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Marketing is a must for any business, and to get business online, you have to consider digital marketing. Every business has different marketing needs; small businesses cannot copy an enterprise’s marketing agency and have profitable results. Big corporates can afford the pricey marketing campaigns, but most small businesses run on tight budgets. Therefore, it is crucial you work on a strategy that is curated for small businesses to nurture and grow your business exponentially.
Here are some of the best results-driven online marketing ideas to grow your small business you must include in your 2022 strategy:
- Personalization in Strategy
- Conversational Marketing
- Customer-Experience (CX) Optimization
- Social Media Marketing
- Interactive Content
- Giveaways
- Geo-targeted Link Building
7 Best Marketing Ideas to Grow Your Small Business
1. Personalization in Strategy
When you do business, it’s vital to form a relationship with your customers. Personalization helps you to do just that. Most businesses run campaigns that have the same message for all customers; earlier, it would have worked, but not now.
Brands now approach people with more personalization, and if you don’t do so, customers won’t even bother to engage with your marketing campaigns. All you have to do is collect more information about your ideal customers and design your marketing accordingly. You can run lead generation campaigns to collect the data and then use that for personalization.
For example, you can include customers’ names in your emails. Moreover, if you have data on their interests, then only promote the content or product of that particular category. Furthermore, you can also design custom offers for them to make them feel special and valued.
This way, you can strengthen the customer relationship and brand loyalty. It’s an affordable marketing strategy for small businesses, and one can easily do it.
2. Conversational Marketing
Businesses and marketers get so overwhelmed with technical details and numbers that they overlook the most important thing for their business; customers! All of your marketing efforts are nothing if people don’t convert on your site. So, it’s crucial for you to engage with your prospects while they are on-site so that you can assist and nurture them for conversion, just like a salesman in a physical store.
You can install a live chat tool on your site to communicate in real-time with your customers. This is called conversational marketing.
Moreover, you can set some auto-responses for common queries, so that your customers get an answer even when there is no one available to chat. This is very effective, and many brands are using this now. There are various free live chat platforms available online that you may wish to consider.
3. Customer Experience Optimization
As mentioned previously, the most important thing for a business is customers, and it’s a must to deliver the best customer experience to earn the business. Small businesses struggle in getting the business when big brands are competition.
Therefore, you should focus on providing a smooth, flawless customer experience to get the conversions and word-of-mouth marketing through to those converted customers for your amazing customer experience. You can use technology like AR to take the customer experience to the next level.
Just like Ikea. Ikea has provided a feature where one can see how a particular product would look in a room.
Moreover, you should know the buyer journey in micro-details so that you can create a great experience. Providing the best customer experience should be deep-rooted in your employees. You can also ask your customer feedbacks to know the scope of improvements.
4. Social Media Marketing
You must have seen this a gazillion times, but there is a catch for small businesses. It’s not all about running ads on social channels to meet your marketing objectives. You can use social media platforms to promote your business organically. It will take some time to gain ample followers, but be consistent and share valuable content, and you’ll get there.
You can even consider ads, but only for the things that will drive business to you, like remarketing. Remarketing campaigns have an impressive conversion rate, and you’ll get some monetary value as returns, unlike awareness and engagement campaigns. You can run the awareness campaigns as well, but only if you have enough budget.
5. Interactive Content
Interactive content is content that requires consumer engagement. Over the years, the attention span of people has reduced, and engaging content has become a must. Considering this scenario, you can’t rely solely on text content. Interactive content has been proven to be engaging and promising in delivering positive results.
Along with increased engagement, interactive content can help you get more user information and increase brand loyalty. Here are some examples of interactive content that you can consider for your small business:
- Branded Games
- Quizzes
- Survey & Polls
- Interactive infographics
- Interactive eBooks
- Interactive emails
- Short Videos
- Product Recommendations
6. Giveaways
Giveaways are a great way to reach out to a huge audience in a short time. Make your giveaways tempting, and voila! The one consideration for giveaways is you must target your target audience only. To do this, design your giveaways in such a way that it only makes sense to your prospects.
For example, a marketing tool company can give away the 6-months subscription of their tool. This would only attract the marketers and businesses that are doing marketing. However, if the business gives away an iPhone, it can drive significant, irrelevant traffic, which isn’t fruitful for the business. So, do giveaways while considering these tips and always be sure you know the current rules for contests on Facebook or other platforms.
7. Geo-targeted Link Building
You must have heard of link building, but geo-targeted link building is even better for the small businesses that serve a particular region or country. Everyone knows the value of backlinks, but for local businesses, links from websites of that particular region make more sense and give more value. So, find out the websites of your niche and target region to publish content to and earn links. You’ll get tangible results with this approach.
Here is a way to find your regional websites. For example, I want Canadian websites that post content about social media marketing. I’ll go to Google and type “social media marketing” + inurl:.ca/blog. This search will return all the websites with .ca at the end of their domain name and a blog that mentions social media marketing.
These are the creative and effective marketing ideas to grow your small business. Try these in your 2022 marketing strategy and let us know how it goes!
If you aren’t comfortable with marketing, then it could benefit you to hire a marketing agency or work with a social media strategist as long as they are delivering a good ROI.
Stick around for marketing content exclusive for small businesses.
Gajendra Singh Rathore is a digital marketing expert and is associated with an online marketing agency Toronto. He is always eager to learn, experiment, and implement. Astronomy is his escape from the outside world.