3 Easy Marketing Practices for Small Businesses
The nature of a small business means that marketing tends to take up a larger percentage of the total time available to you. Having a small team or no team at all means that you’re often left doing it all yourself with very little time to spare. This means whatever marketing activities you choose to carry out must show maximum effectiveness for as little time required as possible. You don’t have time to learn massive new tools or implement CRM systems by hand so quickness of implementation is of upmost importance.
Speaking of quickness of implementation, here’s 3 easy and fast marketing activities you could be carrying out right now!
1. Social Media Marketing
So yes this might be quite an obvious one to most people but the power of social media and the many strategies you can use with it should not be overlooked.
Using social media for the Attract step in your marketing funnel can be extremely effective, especially great quality and consistent posts. If a post you put out goes viral, it can reach many times more followers than regular posts, all for free!
The use of short-form video on social media is something that has grown in popularity over the last couple of years and has seen massive success on apps like Tik Tok and now Instagram. This type of content is easy to make and can often go viral without much effort. It also taps into a different audience that could give the right business a boost in new leads.
If you’re wanting to give social media marketing a go for yourself, we highly recommend that you try using a social media scheduling tool to keep your posts consistent and to save yourself from having to manually post every day. When it comes to free tools, you can do worse than Facebook business manager’s free scheduling tool or Later’s free plan for their social media scheduler. Both come with their own set of pros and cons but, if you’re only looking to post to Facebook and Instagram, Facebook business manager is the way to go. If you’d like to post to far more platforms and don’t mind spending a few pennies every month for the extra features, Later is a great way to get started with third party scheduling tools! To go to that next level our favourite is ContentStudio, you can easily manage your social media and content marketing operations with ContentStudio’s planner, publisher, analytics, inbox, content discovery, media library and approval-workflow tools.
2. Paid Ads
Okay so unlike the other marketing activities we’re discussing today, this is the only one in which a budget is absolutely required. It could be £20 or it could be well over £200, you just need to understand that this investment is well worth the cost to run an ad for a week or so.
When compared to organic reach on social media, paid ads are on another level. On social media, you can either create a specific post to be used as a paid ad through something like Facebook Ads manager or you can boost a previously successful post to reach a larger audience. Both can cost very little money and have profound effects on how many people your business is seen by on a daily basis. You can then direct them to your website where you might have a free guide that they can then sign up for, or direct them to email or call you directly about an offer or service you’re promoting.
Ads generally don’t take very long to create and have great effects on your business from the get-go. They don’t even need to be on a social media site like Facebook, they can setup to run with google ads so that people find your business when searching up certain keywords.
This type of ad may take a little longer than simply boosting a post on Facebook or Instagram but this really isn’t much more work. The great part about paid ads over organic social media posting is that you dive deeper into all different types of ads when you finally get the bandwidth to do so. This could be Google ads, shopping ads or even retargeting ads!
There’s no limit to how much time and money you could spend on ads but there’s nothing wrong with start with £20 and seeing how you get on! Test and try out, then adapt and go again. Of course having a professional look at this will cost you more, but the returns can be much greater.
3. Email Marketing
This is another great activity to carry out for multiple different reasons. Firstly, the most obvious one, you can reach previous customers and existing leads directly that you have the email addresses for with monthly newsletters or even more frequent marketing emails depending on the amount of time you have on your hands. Secondly, this is a great way to start building up more awareness for your new leads and send them links to guides, blogs and other pages on your website that they might be interested in. Like the rest of the activities we’ve discussed, this one is really focused on building up awareness of your business for new leads.
You might be thinking “Well this is all well and good but, don’t I need a platform for sending all these emails?”. And the answer is; yes, you do. But this doesn’t mean it needs to be expensive or cost anything at all during your first attempts. Mailchimp offers a great free service that allows you to send up to 12,000 email sends a month. For most people, this is way more than they’ll need straight away so this free plan is a great start. Of course there are always limitations for free plans but that shouldn’t matter too much if you’re only starting out. We also recommend other tools and you can review these on our business tools recommendation page.
*email returns $42 for every $1 spent, source litmus
The great part about Mailchimp are the other features that they offer such as their free CRM platform. This platform is surprisingly capable and can really step up your marketing and CRM processes! If you don’t have the time or the knowhow for setting up something like this, however, don’t panic! Autus are experts in all things CRM and Marketing Automation and can help you set up your free (or paid ) version of Mailchimp account. We also have some other amazing Revenue Growth, Marketing Automation & eMail Marketing tools; such as Active Campaign, Hubspot, Constant Contact and SharpSpring that we are experts in and can recommend based on your requirements and budget.
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About Autus
Autus provide Revenue Growth Platforms, Marketing & Sales Automation and Digital Marketing services to help sales and marketing personnel and teams build efficient and effective sales and marketing best practices and automate their marketing and sales processes by leveraging personalised content, various digital marketing tactics, segmentation and behaviour of their prospects and customers.
Autus recommend various products for automation, such as Active Campaign, Hubspot, Mailchimp and SharpSpring…it will vary on your requirements and budget the best option for your business.
Find out more here.
Our founder, Tom Berry, also provides selective fractional CMO services and is a member of some client boards.
Let’s keep in touch!
If our team at Autus can help advise further, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our founder, Tom Berry.
