On-trend marketing tips for small businesses

Follow this guide to ensure your marketing efforts prove results in 2020 and beyond

 Regardless of whether you’re a large or small business, new or existing; paying attention to marketing trends as they change (even monthly!) is extremely important. Digital and traditional marketing effectiveness is constantly changing as people adapt—our interests, the economy, the environment, seasonality, and more all have impacts on the effectiveness of marketing efforts. These marketing trends listed below have proven to drive consistent results for all businesses.

Don’t ignore the obvious—inbound marketing

Outside of word-of-mouth marketing, inbound marketing continues to be one of the most effective and popular means of marketing your business. Through meaningful content, inbound marketing is designed to draw your target audience in toward you, versus you forcing your brand on them. Some popular examples of inbound marketing include SEO, blog content, viral videos, social content, web based seminars, and much more.  This type of marketing takes time, as your priority will be to create content that your target audience finds compelling and helpful, driving them to become more interested in you as a thought leader. Don’t stress, you’re a subject matter expert of your brand, what you offer, and your target audience. Come up with a strategy and start posting!

Should I create social media pages for my small business?

In the United States, 77% of people have at least one social media account. So yes, it’s very relevant for your small business to invest in social media marketing. It’s easiest to utilize a tool like Hootsuite or Buffer to post your social content in all platforms at once . If splurging on a social software on day one seems too risky for you, then pick a few platforms, and manage them well. Start out by posting information about your brand, and what you have to offer that sets you apart from your competition. Be sure to authentically connects with users, and post content that your target audience would find compelling. Follow like users in each platform – even competitors. Utilize Facebook and Instagram stories, as well as permanent posting. Stories give you the opportunity to utilize more engaging pieces of the platform like boomerangs, gifs, music, text and other fun filters to make your images and videos more exciting to your followers.

Grow your following with social media influencers

You’ve likely heard of influencer marketing as the influencer population continues to grow on various social platforms. If not, a social media influencer is a user who has gained popularity through a following, while establishing credibility within their specific industry/s. They have access to a large group, which is why businesses pay influencers to repost their content, or talk about their products or services. To find the right influencer/s for your brand, follow and research within the relevant hashtags used in your target market and audience. Poke around to find users that have a large following and post content that relates to your brand. Once you’ve found influencers you’d like to work with, reach out to them to discuss your ideal relationship. Some influencers will work with you for free, on smaller scales, especially if they believe in your brand. Others will work for free product, though the majority will want to be paid based off of leads and engagement.

Video content is more important than ever before

Video advertising has been relevant ever since the first paid television advertisement came out during a baseball game in 1941. But over the course of the last few years, video content has become even more relevant. People seem to engage more with motion than they do with a static image or general text. This makes sense as the combination of text, music, and video has been a popular entertainment mechanism for a long time—it’s relatable to us. It strikes emotion through general story telling. Video drives more traffic to your website and social media pages, in turn increasing leads to your business. Plus, Google loves video content. Video increases the credibility of your content, it can drive a 157% increase in your organic traffic. Keep your marketing videos short and sweet, under two minutes in length. Tease the information and make sure you leave your viewers with a question, or a drive to find information from you whether this is through a live video on social media, or a general video on your website. Make sure your video is optimized for mobile viewing, as nearly 50% of all videos are watched on a mobile device.

You need a website, and it needs to be mobile responsive

For all businesses, large and small, having a website is a must. Websites generate leads, build customer trust, and offer a centralized platform for marketing campaigns. In your business’s website, you have the opportunity to control the message about your brand to your target customers. Plus, you can develop robust messaging through a blog to help drive traffic to your site. Utilizing a website for marketing is much cheaper, and has been proven over time to be more effective with larger returns on spend than more traditional efforts like mailer campaigns. Now, what’s even more important than having a website in 2019 is ensuring your website is responsive. A responsive experience changes the layout of your website based on the device you’re using like a desktop, tablet and especially mobile. It’s widely known that over 60% of online searches come from a mobile device, meaning that if your website isn’t responsive, it’s hurting your business. With a mobile responsive site, you’re increasing your reach to potential customers, creating a positive experience for your users, and optimizing your site’s analytics through consolidation. Custom coding might be out of reach for you, and possibly out of your budget – work with a digital agency like ours to develop a low-cost, low-maintenance third party website utilizing a website builder and templates from tools like Wix and Squarespace.

Drive traffic to your website through a blog

Blogging has become more and more relevant as the digital age advances, and we’re all about it here at Reverie. Customers want to read content that relates to them, that answers a question they’ve asked, or educates them about something specific they’re interested in. Think about your own experience in searching. When you ask your search engine something like, “How to start a small business”, you’ll see that many blog articles written by business specific websites and brands will populate on page one. These include brands like LegalZoom, Fundera, Nerd Wallet and more. They’ve strategically written clever SEO driven articles that the search engine algorithm finds as being the most relevant answer to your question. Their goal is for you to find their articles helpful, that you’ll click on the backlinks, learn more about their business and eventually buy something or reach out. Keep searching for more examples, I promise you they are endless. This is one specific reason why starting and managing a blog on your website is impactful for your brand. It drives SEO value, it gives you content to post on social media, it’s proven to increase leads, and much more. Plus, in writing articles that relate to your business, you’re learning more, and sharing that with your customers, increasing their trust in you and your brand. You’re the expert, and writing content should come second nature. If it doesn’t, reach out to us - we’d love to support you in your blog strategy.

Why search engine optimization AND pay-per-click is essential to your business

SEO and PPC are large topics these days when it comes to marketing your business in the digital space. SEO, or search engine optimization is the process of increasing quality traffic to your website for “free” or without digital advertising spend. PPC, or pay-per-click is a web advertising strategy utilizing funds to pay for publishing space when an ad is clicked. You’d think that SEO would be the obvious lower-cost model, but it requires strategy, knowledge, and hours of content development via your blog and website. PPC offers above the fold advertisement opportunities in search, and can generate quick leads for your business—but at a cost. You have to set a clear budget, and determine your ideal returns. You may find that your ads are being clicked, but they aren’t converting to leads. The strategy behind your ad itself, the page it goes to, and the call-to-action on the page is extremely important when it comes to paying for clicks. Without strategy, you could be overspending without returns. We highly recommend budgeting to work with an agency or individual to manage your digital advertising budget. Reach out to us today to start the process!

Optimize your website for voice search

Voice search is becoming trendier, and this trend won’t be dying anytime soon. Actually, Google and others are recommending that businesses make key changes to their keyword optimization on their websites, local listings, and more to optimize for voice search. If the search engine recognizes your website as being more voice-friendly over other sites, you’ll surface first in the results. So, what do you do to beat your competitors in the voice race? We have a few key suggestions. Stop keyword stuffing. More people are starting to search for full sentences vs. keywords, meaning that search engines are looking for natural language over general keywords. You should optimize for both, though. Write smarter, not harder. Search engines want the average viewer to be able to easily reach and digest your content, so make it easy! Take advantage of your local-ness and get listed online to increase your changes of surfacing on the voice results. Write more local content. This will also support your local initiatives. Make sure your website’s page loading time is average-low. This has been proven to be an important piece of the search algorithm. As long as you’re following the new, basic principles of SEO, you should be set up for success in voice search.

In closing, marketing is an essential piece of your new business. Strategically marketing your brand from the beginning has proven to be more effective than launching your business without a marketing plan. We recommend attributing 8-10% of your sales volume, or start-up costs to marketing efforts. Click here for more information on how Reverie Creative can help you launch your business.