Small-business owners often don’t have the time or resources to focus on acquiring new customers, yet expanding your customer base is vital to growing your business. While it might sound too good to be true, there are some quick and easy marketing tips and tricks that will help any small business tap into a new audience.
If you’re after immediate results, like improving both sales and revenue in the next three months, an SME marketing quick fix might be your answer.
Even if you think your marketing is working well, there are a few health checks that may be able to improve the quality and quantity of the leads you secure.
1.Review your targets
Expanding your customer targets is key to growing your customer base. Tools like Marketfind can provide more detailed information on customer segments, spending patterns and media consumption and will ensure your efforts aren’t wasted focusing on audiences with little return.
2.Make it mobile
Mobile compatibility is another small but important health check. Research from Nielsen shows 69% of Australian web traffic is on mobile and with Google’s Mobilegeddon algorithm prioritising mobile-friendly websites, ranking them higher in searches, if you haven’t optimised your site you could be invisible to a large chunk of potential customers.
3.Keep it fresh
For all your SME marketing it’s important to refresh your content constantly. Rotating your creative every month or two will help improve click-through-rates – CTR – from your ads and is critical to ensure you’re not being overlooked or wasting money. Your CTR can drop by as much as half when creative has been running for just 3 months.
4.Use cost-effective channels to get attention
Consider the most cost-effective and easy-to-implement marketing channels that you can use to get even more attention from potential customers. Although seemingly simple, search, letterbox and SMS have proven return on investment:
- Search – Approximately 93% of online experiences start with a search engine and with the top three links on a Google search getting more than 60% of traffic, optimising your search is critical to not only put your business front of mind but also capitalises on online shopping behaviours.
- Letterbox – Despite what we’ve been told, print isn’t dead. In fact, letterbox media reaches almost 20 million Australians, more than any other traditional media. It is also great for targeting specific socioeconomic groups, or simply targeting people in the local area.
- SMS – When quick results are the aim, you can’t go past SMS. The speed at which it’s delivered coupled with a 98% open rate makes its immediacy and engagement hard to ignore.
While the quick fix is not always the best option in every circumstance, a brief health check of current marketing practices can be really useful to assess the status of your business’ marketing efforts. This will help you better understand where you are performing well and also provides a great foundation for implementing further marketing tactics.
Sarah Pike, Chief Marketing Officer, Salmat
