Effective marketing takes some pretty serious lightsaber skills, even for a large company. For a small business with limited resources, defeating the Darth Vader that is marketing is even harder. As the internet takes over the world, marketing dollars are better spent leveraging online tools that traditional print media marketing.

Streamlining other parts of your business can also help give you more time for marketing. Employee scheduling software, staff rostering software, employee management software, and time and attendance software are just some of the automation options available.

 

1. Blogging with Expertise

Engaging online with people who already interact with you and your website promotes your website to relevant audiences. By showing an interest in your followers, you present yourself as genuine and sincere, and you can provide a more meaningful and customized experience for them. Use a blog to accomplish some of this. You can create sharable content by being unique and original. Linking to other blogs or external sources shows that you foster a community of sharing within the industry and value the opinions of other industry experts.

Linking to relevant external sources in your blog helps to build credibility with other experts in your industry. By sharing blogs on social media sites, you begin to develop inbound links, amplifying your marketing power. Linking to other blogs on your site sometimes generates a ‘return the favour’ sort of attitude within the community, and simply linking to other people’s work can build a good foundation for awareness. You can also create organic inbound links by guest blogging on someone else’s site.

2. Leverage the Mobile Takeover

Business owners need to find creative, innovative, and cheap methods to reach their target audience. One tool that many business owners overlook is the use of text message marketing and mobile marketing to drive customers to their product.

On average, a marketing email is opened and read between twenty and thirty percent of the time. That number for text message marketing skyrockets to ninety percent with the majority of mobile marketing messages read within three seconds of receipt.

The very nature of text message marketing and mobile marketing makes timing essential. If your customer stops for a coffee on the way to work every morning, and you want them to buy your coffee, it makes sense for you to use text message marketing in the morning.

With mobile marketing, the challenge is to know precisely the right time and frequency to send out text message marketing campaigns. What makes the most sense for your business and when are your customers most likely to respond with a positive purchasing decision influenced by text message marketing?

 

3. Social Media Marketing Personalization

Online promotions or contests engage your social media followers, inspire friendly competition, and offer freebies that everyone likes. This is a popular marketing technique because it gets the online community buzzing about your brand, no matter what sort of freebie you’re offering.

It behooves small businesses to track consumer behaviors and target them based on interests. This is as easy as using the customer’s name in a marketing email or as complex as identifying people who work at a specific company. Social media sites have algorithms smart enough to improve your marketing and target people in specific ways.

 

4. Visual Strategies

Periscope is a great tool to use to grow your customer base and business. Live streaming is slowly becoming a player in the social media market, and while it hasn’t experienced the explosion Instagram and other social media platforms have, it has shown steady incremental increases.

Some options for Periscope marketing include new product reveals, a special behind-the-scenes feature or sneak peek, or real-time customer support. Generate interest by using Periscope to market your brand and appear more relevant to the average consumer.

 

5. Email Marketing

With all of the new and creative ways to market your business, it’s easy to forget about email, but don’t underestimate its effectiveness. Statistics show that customers still enjoy receiving promotional emails from companies they have shopped with in the past. Helpful content such as industry news, how-to guides, and links to blog content can help you focus and generate inbound links.

Email content should be engaging, informative, and enjoyable. It should contain unique insights regarding your product or service. Don’t drive people away with a sales pitch every few days. If you wouldn’t want to read it, don’t send it to others.

 

Small business marketing is constantly evolving, and if you don’t change with it, you’ll get left behind. There’s no right way to do any of these things, but it’s important to try it and figure out what works for your business. Using tools such as Business in Your Pocket app  can manage a range of tasks including employee scheduling, staff rostering, employee management, payroll as well as time and attendance. This can help take some of the other management tasks off of your plate and help you focus on the marketing strategies that will bring the most benefit to your business.