Good marketing ideas for small businesses would be worthless without good planning and strategy. So although you may have heard of these marketing ideas, we will be providing the strategy and planning to go with each idea, so it’s easier for you to take and implement into your business model.
We will kick off with the basic and move on to the ones that are trickier to test.
1. Affiliate Marketing
If you are a small business, you can find freelance leader generators or affiliate marketing people to drive traffic to your site. The first you will need to do is work out what you can pay for a successful business conversion, let’s say your cheapest product is $15 and your profit margin is $5, then you want to be giving away somewhere between $2.50, $3 for a lead generation. Affiliate marketing is supposed to provide a return on your investment instantly, so find out what works for you. Even if you don’t want to partner with the affiliate companies it’s worth understanding how software and processes work to see if it will work for you. If you would like examples of companies using affiliate marketing to support, campaigns, business objectives and grow sales, this online marketing publication has the latest news.
Affiliate marketing is all about building a perfect funnel for your user journeys. It’s about controlling every piece of information to ensure that you can harness the traffic coming to your website. You will need to think about the different types of landing pages, traffic will land on, calls to action, average purchasing period. To have a successful working relationship with an affiliate, you will need to work with them to make it easier for your customers to reach that purchasing stage as that’s when the affiliate will get paid (most affiliates work on per purchase basis, not sign ups or clicks). In your strategy you will also need to look at data analytics, who will be in charge of looking at your side of data and sharing it with the affiliates so they can optimise their traffic channels?
The strategy will formalise a lot better once you start working with affiliates because you will know how well they perform and what targets to set. Before you start doing affiliate marketing, you will need to consider the technical adjustments you will have to make to your website, the weekly extra time it will be required to work with the affiliates. Recruitment of new affiliates, there is nothing worse than an affiliate producing great results and deciding to move on to another client, you will need to have multiple to ensure targets are met monthly.
2. PPC (Pay-per-click)
A lot of people struggle to get this to work, especially with Google Adwords. With Google Adwords the only trick is you need to have your conversion columns working perfectly. If possible get a developer to code a referral page in the admin panel of your website, this way you will see if the conversion in google adwords are matching up with what your website is recording. The good thing about google adwords is that everyone from the smallest to the biggest companies can try it. All you need is a few tracking codes added to your website, a basic daily budget and time.
Google adwords should only be used for driving sales, it has no SEO, branding or credibility with it, once it’s stopped you have nothing, so make it work while it’s on to drive your business. Think about research strategy here, think about Display advertising vs Text (one is cheaper but does’t always convert well, costing you more at the end of the day). Think about who your target audiences are, competitors, customers, publications your customers read, words your customers type to find your product. Experiment with phrase matches and exact matches to really filter through the clicks to find those purchasing customers. Tools you will need are the standard google keyword planner, Semrush and Google Analytics.
Once you have a campaign live, it usually takes 2 weeks to get the impressions and quality score adjustments to kick in, so plan 2 weeks ahead in terms of budget etc. If it’s not working in 2 weeks tweak or pause the campaign and try something new. Don’t be afraid to go high on a cpc if you find the sign-up to purchase ratio is good. Set limits in your plan and stick to kpis.
3. Twitter
This social media channel is over discussed and over analysed. We think it requires 2-3 hours a week max and no extra costs to get conversions. All you need is 3 simple tools, Buzzsumo, Hootsuite, Tweepi, one helps you create content, one helps you schedule and target it and one helps you attract new followers to it. It’s as simple as that. We love working with Twitter because our followers interact and engage without us having to do much work.
Where are your links pointing? Is it your homepage? Is it a category page? Once people land on these page will they know what to do, where to go next? List the ideal user-journey you would like a twitter member to take, it will help form content that is focused and targeted. Also, make sure your google analytics is working, don’t get confused between twitter traffic and twitter signups button (I did :D)
The time you will need to prepare content, monitor data, and interact with people, this might be a bit longer in the beginning, but will become easier the longer you stick to the plan. Use a simple excel sheet to plan how many tweets a day you will be putting out, whether they will contain multi-media or link back to your site. Don’t forget to include the re-tweets. Usually companies put out between 10 – 14 tweets a day with hourly spacings, this should be enough for you to get started.
4. Content Marketing
A lot of businesses forget that once you produce content, it’s no good that it sits on your business accounts, like blogs and social media channels. You need to throw your content out there and make it work for your business, which means going to places where your content is in demand. Did you write a blog about the craziest office behaviours? A group on Linkedin might appreciate that, so go and share it. Did you record a video on how to create the perfect press release? I’m sure startup business owners would really appreciate that, so join entrepreneur and startup forums where your content is showcased to the right demographics.
List all the types of content as a business and as an employee you could be producing, videos, blogs, white papers, podcasts. List it all, and realistically write next to each one how long it takes for you to produce and finalise that piece of content. Now our guess is, it will probably take you a whole week to produce content just so you can put out every single type of content you listed? This leaves very little time for targeting, so pick 2-3 types of content you are comfortable with and set realistic targets for producing and targeting. Think about repurposing content, an article written last year can be re-written to have a different angle so set time aside to re-vist the content you already produced.
Monthly figures of content produced, places targeted, engagements, results. Content marketing will take longer to get members and customers through the door, but it has amazing long-terms results so stick with it and enjoy what ever you produce.
So here are our marketing ideas for small businesses, if you have anymore we would be happy to add them to the list of try them out to see what’s good about them.
For any help or support on the marketing ideas listed above feel free to talk to any of our wonderful freelancers.
