We love No 24, but all of these tips and ideas will help elevate your marketing and grow your business. Dedicate even 1 hour a week to marketing and you can start ticking these off and be making a positive impact on your businesses’ brand awareness.
- Add your business to all local and national directories that have a good domain authority. Think Yell.com. etc. Beware of spam directories as listing on these will not help your business.
- Build a database of local journalists. Submit press releases when you have a newsworthy story for some free publicity.
- Attend local events that your target audience are likely to attend. If the general public are your ideal client – local markets, car boots etc. are perfect opportunities that your competitors may not have thought of attending. (So what if you are an electrician, you can still promote your business at a local market!)
- Build relationships with other businesses whose clients are your ideal clients. They will then be in a position to recommend you if an opportunity arises.
- Get a website, and make sure it is mobile-friendly and easy to navigate.
- Create a digital business card. You are saving the environment and making it easy for potential clients to save your details. Think Linktree or Blinq who both have free QR codes.
- Post regularly on social media. Spend a few hours each month brainstorming content that is useful, informative or fun and schedule posts so you can forget about them. Use the platform’s own scheduler though.
- Set up Google Analytics (GA4) and Tag Manager properly. You can’t improve if you don’t know what traffic you are getting already. Google offers free online courses in bite-sized chunks to help you.
- Set up Google Search Console, check your pages are ranking on Google or submit them if they are new. Other useful features are worth a look too!
- Set up an Instagram account, even if it’s not your thing or you think your ideal client doesn’t use it, some will, so don’t miss out.
- Create video content for your website and social media. Don’t overthink it. Give helpful tips and it will be popular. Nobody says you have to go viral. Challenge yourself to 1 video in the next month, you got this!
- Attend a local networking event. Everyone was a newbie once and will be ready to make you feel welcome. Ask questions about other businesses and you will start to relax quickly as other people chat freely with you. Tip: Prepare a 60-second introduction to your business. Focus this on the problems your clients face then how you help them overcome those problems. Examples are great.
- Do you use your vehicle for business regularly? Get it sign written. It doesn’t have to be big and bold. You can even get temporary magnetic signs to use or remove as needed.
- Advertise in local business directory magazines, local parish magazines etc. These are often cheap and can generate regular business while raising your local brand awareness.
- Start a blog or news section on your website and write helpful content for it regularly. This will help your search engine ranking.
- Complete a website review. Checking all links, read and check all content. Does it still make sense? Do you need more pages or information? Aim for a minimum of 3- 400 words per page.
- Are there any local or even national exhibitions or trade events you could show at? These can be attended on a budget, with a bit of imagination!
- Complete competitor research. Find out what your competitors’ weaknesses are and highlight these areas as your strengths in your marketing.
- Set up a Google Business Profile. Or if you have one already, ensure it is up to date. Add new photos or updates to it regularly and link to your business address if possible.
- Business to Consumer or Business to Business you should be on LinkedIn. Get a business and personal profile and post to both regularly. Use your personal profile the most and aim to post to this consistently. Remember to connect with others to grow your audience.
- Use hashtags correctly to gain a wider reach of your posts to your target audience. Hashtag use varies from platform to platform. If in doubt stick to 3, not 30!
- Complete keyword research, and utilise this in your website content, social media posts and blog articles. SEMrush and various other websites and software have free versions to help you.
- Share your social media platforms with friends and family. Invite them to share on their pages and like and follow you, to open your profile to a wider audience.
- Apply for an award. Research local awards and read up on what categories there are and what you need to do. Look at past winners. You may need to collect data before applying, so do this now and start preparing for next year’s awards. Even being in the running for an award is a fantastic opportunity for PR and brand awareness!
- Get a professional to set you up with Google Ads. Don’t try these yourself as you can lose a lot of money quickly without a good response. Set up correctly with regular reviews and Google ads can be a great source of enquiries and offer a fantastic return on investment.
- Set up a remarketing campaign. This kind of ad campaign is focused on specific audiences and hence can offer great value. Imagine targeting anyone who has already shown an interest in your website but has not purchased yet.
- Get a rebrand. Old, tired, or dated logos, styling and fonts can give the impression your business is behind the times. Invest a small amount in upgrading your branding and breathe new life into your business. Plus, this is a fantastic opportunity to get some PR from it too!
- Book a professional photographer. Original photography in your social media and across your marketing will generate more interest than using stock images or worse, no images at all.
- Create an email campaign or newsletter to your client or email list. Utilise email software such as Brevo who offer a free version, so it needn’t cost you the earth. Remember to stay GDPR compliant.
- Create customer personas. Small businesses’ messaging can get diluted by being too generic. Creating a customer persona helps you to pitch your marketing to the specific people you are targeting. Don’t be concerned about alienating others. You will actually connect with more people this way and generate more enquiries, trust us!
- Get more customer reviews. Create a process to make it easy to remember to ask for a review and easy for clients to give you them. Use review platforms like Google Reviews, Trustpilot etc. Share your reviews on your website and social media to help build trust in your business.
- Set up Google Alerts for your business name, your name and your chosen keyword in your local area. Doing this for your competitors etc is also a good idea so you can be aware of any press coverage they have locally. This can help generate ideas and highlight opportunities for you to promote your business.
- Create a lead generation tool that you can give away in your marketing to generate interest. This should be something of value to your ideal client. It could be emailed to them or downloadable from your website.
- Run a social media competition. Choose a prize that will be of perceived high value to your ideal clients but low value to your business to give you the best return on investment. Don’t forget even service items that don’t have a cost applicable still involve your team’s time, and as such do have a hidden cost attached to them! Create a specific website page for the competition entries. Entering could involve automatically signing up to your email newsletter which will give you further opportunities to promote your business.
- Create a referral scheme for your existing clients.
- How can you re-package or re-brand your products or services to create a new niche market or solve clients’ problems?
- Automations can save you time, freeing you to focus your energy on other areas of the business. Auto-populate your CRM from your website enquiries or create an email onboarding program to educate your new clients and provide them with the information they need without you having to have multiple meetings or phone calls.
- Manual tasks such as data entry etc could be passed to a Virtual Assistant who provides valuable services such as researching your competitors, finding email addresses for marketing campaigns etc. Virtual Assistants don’t cost the earth either!
- Can you host a webinar training session to educate or demonstrate potential clients on your products or services? These can be promoted for Free with Eventbrite if you are not charging for tickets. They even promote the event for you (although this is limited without paying additional costs!)
- What guarantee could you offer clients? Guarantees can help increase sign-ups for your products or services and promote trust in your business.
- Do you work with big brands or well-known local organisations? Promote these on your website. Likewise, any certifications or awarding bodies are great to highlight on your website and marketing too. Always ensure you have the right to use any images or branding though.
- Monitor the web for PR opportunities. Journalists are always on the lookout for business owners to help them with articles. Follow hashtags on Twitter such as #journorequest and be sure to respond swiftly, you may just find yourself in a national magazine or newspaper.
- No events locally that are for your target clients? Host one yourself!
- Update your content on your website, and add new pages to target specific keywords from your keyword research. Submit new pages to Google using your search console account once the page or changes are live.
- Write a good quality in-depth blog post. Then break it down into multiple smaller chunks that can be used on your social media platforms as posts.
- Don’t forget to cover ‘national’ days such as ‘World Car Free Day in September’. They don’t have to be directly related to your business or industry but try and make some connection with them for a meaningful post. Don’t forget the hashtags to join the conversation!
- Ask clients for a picture of them using your product or services, with their agreement that you can share it. In return send them a box of chocolates or simply a thank you card in the post. Images with people in get much higher engagement and if they are your clients using your services or products that is even better. Add these to your social media campaigns, email marketing, website etc. and link back or tag the client if they are happy for you to do so.
- Are all of your contact details obvious and clickable on your website and in your email footer? Humans are lazy creatures so make life easier for everyone and increase your enquiries by saving people the time and effort to find, then cut and paste your information before they can try to call or email you!
- Go old school and send a note in the post to a prospective client that you would like to work with. Our inboxes get filled with spam and ignored or autodeleted as standard, but a handwritten note in the post will at least get their interest and attention. Just make sure your Call to action is outstanding when they read it!
- Be bold, witty, intriguing and informative with your headlines. No one will read anything else if you don’t grab their attention in the first place.
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