Marketing strategy here is to connect your business or site to your target market. Questions your business needs to be asking is:
What demographics make up your customer base?
Where is there location ?
What social media and websites are they viewing online
How do they search for products in your niche ?
What channels are your competitors using ?
1. Facebook Advertising
Close to a couple of million SMB’S advertise on Facebook, its inexpensive and effective way of targeting your audiences. Facebook ads use demographics of your target audience as an advanced way of targeting ad space.
Try using AdEspresso to run your campaigns and speed up your journey to positive ROI, or Instagram if your site or ad has a lot of visual content. Instagram Ads also benefit from the same data base and targeting options as Facebook, while also allowing you to connect with an audience that is better tuned for visual sales.
2. Google My Business
GMB is vitally important and a powerful targeting tool for your small business in local search.
It instantly gives your business credibility helps towards gaining visibility in the local search pack. It is easy to optimise and there is plenty of literature online that shows you how to manage all your information for all your locations so customers can easily find you on Google Search, Maps and Google+, no matter which device they are using.
3. Google Adwords
Its a quick way to gain visibility whilst you are building your organic search online. Its competitive & targeted, but can be expensive if not used in the right way.
Integration of PPC and SEO is a good way to decrease PPC spend, especially if you have implemented “ On-page SEO “ to your site pages. Google assigns a quality score to your paid ad which it dependent on CTR ( click through rate ) relevance and the land page your ad sends traffic to.This quality score affects the bid rate you will need to get an ad displayed, with higher scores lowering the bid cost.
Also using this paid channel can then provide very quick insights into your organic search campaign, and in the long run can cut down costs by targeting different channels at different times in the search funnel.
4. Content Marketing
“Content is king” in the age of Google’s Hummingbird, Rank Brain and Neural matching.
Marketers say that content has by far the greatest commercial impact on their business of any channel in 2018.
Unlike PPC, content marketing is for the long term, whether it be a piece of content on your site, or an article for a blog, it needs to time to seed and get filtered through social channels. But at the same time it also provides long term benefits for your organic search campaign that PPC can’t.
Content can include videos, podcasts, online courses, and other mediums in which people consume information, and there are plenty of platforms to utilise.
All sites in 2019 need to have some sort of content strategy in place, but make sure you give it time to generate interest with no expectations for initial ROI. Do your research, use other channels for visibility whilst your campaign is running and do not waste time creating mediocre content. See what your competitors are doing in content marketing and where they are doing well and do it better.
Content marketing is not easy, however, and requires every element to be done right:
- Quality content
- Relevant topics
- Optimized for SEO
- Optimized for readers
- Consistent content creation & promotion
5. Organic Social Media
Social media is a must, but look for the platforms that your target market is actively using, and don’t waste time managing the platforms they don’t use. Reviews are very important in CTR for your site and can be used in conjunction with your social media efforts. For example people are not going to “like” or “follow” a “new roof “ or “painted wall “ but they may view your facebook business page after reading an online review or your services. Working out what platforms to target, how to manage them efficiently and when to add content is key to using social media effectively.
6. Advertise In Niche Print Media
In 2014 retail consumers cited printed materials as the chief sources of information behind their purchasing decisions.
Don’t forget traditional media and marketing, it still exists alongside online media, and should be integrated together. For example “Orange” mobile campaign generated interest for the brand using buses before the brand was known online, and in 1994 subsequently became the UK’s biggest mobile service operator.
Writing articles for different media is also a great way to gain high quality links back to your site long term.
7. Join Local Business Groups
Joining business groups is a great way of not only networking, it also helps visibility in the local search space; sponsor a charity, get a great link back your site and advertise it through it your local niche business group.
8. Partner With Other Businesses
This is all about combining resources with another business that are either in your vertical or can help you do things you could never accomplish on your own.
Some examples include:
A SEO agency could partner with a PPC agency to refer clients to each other.
A restaurant could offer free coffee vouchers to a painting and decorating company’s customers.
A roofing company could partner with an construction or plumbing firm to recommend each other’s services during new client onboarding.
A natural therapist could offer free advice for a hair stylist’s clients.
For more info on how Freshpath can help you build a marketing strategy to last, click here.
