The Top 20 Popular Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

2. Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising allows small businesses like yours to display ads when users use a search engine to look for specific keywords. While it can result in a costly bidding battle, local markets are often less competitive, and the PPC ads allows you to keep your spending under control.

Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords) is the godfather of internet marketing channels. Google AdWords (Google Ads) started on October 23, 2000. Google Ads are competitive, and they can be expensive. However, knowing what you’re doing can benefit your small business.

Despite being a paid channel, Google Ads’ purpose is still to give relevant search results to searchers. As a result, if you have implemented or are implementing proper on-page SEO, your price per click will be less expensive.

Sounds good, right? But how does this work?

How PPC Ads Work

Google Ads works by bidding on certain keywords or keyword phrases. You then create ads around those phrases.

Google will then use an algorithm to display your ads in SERPs and gives them a quality score based on factors such as:

• Landing page quality
• Keyword relevance
• Click Through Rate (CTR)

Then you pay every time someone clicks on your ad or the “pay per click.”

It works wonders for certain businesses. But this must be a deliberate and thoughtful approach!

Quick Wins for Implementing PPC: Claim Free Ad Promo Credits

Google will often send you coupons or promo codes to advertise on the platform. Use these free credits to your advantage!

4. Social Media Marketing

Social media is a must-have for small businesses if you want to reach a broader audience and communicate with clients daily. Maintaining your own social media profiles on the platforms allows you to not only control your message and freely post updates but also to establish a community around your brand or small business. As a free channel to use, social media is an excellent place to develop user-generated content (UGC), solicit feedback, and even solve customer service issues. Many prospective clients will also look to social media to see if they can trust the business or to check out their reviews. Therefore maintaining a presence can help conversion rates.

Still not convinced, take a look at these stats:

• 80% of consumers use social media to engage with brands
• 69% of U.S. residents said that directly messaging a company makes them feel more confident about the brand
• Answering a social media complaint can increase customer advocacy by as much as 25%
• Over half (51%) of respondents said they were ‘very likely’ and 41% said they were ‘somewhat likely’ to become a repeat customer to a brand that answers their question on social media
• Engaging in customer service requests on social media can bring 20% to 40% more revenue per customer
• Shifting to social media customer service can reduce cost per contact by as much as 83%
• 71% of consumers who have had a positive experience with a brand on social media are likely to recommend the brand to their friends and family
• 59% of Americans with social media accounts believe that social media has made customer service easier
• 33% of consumers who would rather contact a brand’s customer service via social media rather than by phone

(Source: Invesp )

But remember these important details:

• Showing up on social media platforms when you feel like it is not enough!
• You are on rented land; use social media for what it is, be social and try to drive traffic back to your website.

Social Media Quick Wins:

• Tag people and brands: Be sure to tag your users and other brands on social media. Also, encourage your followers to tag your small business’s social media handle or location in their posts for the coveted UGC.
• Use hashtags: This free marketing trick can expand your reach. Hashtags work great on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. They are also starting to make significant headway on Facebook and LinkedIn.

6. Ratings and Reviews

Aside from the content you create, the services you offer significantly impact your online presence. You should be aware that people are leaving reviews of your business and services on sites such as Google, Yelp, Facebook, Tripadvisor, and others. This is fantastic if you’re doing something exceptional and providing excellent customer service. If not, there may be catastrophic consequences (more on this next). You have to be proactive in both encouraging favorable reviews and correcting bad ones. This isn’t to say you should falsify reviews to boost your company’s image, but rather that you should make it easy for your clients to leave an organic review.

Great reviews and ratings are essential for every business, especially those offering services. People trust what others say about a company, making reviews crucial. For example, a historical Normandy touring agency has a landing page with over 200 reviews, including comments and photos from past travelers. This company encourages travelers to leave reviews, which helps attract new customers.

Quick Wins for Ratings and Reviews:

• Encourage your staff to ask for reviews
• Use a widget to help you embed Google reviews on your website or point people to sites where you have the most reviews
• Never ever, under any circumstances, pay for, buy reviews or incentivize clients to leave you a review!

8. Google Business Profile Business

When it comes to marketing strategies for local small businesses, claiming and optimizing your Google Business Profile (GBP) is one of the most powerful things you can do for any business, especially yours.

GBP is a platform that allows businesses to create a free business profile on Google. It will enable you to create a profile for your service area or storefront and then personalize it with your posts, offers, photos, and much more.

Follow these steps when setting a GBP profile for your business.

• Choose a relevant category and business address. Choose the area that you want to target
• Add high-resolution images
• Use a local business number
• Add your products and services
• Indicate your working or business hours
• Indicate the modes of payment you accept
• Include the logo of your company
• Give a clear description of your business

Quick Wins for Dealing Google Business Profile Optimization

• Your GBP information should match your listing everywhere else, and make sure you avoid Google penalties.
• Reviews are very important for building your local search presence, so encourage your clients to give reviews of your services.
• Make sure your website’s content is optimized for searches.
• Enable Google business messaging to allow clients to interact directly with you.
• Create GBP posts for users to read when they see your profile. You can also post the same content on social media channels for added online exposure.

10. Write A Column

If you’re a good writer, sharing your knowledge through a weekly or monthly column might help your small business tremendously.

This is not typically a circumstance in which you get paid, but it is also not one in which you are required to pay out either. These articles allow you to maintain continuous touch with an audience and to develop a genuine relationship with the publication’s readers. Their audience will remember you when they think about specialists in your industry or area.

On the other hand, local newspapers and non-profit periodicals are frequently looking for quality contributors. On the more exclusive end, journals such as Forbes, Inc., and Fast Company are virtually entirely comprised of unpaid expert essays.

But trust me on this. These professionals make money because of their presence on these renowned sites.

Make certain that what you write about is relevant to your intended audience. This is hardly subtle advertising. It’s an opportunity to gain access to and create trust with an audience that someone else has worked very hard to build.

Plus, even if you don’t get a column, you might get a guest article, which can be really beneficial.

12. Partner With Other Businesses

Partnering with another small business or organization with a similar target clientele can help you both increase your reach and marketing abilities. By pooling your resources together, you can help build your brands.

Complimentary services can be an excellent place to start. You can create win-win situations for both businesses by sharing email lists, swapping blogs (guest posting on each site), bundling offerings, or even co-branding campaigns, sponsorships, or ads.

14. Affiliate Programs

Tapping into the goodwill of happy, existing clients is one of the fastest, easiest, and most cost-effective ways to grow. Encourage your clients to spread the word about your services by reminding them to share their experiences and rewarding them for bringing new customers to you. You will most likely receive well-qualified leads at a lower overall acquisition cost than if you had to search for them yourself.

16. Link-Building for Small Businesses

When it comes to your search rankings, Google considers the quality and quantity of sites that connect to you or backlinks.

The best way to think about a backlink is to remember when you had to write a research paper. You would reference or cite all the sources you used. A backlink is similar, but in this example, you are providing the link back to the authoritative source. Therefore your goal is to become the authoritative source and have people linking back to your site!

A word of caution, some agencies may suggest buying links to improve your rating. This strategy may work, but be very cautious if you choose this route.

However, without a doubt, high-quality links increase authority and trustworthiness, ultimately enhancing your rating. Still, the Google Penguin algorithm penalizes sites with an excessive number of low-quality or “spammy” links. The idea is to create meaningful, relevant content that people want to share in order to build links the old-fashioned way.

For small businesses, this means investing the resources and money to develop top-quality content that is highly shareable and people want to link to. Infographics, in-depth articles, long-form blog posts, and videos are examples of high-performing content likely to get you more links.

18. Apply for Business Awards

Most industries offer business awards that you enter and may win. These awards will come with an online badge you can display on your website. You can use these badges to help promote your trustworthiness and, as a result, more revenue.

20. Warm Calling

Cold calling has to be one of the hardest things anyone can do. While some people thrive on getting through all the no’s to that all-important yes, it’s still hard.

So it is unpleasant? Yes.

What you should do instead is warm calling!

Warm calling is very much like cold calling, but you do your homework before instead of dialing for dollars.

Dan Tyre offers these tips:

• Identify good fit companies, both large and small
• Research the business
• Research the executives
• Perfect your opening
• Be human
• Prepare your talking points ahead of time
• Ask open-ended questions
• Listen for triggering events or pain
• Keep the call short, under five minutes
• No answer, leave a voicemail
• Follow up with an email