Looking to better your marketing strategy? Luckily for you, Quantus Creative has these 25 helpful tips for improving any small business’s marketing.
Branding
1. Logo
Creating a unique logo will help customers to visualize your brand and establish identity. Logos should represent your brand well and be memorable for customers.
2. Brand Voice
Establishing a brand voice is vital, especially today when users prefer brands that feel more personable. By creating a specific brand voice, your content(especially copy) will be easily identified as your own and increase trust among customers.
3. Create a Mission Statement
By creating a mission statement, you are setting guidelines for your brand that you and your employees can refer back to. Mission statements establish your brand’s values and should be between one and three sentences long.
4. Establish Value Proposition and Emphasize It
What makes your brand different? Do a deep dive into your products or services and determine what sets you apart. Make sure you communicate this value proposition so that you clearly set yourself apart from competition.
5. Set Short and Long Term Goals
Building a brand is both a marathon and a race. To keep yourself from burning out and becoming overwhelmed, set several short-term goals for the quarter or the year. These short-term goals should align with your long-term goals so that you are always making progress.
6. Create a Brand Book
Brand books or brand guides are documents that include everything about your brand including logos, color schemes, mission statement, and fonts. This is a template for your brand and assists in maintaining consistency. With a brand book, everyone on your team will have a concise guide to the brand.
Social Media
7. Know Your Audience
Determining your audience is absolutely crucial to marketing your brand properly. Identify your target demographic by doing market research, and then focus on appealing to them through social media and other mediums. Ask yourself who your brand is for, where are the customers located, and how do they buy?
8. Professional Content
Using professional content on social media will establish you as a reputable brand. Hire professional photographers and designers to create eye-catching content that can be used and repurposed.
9. Creating Yelp page
Especially if you own a brick-and-mortar store or offer services, having a Yelp page can boost your brand in the Google algorithm and allow customers to review and ask questions.
10. Run Social Media Ads
Social media offers the opportunity to run paid media ads that fit your budget. Paid media allows brands to specifically target audiences by demographic, location, and behavior.
11. Implement UGC
Whether it’s influencer marketing or organic, user-generated content can work wonders for a brand. User reviews or posts featuring your brand are seen as more authentic than other ads. Additionally, users with a large, dedicated following (i.e. influencers) can help to build your reputation and gain customers.
12. Plan and Strategize
Creating a social media strategy will help you to stay on track when posting. Having an overall social media strategy can help with consistency across all platforms, while strategies for specific platforms may differ based on the audience and content type.
Website
13. Create a Positive Customer Experience Through Your Website
Your website should be easy to navigate and interesting to look at. Be sure to provide any contact information or business hours in a location that’s easy to spot. Keep in mind that the most important information should be placed “above the fold”, meaning customers don’t have to scroll to find it.
14. Write Blog Posts
Blog posts establish authority and expertise in your field, and help with search engine optimization. By including keywords and important information in your blog posts, your site can move up in ranking.
15. Landing pages
Custom landing pages further improve customer experience while driving conversions. These pages often encourage users to complete an action such as signing up for a newsletter, downloading an app, or registering for a free trial.
16. Ensure Your Site is Mobile Friendly
Using Google’s mobile-friendly test, it’s easy to make sure that your site is optimized for mobile usage. If your results are poor, Google will provide suggestions and you can outsource to better optimize your site.
17. Use Original Content
Using original content can also boost your SEO. By incorporating original images and copy, Google recognizes this content as unique and is more likely to put your site higher in the algorithm. This is another reason to invest in professional content creation.
18. Include CTA’s
Encourage users to take action with a call to action (CTA)! No matter what page the user might be on, interaction is important. For example, “Claim your bonus by signing up now!” or “Reach out to us below”.
General Tips
19. Use Analytics!
There are many tools at your disposal when it comes to checking analytics. Google is a prime example, as is Instagram. Both have built-in features for checking analytics and adjusting whenever necessary. Analytics can help you become more accurate in your marketing efforts and discover who is viewing your content, when, and where.
20. Email Lists
Email marketing is still one of the top ways for brands to connect with customers. Therefore, having an email list is extremely important for sending updates, deals, and newsletters to customers as well as increasing retention.
21. Consider Automating Content
Speaking of email marketing, one of the most efficient ways to stay on top of newsletters and other updates is automation. There are services available for brands to fully automate their emails and social media, so that they are sent or posted at specific times or to specific people.
22. Stay Consistent
Maintain consistency across all platforms! While you can switch things up a bit depending on the platform, the overall identity of the brand should stay the same.
23. Gather Feedback from Users
Gathering feedback from users can further help you pinpoint the needs of customers and how to accommodate them. Additionally, reviews can be helpful to establish brand authority and encourage new customers to buy.
24. Customer Service
Good customer service improves customer experience, while increasing your brand’s reliability and trust factors. Adding a chat box to your website makes it easier for customers to reach out, as does using social media for customer service purposes.
25. Keep Assets Organized
It’s best to keep all of your assets organized in fewer places. For example, if social media assets are spread out over 4 different apps and websites, it’s easy to forget what you have and hard to determine what you need. Additionally, when other members of your team are looking for assets, they should be able to locate them quickly. This goes for templates, brand books, images(raw and edited), and other documents. Take some time to really organize your digital assets and make your life easier in the long run.
