Easy Ways to Improve Marketing for Small Businesses
A recent article on Forbes listed five easy ways for small businesses to improve their marketing. At Adopt A Highway Maintenance Corporation®, we thought it would be a good idea to share some of our small business marketing tips.
1. Work Collaboratively
More often than not, employees end up focusing solely on their department and their role within the company. This creates a vacuum and is terrible for business. It is crucial to create and cultivate a seamless experience for your customer. This is done by having all departments, especially sales and marketing, work collaboratively. In simple terms, marketing does the preliminary research and plans campaigns, while sales acts on marketing’s efforts. It is crucial for sales to provide feedback to marketing, not just to track ROI but in terms of lead quality and target market response. This will help ensure that campaigns get progressively more effective and marketing efforts get more tailored to your specific business objectives.
2. Prioritize your current customers
For small businesses, it is crucial to maximizing every dollar. Because of this, it is so essential to ensure that your current customers are satisfied rather than spending your entire marketing budget trying to attract new customers. If you have found flaws in your customer service department, allocate some of your budget to solving those issues first. Your current customers need to feel valued. A happy customer will lead to good testimonials, referrals, and, as a result, new customers!
3. Research
Subscribe to email updates from blogs, journals, websites, newspapers etc. This is the most cost-effective way to stay updated with current events, industry changes, and trends. Some of the best marketing ideas come from reading articles and getting ideas written by people outside of your business.
4. Google My Business
Google My Business is a free way to reach your local target market. Visit google.com and click on “get on google.” You can set up a business account, and your listing will appear on Google and Google Maps when someone searches for your business or similar businesses near you.
5. Be Visual
People love visual content, especially on social media! Make sure your website and social media accounts include just as many images and videos as they do text. A balance of the two will increase customer engagement and will more likely convert a page visitor into a customer!