Is your business struggling to generate adequate revenue? Are you stuck barely making ends meet at every month? Would you like to bring in more customers and clients?
If you are looking for proven strategies that will help you market your SME company effectively, you’re in the right place. Smart business owners understand the need for techniques that’ll help them do a great job of marketing their SME firms.
Unfortunately, only a few small business owners actually do active marketing on a weekly basis. According to a Statista report, the majority of all small businesses spent 2 hours or less on their marketing efforts weekly.
That means, 8 hours or less monthly. Yet, they wonder why they’re not drumming up enough business. You need to have dedicated marketing strategies in place.
This is what we’re going to help you with now:
Research has shown that 61 percent of customers are influenced by content marketing. This means you need to consistently publish high quality and informative content that will cause them to pay attention to your brand.
the content can be in the form of articles, guest posts, blog posts, podcasts, and videos. It could also be in the form of user-generated content. A good example of this is testimonials and reviews.
You should encourage your customers to leave reviews. Most people don’t think of content marketing this way, but it really is effective a getting you more customers.
Reviews have been known to get people off the fence and convince them to buy from you. Use that.
Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook Advertising, and Instagram Ads… what do these platforms have in common? It’s simple: The ability to increase your brand’s awareness, grow your business and provide at least 100 percent returns.
This means that for every dollar spent, you get back $2. That’s huge, and a great way to market your SME business. Use any of the aforementioned platforms for your online advertising. If you need just one, go with Google Ads.
They have the largest market share and produce a ton of traffic too. The only downside is the cost per click (CPC) is relatively high, compared to the others.
When most people do a search for local businesses, they typically pick one that’s on the first page. This means very few people check the second page.
The reality is if you’re not in the first 3 listings for your target keywords, you’re losing a lot of money and business. This is why you ought to focus on optimizing your website for higher search engine rankings.
This is what SEO does for your business. Not only will you enjoy increased revenue, but you’ll also enjoy increased brand exposure, leading to your brand becoming a household name.
The only downside is SEO takes time. So, if you don’t have the time, you can combine this with paid search when you want to market your SME business. Just get an SEO company to handle that.
Simply pay for the traffic first, while working on the SEO. And as you begin to rank and gain visitors, you can gradually cut back on your paid ads spending.
Do you have an email list? If you don’t you need one right away. Here’s why: For every pound spent on email marketing, small businesses make back 38 pounds. This translates to a 3800 percent ROI. That’s unheard of.
No other marketing channel comes close to providing that kind of return. So, you would be crazy to not use email to market your SME in Ireland or anywhere else for that matter.
To get even better results, always segregate your email list. If your audience is demography neutral, this might not be a problem. But, if you have multiple products or services for different demographics, you need to segregate your list accordingly.
This way, you can launch even more targeted campaigns for max returns.
More people are now watching videos online, thanks to YouTube. Currently the world’s second largest search engine after Google, it generates billions of searches per day.
You can take advantage of this platform by creating instructional videos, vlogs, webinars, workplace videos, testimonial videos and so much more. A good example of using video marketing effectively would be to do a before and after comparison of a house you renovated.
There’s almost no limit to what you can use videos for. Everyone from medical practitioners to plumbers is displaying their wares there. You should too. Just make sure it’s not too heavy.
You can also pay for their display advertising if you can’t wait to get organically ranked. The good news is video marketing has been known to provide at least 49 percent ROI if utilized properly.
If you want to increase your brand’s popularity locally, you should start getting involved in local events more. This is a great way to get decent local coverage for your business. Look for major local events, sponsor those events in some small capacity, and issue a press release to that effect.
Better still, call a local media house and tell them about your participation or the event itself. Most would be more than willing to cover it, as it’s considered decent content.
Or, you can pull local publicity stunts. You can also run special offers as a way to market your SME. For example, if you run a barbershop, for instance, you can easily offer free hair cuts to the first 5 people to walk through the door.
Another perk could be to give them a steep discount for their first haircuts. Always works.
Yes, there are a lot of ways to market your SME firm. The above listed should get you started though. But, if you need more ideas, you could try partnering with firms offering complementary services.
You might also want to ask for recommendations and referrals from satisfied customers or incentivize people to do that for you. You could also take out radio ads or pay a local influencer to hype your brand. The options are almost limitless. All it takes is a little out-of-the-box thinking.
If you want to learn more about promoting your small business in Ireland, go read the marketing articles on the Host.ie blog.
