Clever marketing is all about visibility. If your small business is visible to the right audience, you’re much more likely to turn them into customers.
If your marketing strategy feels stuck or stale, it’s time to make some changes. These approaches will help you identify who you should be speaking to and how to get in front of them.
1. Choose a really specific audience
If you’re finding it hard to get in front of potential customers, it could be because you’re not being specific enough. Demographics like age and gender can be useful, but they’re massive. There are loads of other things to think about, including:
What questions/problems the customer’s trying to answer/solve
Where people are searching
What will make their buying decision easier?
What are their main concerns?
Finding a niche that works is much more effective than trying to appeal to loads of different people with different needs. This group of customers doesn’t have to be your target audience forever, it will develop if you’re flexible.
How to get started: Write a big list of your target customer’s characteristics, preferences, questions, and problems.
2. Build landing pages that solve problems and answer questions
Whatever your product or service is, it’s doing something for the client or customer. That should be really clear in all your content and marketing, especially your landing pages - your first introduction to new site visitors.
Your website could have the perfect aesthetic (and that’s important), but if it doesn’t answer those big questions or offer something interesting, people will probably leave.
How to get started: Landing pages are easy to design and build yourself with tools like Wix and Squarespace.
3. Go back to basics with your digital marketing strategy
A lot of small business owners are aware they need to work on SEO and digital marketing, but they’re not sure how. You could spend half your week reading all the latest SEO blogs and whitepapers...
The main thing you need is a strategy that works and you can stick to. When you’re short on time, it’s better to try and do one or two things very well, instead of spreading your resources out too thinly.
How to get started: Decide what will benefit you most. That could mean making sure your technical SEO is on point, updating the blog every week, or focusing purely on generating a bigger social media following. Whatever it is, do it 100%.
Read next: 6 marketing mistakes nearly all small business owners make (and how to fix them!)
4. Go where they go
Now you know who your specific target customer or client is, you can talk to them directly. If they’re at trade shows, subscribing to specific publications, reading newsletters, or listening to a particular podcast, you should try and get in there if possible.
How to get started now: Start researching! Draw up a shortlist of places/publications to target and find out the costs or what resources you’ll need.
When you’ve got your digital marketing strategy all sorted, Solna can help you get your invoices paid. Send automated reminders, and get paid faster with payments powered by Stripe!
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