Marketing Tools for Small Business Growth

by  Devin Morrissey, Guest Contributor

Any professional at the helm of a company has undoubtedly heard the buzz about content – creating content, marketing content and using content in new ways, such as video. Rich blog posts that contain various types of media are now the norm, and video content is catching the eye of customers everywhere. Content marketing will remain huge in 2019 (and likely beyond), but there are a number of other ways to market your small business, too.
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Lumen5 is a video creation tool that converts blog posts into social videos. It allows anyone without training or experience to easily create engaging video content within minutes.

Conduct Market Research
Market research is an absolute must for any company, and you should start as early as possible. This process will determine if there’s a market for your product or service, who your customers are and how to appeal to them. There are four main components of market research:

1. Ask questions to identify your target audience: You can ask them directly or you can put yourself in the customer’s shoes. Ideally, you’ll do both.
2. Figure out who your competitors are: Determine who you’re in direct competition with and look closely at their strategies.
3. Discover what sets you apart from your competitors: Read their reviews to see what customers are missing, then decide how you’ll fill in those gaps.
4. Regularly research to optimize your marketing strategy: Marketing strategies are fluid. They change with the seasons, trends, and audience requirements.

Market research puts the customer front and center. Everything you do in your business should be customer focused. Each market research step is about figuring out who your customers are and what they want so that you can build relationships.

Collect Customer Feedback
Nobody can tell you more about what your customers want than your customers themselves. There are several ways to collect customer feedback, but they boil down to two distinct types:

1. Primary research that you gather yourself, such as responses to surveys from your current customers.
2. Secondary research about a broader audience (millennials, for example) that others have gathered, such as a study conducted by another company or organization.

Secondary research is a good place to start to discover generalities about your audience. For example, if several studies show that your target audience is on Instagram more than LinkedIn, then you know where to create a business account. Only primary research will determine specifics, though, like how your audience engages with your posts and how your account has grown.

Since you’ll want to collect customer feedback as early as possible, you may not even have social media accounts or other marketing tools set up yet. To hear from your target audience, you can hold focus groups, send out surveys or arrange interviews with potential or current customers. As you grow your business, regularly read and respond to customer reviews, and share the best ones on your website and social media accounts – reviews from friends and real customers can influence other shoppers’ decisions. There are even ways to encourage more customer reviews, such as sending automated feedback surveys after a purchase.

Create a Customer Loyalty Program
While acquiring new customers is always great, smart business owners know that they get more traction out of returning customers. A large part of marketing should be focused on retaining customers and encouraging repeat purchases (as opposed to converting non-customers to customers). A loyalty program can create an incentive for a customer to buy from you over and over, and it may even encourage the customer to spread word about how great your brand is.

Setting up and maintaining a customer loyalty program takes a lot of work. If it’s too confusing or if the incentives aren’t tempting enough, you won’t get anywhere. Here’s what you should keep in mind:

• Signing up should be simple and easy. Require only basic information, like an email address, and don’t redirect them to several pages just to complete signing up.
• Make the loyalty program exclusive (or at least make it feel exclusive). You can invite customers who spend over a certain amount on one purchase or you can allow anyone to join and dub it your VIP program. Either way, it should feel special to the customer.
• Create repeatable – not one-time – offers. The customer has to come back multiple times, not just once. Offering 10% off the next purchase isn’t nearly as enticing as offering 10% off all future purchases.
• Think about what customers want. This isn’t the time to off-load product that nobody’s buying. Instead, offer your best products at a discount or for free with a certain number of reward points.

Every business owner dreams of growing their business over time; the dream is not to remain small and never evolve. There are all sorts of ways to grow your business, and the tactics that will work best will be suited to your audience. Remember, no marketing strategy is set in stone. Be open to trying new things, learning from them, and improving to test new tactics and ideas.

Author bio:

Devin prides himself on being a jack of all trades; his career trajectory is more a zigzag than an obvious trend, just the way he likes it. He pops up across the Pacific Northwest, though never in one place for long. You can follow him more reliably on Twitter. 

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