Marketing is a vital part of success for every business- especially small businesses. Marketing is one of those areas that’s often an afterthought, but without it, your business would stall very quickly. So if you’re starting a small business, it can be very nerve-wracking!
A big part of writing your business plan is doing research and creating a rough marketing plan to make it a success. By now, you should have done all of your research and know who you’re targeting, where they hang out and what your USP is. This guide is your next step – how to choose and implement the right inbound marketing strategies for your business.
Website
The very first thing you need to get set up is a website. This is the foundation for all inbound marketing strategies and serves as the hub of your business online. Every marketing effort you invest in should lead customers back to your website, where they can get in contact with you directly. Which means you need to make sure you get it right first time. Even if you’re on a shoestring budget and putting together a website yourself using a service like Wix or Squarespace, there are a few important things you need to remember:
Include The Right Pages
You will need at least a home page, a services page (or pages), an about page and a separate contact page. Depending on your business you can add more or include specialised pages like a press hub or a product overview page. But having the basics will go a long way.
Make Sure It’s Optimised For Search Engines
A key to being found online is making the search engines happy. Making sure your site is optimised for SEO is a must. That means researching and choosing your keywords, making sure your site is mobile-friendly, with a clean and readable design and enough copy on each page to register with Google. Once you go down the SEO rabbit hole it’s easy to get lost, but make sure you have the basics covered at launch, and the rest can be developed as you go.
Make Sure It’s Well Designed
Nothing turns users off faster than a badly designed website. So whether you design your website yourself or get a professional to do it for you, it’s important to make sure it looks good on desktop and mobile, it can be read easily, and it loads quickly.
Once your main website is done, you should continue to populate it with content on a regular basis. This is usually done via a blog page, where companies can write and publish blog posts for their customers to read. This provides valuable information, and content to share on social media, and gives Google more pages to index – all of which improves your Seo and visibility.
Social Media
Once you have a website sorted, it’s time to set up your social media accounts. We’re going to say something that might be quite controversial here. Are you ready for it?
You don’t have to be on all of the social media platforms.
There’s a lot of pressure for businesses to be present on every single social platform there is so that they can maximise their reach. But there are, at time of writing, around 14 main social media platforms across the world, along with hundreds of more localised variations. It’s impossible to be on all of them and do a good job.
So don’t.
Use all of that market research to really hone in on which social media platforms your target clients are using, and make sure you’re on them. If your clients aren’t there, anything you do on the platform wastes time and energy. If you want to expand to other platforms in the future you can, but while you’re starting out, it’s worth just focusing on what will get results.
Create your accounts, make them look beautiful, and then start posting. More than that, make sure you engage as well! Follow other accounts, talk to people who interact with your content, and participate in public discussions. There’s no better way to highlight your presence than to show up and share your knowledge.
Video
Right alongside social media is video. Video marketing is incredibly important for SEO and customers, so you should invest in it if you can. Whether that’s recording short videos for social media, explainer videos for your products or a company introduction trailer, getting some video content mixed into your general marketing will increase its success significantly.At Lion Spirit Media, we understand that marketing doesn’t come easily to everyone- and that many small business owners will struggle to find time to fit it in alongside their other business activities. That’s why we provide a full-service marketing service for business owners, whether you’re a one-man band or a large corporation. If you would like to find out more, just get in touch with the team today.
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