Five Creative Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

In a competitive market, it is extremely difficult to gain attention and brand awareness. For a small business especially, bootstrapped marketing with a limited amount of budget, knowledge and time is not easy. The question inevitably becomes “How can we grab the attention of our customers with a shoestring marketing budget?” The real returns are a necessity and every dollar counts for a small business or startup. Having said that, let us take a look at a few creative and cost-effective marketing strategies to generate revenue and revitalize your small business.

Leveraging Local SEO

According to Google, online businesses grow 40% faster. Many online businesses make the maximum use of SEO to stand out in the crowd. Local SEO incorporates optimizing your website to make sure it has a result of high-rank in the local search inquiries. Local search inquiries imply that someone existing in your area is searching for your services or products utilizing keywords in search engines.

For example, Google unleashed a program in 2015 to help the small businesses and startups get found online. For virtually each and every town and city in the USA, Google has created customized websites to enable small businesses and startups to gain knowledge to enhance the information that appears on Google+, Google Maps and Google search. This program is known as ‘Let’s Put Our Cities on the Map.”

This initiative provides benefits to businesses who want to be successful online. With the utilization of Google My Business, the indexing for local keywords can be done very easily and with your free Google listing, you can attract new customers. When people search for businesses like yours or even your business on Google search or maps, your listing appears. The backlinks appear to have the powerful correlation with positive rankings. While owner-verified businesses, photos and/or reviews all correlated with strong rankings.

Mastering your Social Networks

Engage with your audience on a continuous basis. Every social network has a different demographic and focuses on a specific sector of the audience. You must make sure that your presence on social networks reflects your core customers’ demographics.

For example, “On linkedIn, the key age bracket that is represented in people between the age group of 30 and 64 years. 61 percent of LinkedIn users fall into this category. Out of all the age groups, these people will have the most buying power as they usually have more established careers with very high earnings.

B2B Portals

B2B portals (also known as B2B marketplaces) connect suppliers and buyers around the globe and help the business owners in generating millions of dollars in sales. The B2B portals are used by small businesses to enhance visibility and gain a competitive advantage.

The online B2B portals with high reputation enable the sellers to create their own homepage very easily, the list offers to sell, reply to leads, locate and liaise with buyers and showcase services and products. For instance, you may be familiar with the global e-commerce platform for small and midsize businesses known as Alibaba.com. The annual membership usually ranges from free to premium paid options.

Investing in Email Marketing

Email marketing is a highly profitable and proven strategy. Statista, a statistics portal, states that 86 percent of consumers are willing to receive promotional emails from organizations they do business with at least monthly, and 15 percent are willing to receive them daily. The businesses get an average return of $44.25 for every $1 invested in email marketing. Use the services of email marketing to optimize key metrics(for e.g., open rates, CTR etc.) and personalize automated emails.

Sharing your Expertise

In the market, nothing speaks louder than leadership and authority. Share your expertise through local conferences, public speaking, webinars, blogging and short online tutorials to gather potential new business and leads. Build your professional network apart from sharing your knowledge.