As today’s consumers rely more on the internet to seek and select appropriate products/services, online marketing has become crucial for small business in order to compete and win in the marketplace. However, small businesses usually have a shoestring budget making it hard to access the huge online marketing campaigns. How, on a low budget can small businesses do well at online marketing? Here’s a roundup of my suggestions.
1. Find your niche market
Many owners of small businesses think that the market where the competitors are gathering is what they are going to focus on. However, as a small business, the primary focus should be targeting your niche market. Think about why you want to open your own business at the beginning. Is there any interesting story or moment that lets you make this decision? Then tell your customers the story and deliver the philosophy behind your brand to the mass across the internet. It is important to differentiate your business from other competitors, especially your business is of small size compared to probably hundreds of them. Also, your unique, compelling philosophy of the business would not only help you target customers who are going to gladly enjoy and pay for your product/service, but also strengthen brand awareness as there is something special and memorable involved in the brand. Therefore, your online marketing should possess an exclusive philosophy inside and link it to the niche market.
2. Engage with consumers
It’s known that small business owners are usually very busy dealing with daily tasks, and do not have extra time for managing their social media channels. Some of them may even automate the social task by using automated tools. But let’s not forget that social media is not a channel to flood with your ads to random followers. Engagement is what businesses need to do to build up credibility and gain real fans. No one would put trust in a company that is not willing to listen and communicate. Starting with Facebook and Twitter, which are the most dominant social media channels in the market, is a good way to practice the technique of engagement and not distract your attention between too many accounts. Try to act like a real person on your social account: ask questions, offer opinions, response to feedback, properly comment on trending topics and connect yourself to customers.
3. Follow your competitors
Although it’s been said that your business has to differ from competitors, following what they are doing would benefit your future strategies planning. In the age of social media, it’s fairly easy to pay attention to your competitors’ moves. It’s not recommended to simply imitate them. Instead, you should try to get inspiration and be creative based on their strategies. Good marketing ideas cannot be gained from nothing, and it has the likelihood to dramatically increase the attention without spending too much money. What’s more, by observing competitors, you can roughly know how customers react to and think of their online marketing. Write them down in a document and analyze it to see if your online marketing needs to be tweaked at all.
4. Take advantage of free stuff
First, claim your business on free local directories such as Getlisted.org and Google Local Business Directory. Second, use “Google analytics” to measure the traffic and the performance of visitors on your sites. Third, create an alert on “Google alert” to inform you your online presence on the search engines. Use the name of your brand as a keyword and you can constantly receive report results.
5. Automate your classified ads posting
Are you still posting your classified ads manually? You have to admit that it’s such an inefficient and ineffective way of advertising. I am not saying that online classifieds is bad for driving leads and sales. Actually, online classifieds is a really good source of clicks and traffic. Online classified community is extremely active for selling and buying, as well as this their websites are optimized for displaying your ads in a way to get understood and searched by consumers easily. You can upload relevant images in your listing catching the eye of potential new customers increasing clicks and views to your ads. In addition, full length titles and key description information on listings offers high conversion new clients to your business.
Gapmarks.com, a new low cost automated professional posting platform, finds many targeted new client for your business and generates high conversion paying leads. It’s available, easy and low-cost. The system has been intricately developed in its ability to post ads automatically to high traffic classified sites 24/7, along with its user-friendly dashboard to help you create new ads without too much effort and track the clicks and response of all the ads in one place. Customization is accessible to let you set up automatic re-post times and select the correct section and location. Various packages are available for different sectors of business, with inexpensive prices starting from $11.99 USD per month.
Check out: http://gapmarks.com/lp for more information
