Tag Archives: marketing

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Marketing your small business is important to raise your brand awareness and build a pipeline of qualified leads that can turn into customers.

If you’re struggling with a limited budget, time restraints, or even a lack of direction, a solid marketing plan can provide guidance as you scale your business.

Here are 5 tips to consider when initially starting your marketing plan:

  1. Know Who Needs Your Help 

Understanding your target market’s pains, problems, triggering events, and priorities is essential in effectively marketing to them. Spend time networking and talking to other small business owners. Find out what they struggle with in their business. Read industry blogs, join online entrepreneur groups or listen to small business podcasts. Targeting the right audience with your value proposition can make all the difference in having a successful marketing campaign and attracting clients.

  1. Set Yourself Apart from Other Small Businesses 

What do you do that will differentiate you from others in your space and make your target market feel that you’re the VA to go with? What do you do better than anyone in the industry? What talent or experience will resonate with their pain points? Conveying this makes a compelling argument to learn more about you and your services.

  1. Be Strategic 

Start small and be scrappy. Figure out where you spend your time online and start there. Use free online tools or invest in a paid Google ad or sponsored Meta post. All these options are an effective and budget friendly option to start with. As your business starts to scale you can invest more time and energy into larger marketing goals and more sophisticated online tools.

  1. Leverage Current Clients 

Your current clients can easily help you with your marketing by sharing your social posts, adding you to their newsletters, and providing word of mouth referrals. Don’t be afraid to ask them for their help by mentioning your business to their network. As long as there is reciprocation, this can be a win/win for everyone.

  1. Have a Professional Visual Identity 

Having a logo and an easy to navigate website can make a difference in attracting customers. Having a unique branded identity (as previously mentioned) is important for your professional online presence. There are free and inexpensive options for designing your logo or website online, or you can also reach out to freelance graphic or web designers who can provide you with design assistance and website building tools.

 

BONUS TIP: Hire a virtual assistant to help you in the areas of marketing that you may not be confident in. Social media markting, graphic design, and email marketing are a few areas where hiring a VA a few hours a week (or more) may be worth the investment. We are always here to help you find the right virtual assistant that will become an asset to your team. 

There is a lot of information being pushed out online, and getting your message read is not always the easiest thing to do.

Here are 5 tips to help you stand out from your competition online:

1. Identify your customers pain points and explain how you can help solve them.

2. Keep it simple – blogging and social media marketing doesn’t have to be difficult. Keep it simple, focused and streamlined.  Make sure you stay in your professional lane.

3. Focus on quality  vs. quantity.  If you only have time to blog once a month, than make sure that blog post adds value to those reading it.  Same goes for social media.  Stuffing your platforms with content is never a good idea unless that content is relevant to your audience and provides useful information.

4. Collaborate with like-minded professionals. This is a great way to extend your brand and meet amazing folks who are on similar business journeys.

5. Be responsive.  If a comment or question is made on your blog or posted on your social media be sure to respond. It shows that you are invested and engaged with your community.

Many people think that sending business related emails may not be an effective way to reach their customers, since many of our in-boxes are over-flowing with daily,weekly and even monthly messages.
Shockingly, trends and statistics are showing the complete opposite. People are reading and still opening their emails every day.

That being said, let’s look at a couple of tips from Huff Post – What’s Working With Small Businesses that will help you take advantage of using email to convert sales.

1. Communication – Think about it. You talk to customers daily. You, or your team, interact with customers and prospects (and multiple people within a customer) daily. Much of this interaction occurs through email. Be sure that you are using some type of email marketing platform that allows you to track your emails – when your contacts open and/or click through to certain links. Platforms such as Mailchimp, Constant Contact or iContact are just a few to name.
2. Offer an incentive – Name one person that doesn’t like free stuff. Offering a free gift or providing a special time sensitive discount is a great way to push leads to convert. The discount doesn’t have to be something outrageous and the free gift doesn’t have to have a high monetary value. The average consumer simply can’t pass up a free offer or a limited-time discount.
3. Ask for the sale – How is asking for the sale ground breaking marketing advice? It’s not — it’s actually common sense, but something that many businesses just don’t do. Ask your leads if they are ready to purchase and watch how many reply “yes.” They became a lead because they were interested in what your business offers. Food for thought: if your business doesn’t ask for the sale your competitor will.
4. Develop a great FAQ page on your website – Many leads won’t convert because they have questions that they need answered before they pull the trigger. Answer common questions that your leads might have and make it prominent on your website. Talk to your sales team and customer service reps to put together a list of common frequently asked questions. Take a look at this excellent FAQ page from Webdesigner, to learn how to create the perfect FAQ!

The world of marketing has changed drastically over the past decade, but one thing is certain, getting your message or offer in front of your customer, potential customer, or past customer is still the basis of a strong marketing campaign. But what is the best platform to do that on? There are many choices, but the email inbox is still a very personal way to communicate with them.

Email marketing is generally subscription based, meaning the recipient has given you or your company permission to email them. This list needs to be treated like gold, because what is given can be taken away, meaning there is usually an UNSUBSCRIBE option on all the emails sent to your list. Unsubscribe is often clicked on when you are sending out too many emails that are not providing value or relevant information to your subscriber list. Can you hit a “home-run” every time you send an email out? Not likely, but if you are strategic in your email marketing campaigns an provide useful information or exclusive offers your emails subscribers should grow and not shrink.

When you offer an opt-in box on your website for a visitor to be added to your email list, you need to have a welcome email setup in an auto-responder through your emailing marketing or e-commerce service. Some popular services are Constant Contact, MailChimp, Aweber, 1ShoppingCart, Infusionsoft and Shopify. Marketers have a huge opportunity with welcome emails. According to Skyline Technologies, welcome emails have an average open rate of 50-60%. With a high open rate you can see the importance of the welcome email to new subscribers.

According to Hubspot, a typical welcome email content should include:
• A link to confirm the subscriber did indeed subscribe to the email list
• A message of thanks for subscribing to the email list
• A request to mark you as a safe sender, or save you to their address book
• Some information about what content future emails will contain
• Your privacy policy to ensure their information will be used properly

The welcome email is also a great time to introduce your subscribers to your blog, with a direct link and description, ask them to join you on social media, again with easy links to your accounts, and give them the opportunity to contact you directly about your product or services.

After the initial welcome letter, be sure to have your email marketing plan in place so that your subscribers continue to receive your emails on a regular schedule. Managing your email marketing can be a lot of work, but you can’t ignore a list of people who have asked to receive updates from you. If you can’t handle it yourself, find someone who can help you with managing it. Don’t let your subscriber pot of gold turn into dust!