There are three marketing opportunities that small businesses should be taking advantage of. These marketing tools are overlooked yet simple ways to increase customer interaction and brand exposure. So begin 2017 right and take advantage of these indispensable opportunities for marketing your business.
1. Use Public Relations With Trade Publications
There are trade magazines for every industry, you just have to dig a little to discover them. They serve the people who are interested working in your field of business.
Chances are, your industry’s publications will welcome articles or press releases from your company. Hot topics include new product or service announcements, special events, and recent innovations. Be creative and choose different angles to highlight your expertise and distinguishing features.
Editors are especially pleased when you pitch an idea for a story. Finding writers for trade publications is becoming more difficult on limited budgets, and keeping the news cycle fed around the clock requires many helping hands.
Don’t forget to reach out to local publications, such as your local newspapers and small-town dailies and weeklies. Community journalism continues to be widely read by loyal followers looking for familiar names and faces.
2. Join the Video Revolution
Competing for audience attention is a growing challenge with social media, online blogs, and the numerous specialized publications being introduced into the marketplace. Digital media has helped create an instant-gratification response to already shorter attention spans.
Everywhere you go online, it’s noisy and distracting. In response to this noise, a video revolution began in 2016 and shows no sign of stopping. While text-based content will never go out of style, the power of communicating with video as a versatile and profitable tool is worth your consideration.
Wyzowl statistics show that 61% of businesses have incorporated video as a marketing tool. Some of the top reasons to use video in your marketing include:
- Product videos and videos explaining how to use your product can help increase sales and conversions. Effective videos can also help build customer trust by providing useful and interesting information, an essential ingredient in content marketing.
- As an added bonus, videos increase the time your visitors spend on your website. This tells search engines that your site has good content, helping your rankings.
- By embedding video in your site, you are fifty-three times more likely to show up on page one of Google, according to Moovly. Google likes video, especially when you’re optimizing your videos on YouTube, which Google now owns.
- Video is easy to digest, share, and create. Take advantage of the video-making platforms out there, such as Magisto, Animoto, and numerous other apps. Social media has its own formats, including Twitter’s Vine, Instagram, and Snapchat.
In five years, will you be reading an article like this, or will you be watching it on video? If you think about the rapid growth in video so far, it’s a question you need to be asking.
3. Check Your Website
Just because you have a website doesn’t mean that you’re done with it. Certain website features are an absolute requirement for growing your business. Here are three:
- How’s your About Us page? Is it designed to maximize its potential to yield results? Your About Us page should be more than a poster for your team. It should help you establish a relationship with people, turning leads into customers by building trust.
Talking directly to your audience and offering them solutions in a way that connects will help them in their decision to choose your product or service. Add some testimonials, include your company logo above the fold, and be forward-thinking by embedding a video.
- Do you have a call to action (CTA) on every page? There should be a clear image or line of text that asks your visitors to take a specific action. The action to take should be clear and will often include an imperative verb, or a verb that gives an order.
Examples are “call now,” sign up today free,” or “get started now.” It should also be clear what your visitor can expect from taking action. They need to know if they’re going to download a free e-book, get a coupon, or receive a quote.
Make sure to include a CTA above and below the fold if possible. Including a secondary CTA can be beneficial in certain cases, such as asking visitors to subscribe to your blog. It can also prove to be useful when your visitor isn’t interested in taking the first course of action, but they’ve stuck around to keep reading. So why not offer them another option?
Give your audience plenty of opportunities to learn about you by optimizing your site, utilizing video, and getting your company recognized in trade publications. Each of these missed opportunities holds huge potential for marketing your business.