5 Marketing Tips for Small Businesses
As essential as it is for any business, marketing is quite the challenge because there is no universal formula for success. At the very least, though, you should have a clear idea of who your target customers are, what they need, and what they want. With this in mind, your accountant in Billings, MT explains 5 simple marketing tips that can help boost sales for your small business.
Be Active on Social Media
If social media has yet to be part of your business, then you are missing out. Get on it right away and create accounts on popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Then comes the hard part; coming up with quality content that will continually engage your target audience and keep them coming back to your page. Don’t just post about your products as this will make it seem like your page is purely an advertising channel. Include posts about useful tips and hacks, best practices, interesting top 10 lists, and tutorial videos. If there are comments and questions, respond accordingly so your readers will feel that they are important to you. Strive to inform, entertain, and interact. Make sure also that your content is relevant in some way to your customers, as well as your brand, otherwise, you’re just wasting time and effort.
Establish Community Presence
Business should not always have to be all about profit. Let your customers know that you embrace this philosophy by giving back to the community. Participate in local events, sponsor local contests by providing your products and services as prizes, donate to charity, do volunteer work. The more involved you get, the more you’ll become recognizable as an organization that cares about more than just making money.
Advertise Relentlessly – Day and Night
All materials related to your business should show your website name. This includes your business cards, posters, flyers, banners, brochures, signs, delivery vehicles, and all other advertising materials. Go further by having clothing items (shirts, jackets, caps) branded with your logo and company name. Distribute and encourage everyone in the organization to wear these as often as they can to help improve awareness of your brand. You might also want to have stickers made to put on your car, or even on your kids’ bikes. Additionally, make use of the power of search engines to make it easier for customers to find you. There are a number of search engines out there – register your website to as many as you can, and use search engine optimization techniques.
Reward Loyal Customers
It’s been said that the second sell is more important than the first sell simply because it implies that the customer was satisfied with the purchase and is well on the way to becoming a regular buyer of that product or service. It is not enough, though, that the customer remains satisfied. You need to go one step further and make sure they know that their loyalty is appreciated, and that you are always working on maintaining a mutually beneficial relationship. One sure way to achieve this is through an incentive program. By continuing to buy from you, as well as referring and endorsing your products to family, friends, colleagues or associates — your existing customers get to receive discounts, rebates, special deals, and other gifts.
Repeat What Works and Improve on It
Analyze what’s been bringing in more sales and conversions. Once you find out which strategy or strategies are working best, focus on these, and find ways for improvement.
Let Practical Taxes Help with Marketing Tips
We can’t offer to do your marketing, but we can offer marketing tips, and we can take your mind off other things. If every two weeks you are slogging through your payroll, let us take that burden off you. If you are sitting down every spring and spending hours and hours on your taxes, you need to stop! We can free up those hours where you can be more invested in your business.
Practical Taxes offers affordable tax preparation services, as well as many other accounting products, to the Billings, Montana community. Give us a call at 406-894-2050 to learn how we can help you.