Marketing 101

1. Make Data Cleaning a Routine

Data cleaning shouldn’t be a once-a-year task. If you’ve been neglecting your database, your entire marketing strategy could be off-kilter. In fact, 72 percent of companies feel that data quality issues impact consumer trust and perception.

Why? Because successful marketing relies on data-driven decision making. If your data is inaccurate, your decisions won’t be much better. In the same study, less than half of organizations globally (44%) trust their data to make important business decisions. Talk about opportunity lost!

Ensure your marketing strategy is as targeted and on-point as possible. Make data cleaning a recurring monthly routine and you’re on your way to more trustworthy data.

2. Know Your Audience

When considering small business marketing ideas, think about your audience. Who are they? What do they do? How can you help them do it better?

Buyer personas are a great way to define your audience in terms of demographics, responsibilities, and interests. Done well, a buyer persona will take on a life of its own and give you a target. Plus, these personas can be used to segment your list and better personalize your sales and marketing messages.

Lastly, don’t forget to take a funnel position into account when creating buyer personas. For example, a customer that needs nurturing will require a different message than someone ready to buy. You should be having conversations at the right time to be sure you aren’t too late or too soon.

3. Keep Content on Target

When you know your audience, it’s much easier to create targeted, relevant and (above all) valuable content. Clickbait and countless sales pitches aren’t the way to gain trust from your network. Instead, make it your goal to reach your audience on a more personal level. Show them you understand them and care about their wants and needs.

How? Instead of pushing your product, focus on providing insight, information, and maybe even entertainment. Believe it or not, this approach is a much more effective means of guiding prospects along the buyer’s journey.

This is also the main concept behind content marketing. Learn more about what content marketing is and how it helps small business here.

4. Optimize Your Emails

Ask most people, and they’ll say they get a lot of emails. Some may say too many, yet 86% of consumers prefer email when communicating for business purposes. Long story short: email shows no signs of slowing down because of how effective it is.

Email marketing for small business owners is an important but tricky business. Great content doesn’t guarantee that recipients will open your email. There are, however, ways to improve audience engagement, open rates, and conversions.

Check over this list:

1. Make sure your emails are coming from a recognizable sender name, preferably a business address.
2. Think about your email subject line. Does it tell the reader what’s next? Is what’s next worth clicking? If not, you’d better head back to the drawing board.
3. Assume the recipient opens the email. Is your content optimized for mobile viewing? Does it deliver on the promise of your subject line? Is it visually appealing and easy to read?
4. What about your call-to-action (CTA)? Do the recipients know what you want them to do? Is it easy for them to do it?

Check out our post “Understanding the Anatomy of an Email Newsletter” for more on proper email optimization.

5. Boost Your Social Media Content

Social media algorithms are constantly evolving. Oftentimes, these changes mean it’s harder to gain traction organically. That’s where paid advertisements and boosted posts can help level the playing field. In fact, paid ads are expected to generate over $19 billion in revenue by 2018.

And it’s hard to argue with their success — 76 percent of B2C content marketers in North America used promoted posts in 2016, with 61 percent reporting these posts were effective. Social ads ranked slightly lower, with 74 percent of B2C marketers using them and 59 percent reporting them effective.

If you need a quick guide to the world of “play to play” social advertising, these links are a great place to start:

• Facebook ads
• Twitter ads
• LinkedIn ads
• Instagram ads

6. Show Instead of Only Telling

Visual content continues to grow in popularity as we move into the future. After all, the human brain processes images 60 times faster than words. When you’re brainstorming small business marketing ideas, consider video.

Video content (think Snapchat, Instagram Stories, Instagram Live, Facebook Stories and Facebook Live) is continuing to grow. If you want to be on the cutting edge of visual content, try moving out from behind your keyboard and step in front of the camera.

A great idea for your first video is recording a quick introduction about yourself. Keep it under 2 minutes, informative, and engaging.

Pro tip: For even higher engagement and impact, add captions to your video instead of solely relying on your audio. As much as 85% of videos are watched without sound. Makes sense when you think about all the people scrolling through social media while at work, at the doctor’s office, or on public transportation.

Video is also an easy and effective way to engage your audience. Hubspot found 72% of people prefer video to learn about a product or service. More and more consumers are using their smartphones in place of a computer, and visual apps like Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube make posting and viewing and sharing content like pictures and videos super easy.

7. Embrace Marketing Automation

No matter how hard we all try, we can’t do it all. Many of us feel bogged down and overwhelmed by responsibilities that could easily be delegated and automated for efficiency. Even worse is when you start dropping the ball because you’re trying to do too much once. When your business starts to suffer, it’s time to reassess the plan.

You aren’t alone in looking to automation for support. In fact, more people use marketing automation than not. A Salesforce study found that 67% of marketing leaders use marketing automation. That number is anticipated to grow by 30% by 2019.

If you’re looking for small business marketing ideas that will save time and money, keep you top-of-mind with your network, and maximize referral leads and customer retention, it’s hard to do better than marketing automation.

Marketing automation can help you make the most of every customer interaction. This means identifying warm leads, putting sales-ready leads on the fast track to conversion, and follow up with unprecedented efficiency — and do it all automatically.

Sound like something you want to check out? Marketing automation is what OutboundEngine does. We’re here to answer any questions about how marketing automation is one of the small business marketing ideas that help your business succeed.

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