Marketing your small Business

When you have limited time, talent and resources, marketing your small business is one of the first things you need to get right. You don’t have infinite resources to allocate towards marketing  so making sure you cover the three main areas well: objectives, messaging and user experience. 

What Are Your Digital Marketing Objectives? 

When we meet with a new small business client we always ask them what their digital marketing objectives are. These need to be clearly defined from awareness of your brand or business all the way down to asking people to take an action (conversion), and everything in between.  Your objectives will be both macro and micro and will normally be balanced around your website and your ads themselves. 

Always remember that you don’t own the social sites and paid platforms that you pay to play on. When marketing your small business, the only thing you own online is your website so always make sure that one of your objectives involves interacting with your company website. This sounds obvious, but it’s more than eCommerce. You want people to subscribe to your newsletter, follow you on another social channel, or perhaps maybe even watch a couple of videos. All of these actions can be tracked and analyzed against your objectives. It’s not always about selling. 

What Is Your Message? 

This is where the penny drops for most small business clients. They want to sell straight away but often, they haven’t been able to clearly define what their product is, why they do what they do and most importantly, why you should buy from them. What’s your Unique Selling Point (USP)? What is your hook? It is your 4 year 48K miles warranty on parts and labor like A+ Automotive make you awesome?  Whatever it is, make sure your message is super clear and easy to understand.

Once you’ve nailed down your messaging you’ll put it into the correct order of product / service awareness with a specific objective (reach). You’ll then create messaging that further informs your website visitor about your product / service proposition (engagement). And of course, you’ll finish off with asking for an action like mentioned above (conversion). 

How Easy Is It For People To Take Action? 

User experience is a fancy word for how people get to your landing page and sign up to buy something. It’s the experience of what they saw, where they saw it, on what device and with what objective. The first touch point in digital marketing is how you interact with your prospect. Is it an ad? Was it a sponsored post?  If so, where does it take them? To your home page or a landing page? And why? Are you selling something or asking them for their information so you can contact them later? 

All of this stuff is suuuuuuper important because the more hoops you make the user jump through, the more fatigue and abandonment you will get in their user experience. Make “the ask” easy, especially early on when they don’t know your brand. They just get fed up with having to click on more than one or two things before taking an action. 

Marketing Your Small Business

Your website needs to be easy to use. It needs to be easy to view on mobile devices. Most importantly, it needs to make your objective as easy as possible to achieve. Following these three areas closely will help make marketing your small business a lot more efficient.

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