Small Businesses - Marketing Trends To Focus On

Marketing is a surprisingly complicated affair. Awareness of upcoming trends and new channels of communication is absolutely crucial, since missing out on even one or two might put you in plenty of problems. In order to keep your small business successful, you might need to step up your marketing game. Here are a few tips on where to start.

1. Create a visual strategy

The prevalence of live streaming is steadily increasing. Just in the last year Facebook reported over 100 million hours of video per day being watched on its social media platform. Engaging with your audience using visual content is much more successful than by text when it comes to interaction.

Visual campaigns take quite a bit of effort, but are registered by the customers at a much higher rate than text-based ones, and are notoriously more successful when it comes to social media impact. Long story short, images stand out - text doesn’t.

2. Take care of the quality of your blog posts

Pretty much every business out there adopted some sort of a blog over the last few years. It’s a great way to improve your search engine optimization and improve your ranking. However, most firms focus on the frequency of posting rather than quality of the content they provide (Not us, obviously!).

Let’s be honest here - if you are writing an article, aren’t you doing it so somebody will ready it and interact with it? Otherwise it’s quite pointless. By combining content with keywords and proper SEO you are capable of achieving a larger amount of visitors, but it won’t do you much good if you manage to quickly lose their interest, and the effectiveness of your blog will take a plunge.

3. Email Marketing

Email marketing is easy to discredit as spam. However, it does not necessarily have to be the case. A study by MarketingSherpa shows that the vast majority of online adults in the US (91%) don’t mind receiving promotional emails, with most of them checking “at least monthly” as their preferred frequency.

The key aspect of the study was receiving messages from companies that the person has previously done business with. This shows that they are not willing to simply accept any sort of promotional content - it has to be specifically targeted to them, providing them with relevant and interesting information. If what you are sending doesn’t appeal to you, why should it matter to them?

4. Personalize your marketing strategy

We live in the times when mass approach is not particularly appreciated by the customers. Personalized experience is the key to success, and it will be extraordinarily difficult to provide it if you don’t know your customers or are unable to contact them properly. Some ways barely require any effort, such as including the customer’s name while sending mass emails, while others can be quite complex and demand significant amounts of research and data collection.

Personalized messages give significantly better results than their mass counterparts, having better open rate and click through rate, and resulting in a larger number of potential customers.

5. Don’t ignore mobile devices

Everyone has a smartphone. They are topping the charts as the most popular way of using the internet, and are constantly on the rise in terms of popularity. While having a website is a great starting point, it won’t be nearly as effective as it could if you don’t adopt a mobile strategy and set it up to be as mobile-friendly as possible.

Most effective marketing practices are constantly changing. Paying attention to what the customers want and what trends are emerging is key to understanding how to conduct your communication and what to focus on for the given period. It’s certainly not easy, but the pay-off is definitely worth it.