

My anchor background is in the sales profession and there was a long period of time where I didn’t really understand the difference between sales and marketing.

I figured I’d better start by defining “Marketing”, just in case any of my readers were in the same state of mind that I was. There was a time when I was of the mindset of pure sales, which is very valuable, but it doesn’t take advantage of the other processes that support sales, such as marketing institutions.

Adding the awareness and the use of marketing institutions immediately gives a small business an exponential creation and communication advantage and it’s easier to do this today than ever before.

Marketing gives a salesman leverage and increased exposure that would not be present if it wasn’t available.

It can be the difference between riding a horse or driving a Ferrari. Sales is cool, but it’s very watered down without the support of good marketing.

The marketing tips we will discuss in this article will discuss the institutions and processes for creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging offerings that have value for clients, partners and society at large.

Let’s go!

1. Get A Website

The most impressionable part of my early sales career was with a company that thrived on door to door sales. Our training included being loaded onto buses, dropped off in strange neighborhoods and having to sell consumer products door to door, working our way back to the home office on foot!

When you completed your training, the practice was transferred and instead of calling on neighborhood homes, you called on businesses.

I did this for years at a very high level, achieving top sales status and ultimately a regional managers position helping my fellow salespeople to do the same.

I can tell you from experience, you’re only going to sell so much doing it this way. I carried on like this for years, even after I started my own business, until I discovered my first website.

My website helped me to gain an advantage I didn’t have while only selling door to door.

Before I discovered the website, I sold products in New Jersey, New York and a little in Connecticut, seeing on average of 15 customers a day. I wore out lots of vehicles and spent lots of time riding in the car.

When I introduced the website to my business, I sold products all over the world and my warehouse was in my basement!

I sold products in most of the United States, Canada, England, Australia, Jamaica, Belgium, South Africa, The Netherlands, and other countries that I’d never set foot in. I’d also secured distributors nationally through this process; all because of a website.

It was typical for customers to call and say, “I placed an order yesterday, would you be so kind as to transfer me to the department where that I can get a tracking number?” There I was, sitting in my kitchen, in my shorts; it took everything I had in me not to say, “please hold”.

2. Door to Door Sales

If I seemed to “poo poo” door to door sales, I didn’t mean to. It’s very effective, especially when you’re first starting out. The close ratios are much higher. Door to door sales is marketing too, but don’t make it your only means.

3. Facebook Advertising

There are over 2.38 billion monthly active users on Facebook. We also give Facebook permission to collect an incredible amount of data about us; trust me, they know EVERYTHING! If you need to get in touch with a customer about something you offer, you can do it on Facebook. If you don’t believe me ask the Russians! (a little media humor)

You can target almost anyone on Facebook. I’ve personally spent thousands of ad dollars targeting women who are interested in natural hair care and I can tell you, it has all come back to me in the form of sales.

4. Google Ads

You hear it all the time, “Google it”. Google is another big data collector and millions of people use it every day to find what they want. Make sure you’re considering the ad platform to target people who are looking for what you have to offer.

Google ads are a bit more expensive than Facebook, but Facebook social media crowds are considering products for the future, whether it be near future or far. Google’s crowd is looking for products in real time; they want what you have to offer, and they usually want it now.

Also, if you’re a local business, don’t forget to sign up for your Google local listing, it’s referred to Google My Business and if you get on the first page of the business listing you can reap big time. Bing and Yahoo have local listings as well.

5. Webinars

Webinars are another great marketing tool. As with all forms of marketing you should always seek to offer value.

You may have to experience this to know that it’s true. What I’m about to tell you may not make immediate sense, but if you have a service or process that you like to provide for people you can actually show them step by step how to get it done by themselves, without paying you a dime. Now that’s value!

You might be thinking, as I was, “how am I going to make money if I show them how to do it themselves?” But here’s the catch. Time is the most valued commodity that I know of and yes, some of your viewers are going to follow your webinar instructions and perform the service for themselves, but a percentage of your webinar participants will just opt to have you perform the service for them.

Most people are busy and have other things to do, they just want to have confidence that you know how to get the job done.

A webinar is a great marketing tool.

6. Email Marketing

Maybe four years ago I discovered email marketing, honestly, I thought it was not important.

I know better now. If you are not actively and aggressively collecting emails you are sleeping on a major growth opportunity. Email Marketing is relevant and powerful. The bigger your email list grows the bigger your business grows – full stop.

Before I understood this, I casually collected emails and hardly ever used them. When I discovered my mistake, I immediately started offering something of value in exchange for customer emails and grew my list to 4,400 emails in a short period of time and used the list on a regular basis.

My customers responded when I sent them something of value and when I had a sale all I had to do is press the send button to reap huge benefits. If I’d only known sooner my list would have been 10,000 or more!

7. Content Marketing

Because of my past business affiliations, I have a special insight into the marketing practices of my former customers. First, I’ve noticed that most of them do not have websites, but I’ve also noticed that the customers who do have websites don’t produce a steady flow of content.

For the past 10 years I’ve been hearing the assertion that we are in the information age and it’s true. You don’t need the right answers today; all the right answers are available; what we’re really after are the right questions. This is the luxury that the information age has afforded us.

Technology is moving so fast, that, if were not careful we can be left behind in the flicker of an eye. I heard someone say recently that we’re no longer in the information age, were in the attention age! There’s so much information that we’ve reach information overload.

Because there is so much information, good marketing demands that we produce excellent content; content that our customers will pay attention to.

Content is Queen today and you must at least participate in one of the big three: blog (newspaper), YouTube (tv station) or podcast (radio station). You don’t have to do all three, but you must do one and dominate.

So much good comes from content creation. Through content creation you gain credibility, exposure, distribute value and a host of other advantages.

Content marketing is key if you want to gain attention and it must be valuable and produced on a regular basis to be effective.

Conclusion & Summary

Ok, that’s the deal: 7 proven marketing strategies that have worked for me personally. They are also working for thousands of others and I know they can work for you as well.

There’s one thing that I didn’t mention but I’ll cover in depth in future post and that is learning to split test when you’re advertising. I’ve learned the hard way by spending lot’s of money in online advertising that you have to split test advertising headlines. That’s the only way you’ll ever find out what’s really working and what’s not. I hope you enjoyed this and I’ll be back in contact very soon!