6 Ways to Bolster Your Small Business’ Marketing Strategy

As a small business manager, you need to have a marketing plan so that your business stands out among the competitors. However, for the marketing plan to work, you must have a solid execution strategy. This post will look into six ways you can bolster your marketing strategy as a small business.

1. Look at Your Competitors

You need to look at what your competitors are doing and learn from them. For instance, if you see them regularly running ads on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, consider doing the same. It could be they are generating a lot of leads and making conversions from such platforms. It is also important to learn from their marketing mistakes. Avoid the mistakes they make or try to correct them to better your marketing strategies.

2. Get Customer Reviews

When someone wants to purchase something, he or she will inquire what other people are saying about the product. No one will purchase something he has never heard of or not known by anybody. This is where customer reviews come in. Encourage your customers to leave a brief testimony about their experience with your business and its products. Publish these reviews on your website and other online review platforms.

3. Invest in Your Staff

Your staff can make or break your marketing strategy. Highly skilled and trained marketing staff will most likely bring you the desired results. Untrained and unskilled individuals, on the other hand, will slow down your progress. Train your employees so that they become knowledgeable and skilled in all aspects of marketing for small business. Make sure they have a deeper understanding of what your business is all about, including what you hope to achieve.

4. Automate Where Possible

Automation reduces expenses and saves a lot of time. Automate the tasks you think to take a lot of time and human effort. For instance, you can automate the content that goes into social media platforms. This way, you will have an easy time composing and posting new content on social media. You can also come up with email autoresponders that send individualized emails to your customers.

5. Network Widely

You can speed up your marketing through networking. When you network, you give your prospects a chance to have a personal touch with your company. This builds their confidence and trust levels, which translates to brand loyalty and long-term engagements. Get time and engage your prospects over a cup of coffee. Form an online community or a meet-up with other small business owners to brainstorm on a variety of marketing ideas. You might gain new insights and learn about the marketing tactics that work.

6. Work on Your Social Media Accounts

Over two billion people are on social media nowadays. Hence, you cannot ignore its importance. Having a Facebook, Instagram or Twitter account is not enough to get you the results you want. You need to keep the accounts active and updated. If you change anything about your business, for instance, make sure the same information reflects on your social media profiles. Above all, post fresh and enticing content.

What Do SEO Consulting Agencies Actually Do?

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process of applying certain tweaks to your web content that improve its ranking in the search engine results, resulting in more free traffic to your offers. These tweaks are based on following accepted practices dictated by the search engine’s algorithm, or mathematical ranking formula. How closely you follow these practices determines how well your site or videos will rank.

The sheer volume of updates to the ranking algorithm – some 600 per year for Google alone – makes SEO for the novice a challenging if not impossible task. For this reason alone, many businesses employ an SEO consulting company to help with their search marketing campaigns.

What Services Do SEO Agencies Typically Provide?

While SEO agencies tend to vary widely in style and basic approach, there are some similarities in the tasks required to execute a proper search marketing campaign. Depending on the size and organization of the agency, some of these tasks may be performed in-house while others are outsourced to independent specialists. Here’s a closer look at the most common tasks undertaken by the typical SEO agency.

1. Discovery

This is the first phase of the agency-client relationship and involves the immersion of key agency personnel in your business. The agency is brought up to speed regarding your overall operation, products, marketing successes and failures, targeted customer profiles, and marketing objectives. Your website and conversion funnels will also be carefully examined during this phase. The better informed the agency is, the more on-track the recommendations it can make.

2. Competition Analysis

Here your primary online search competitors will be examined – looking at the keywords each is targeting, how well they are ranking, and the quantity and quality of their inbound links. If you’re trying to rank for local search terms, the number and relevancy of relevant citations as well as online reviews will also be analyzed.

3. Keyword Research

The keywords currently driving traffic to your site will be examined, and a fresh search made for new keywords and long-tail keywords with the potential to drive additional traffic. Keyword recommendations will in part be based on estimated search volume and the competitiveness of each proposed keyword.

4. Content Strategy

High-quality relevant content is a critically important part of the SEO process. Your content strategy will take into consideration the make-up of your target prospect, current trending topics, and how well your present content is converting. Recommendations will also be made for expanding content formatting to include visuals, infographics, and video.

5. On-page Optimization

Each of your current web pages will be analyzed and optimized for maximum search engine visibility. Special attention will be paid to title and meta tags, and keyword and image (alt tag) optimization. Schema markup will be added if needed, and your site load speed checked.

6. Link Building

Your inbound link protocol should follow Google’s best practice for link building – only links from niche-relevant authority sites should be considered. Links falling outside of these parameters will be added to a disavow file. Web page content should link internally to relevant pages on your site wherever possible for additional linking juice.

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