If you are looking to grow and expand your small business, you should be looking to improve your marketing strategies. A lot of small businesses will rely on referrals and word of mouth to generate leads, but there are a few more things that they should do to get their message out while staying within your budget.

Ways to Market Your Business

There are a lot of tools and techniques available for small businesses today to market their brands and products. No matter what strategy you use, you have to make sure the following are relevant to your audience and aligned with your brand’s positioning.

  • Your website
  • Your content on your site (blogs with SEO keywords)
  • Direct mail
  • Flyers / Brochures / Graphics
  • Social media platforms
  • Public relations
  • Traditional and digital advertising avenues
  • Email marketing campaigns

Which is the Most Important?

Knowing you are a small business, you can’t perfect each of these bullets unless you want to work all day, every day. To figure out which ones to perfect, you have to have a greater sense of your target audience. If they are younger, you may want to focus more on your social media and email marketing campaigns. If they are older, you may get more leads through TV/radio advertisements or direct mail.

When choosing to prioritize a given channel, you need to keep several things in mind – the most important of which is knowing your target audience and how your brand/product/service is positioned in their minds. Keeping this in mind shapes not only your approach in selecting the appropriate marketing channels but also in producing relevant content.

Whether done through a valid quantitative method or just from having an overall perception you’ve gained of your clientele, the business owner or a key stakeholder that’s close to your business will best know what your clients want. Your marketing efforts should be an expression of this – if your product or service involves very involved and deliberate thinking before making a decision, and ‘theme’ of your services is rather serious – then the tone of your content should be in line with that – regardless of whether it’s communications on your site, social channel, or print advertising.

Networking

No matter if you run a small or large company, networking is still one of the best ways to generate new leads. A particularly good method is through trade shows and industry conferences, where you can make strong b2b partnerships or find clients that are actively interested in your marketing. An essential component that may dictate your success at a trade show is how your business presents itself. This can be greatly improved by using professional banners, a service offered by Lamin-8.

In sum, there are a variety of marketing methods that a small business can employ. However, the focus shouldn’t necessarily be which channels to use, but rather how to shape your content and communications, in order to achieve your desired marketing objectives.

 

All credit goes to Lamin-8: Best Banner Printing in Toronto