Stay a cut above the rest despite the overwhelming market with these tried-and-tested marketing tips for small business owners.
Being a small business owner can be challenging. Resources are scarce and the market grows more and more competitive by the day. You need to be smart with your marketing strategies if you want a chance of making an impression. By applying the right marketing tips for small business owners, you can level out the field.
In this article, we give you a few pointers on how you can play your cards well in the game of eCommerce and digital marketing in the Philippines.
You Wouldn’t Want to Miss These Marketing Tips for Small Business Owners
We all want success when running a business, especially if you maintain small-scale operations online or home-based. To help you sail through, we enumerate some digital marketing solutions for small businesses to help you grow your brand.
1. Define your audience.
This is probably one pointer that you’ve already heard many times now, but we cannot emphasize how important this is especially for a small business. One of the biggest mistakes that entrepreneurs do is that they want to be everything to everyone. Unfortunately, when you target everyone, you talk to no one.
Imagine sitting at a restaurant because you’re craving a burger and the waiter gives you a 20-page long menu with dozens of cuisines, flavors, and other choices. You’re a hungry customer who only wants a straightforward hamburger, and now you have to flip through the pages, choosing between Italian or Chinese or pasta or pizza. Frustrating, right?
This will be entirely different if you actually know the market that you are catering to. Creating a customer buyer persona that puts you in the headspace of your target customer makes the whole marketing process easier because it lets you focus on the things that streamline the experience of your customer with your brand. More than just specifying their demographics, consider their psychographics, too. What are their values? What is their life goal? What do they do on a boring day?
2. Reward your customers. Even better, sell the concept of exclusivity.
This is a strategy that can apply not only to digital marketing in the Philippines but also to traditional marketing approaches. All customers want to feel special, so approaches that make them feel like they are part of something exclusive boost their loyalty to your brand. You can apply this in various ways using digital marketing. For example, you can create a VIP circle and send people exclusive access or special discounts via newsletters and emails.
You can also follow the same concept when using traditional marketing methods. Even doing something as simple as using loyalty card stamps can be effective because it sets your customers to think that they need to constantly buy from you to achieve a goal.
3. Make the most out of your existing customers.
One of the best marketing tips for small business owners is to maximize their pool of existing customers. According to Hubspot, it costs five times on average to acquire a new customer than to close a sale on an existing one. That means if you have limited resources for paid marketing efforts, you can get more bang for your buck by tapping those who have already experienced your services.
How do you do this? By creating strategies for repeat purchases (like the loyalty card stamp system mentioned above!) upselling, and cross-selling. As long as you’ve given a good experience to these customers before, then you have better chances of encouraging them to buy from you again.
4. Bank on these two words: social media.
Filipinos are avid users of social media—there’s no question about that. A 2021 report by Hootsuite and We Are Social shares that the regular Pinoy spends an average of 10 hours and 56 minutes on the internet every day. This makes us the number one country in terms of global internet and social media usage.
This figure emphasizes the importance of digital marketing in business, and how having social media platforms is no longer an exception but a necessity. Utilizing social media marketing puts your brand on the radar, builds brand identity, and allows you to connect with your customers better.
Don’t have enough time and resources to manage a social media account? You don’t need to have one for every platform! Go back to your customer persona and ask yourself where your target audience will organically be. If it’s on TikTok, then focus on creating content there. You can always expand your efforts bit by bit.
5. These marketing tips for small business owners won’t be enough. You should track your success.
None of the digital marketing solutions that you do for your small business will matter if you are not tracking the results of your strategies. Whether you are A/B testing or trying new approaches, making sure that you have enough data to let you know which approaches to scrap and which to keep is important for constant optimization.
Thankfully, a lot of these useful analytic tools can be set up for free like Google Analytics and Search Console. Other platforms—for example, social media—also have their native analytics tools that you can use to monitor your numbers.
6. Build your SEO.
Marketing aims for one thing: to provide visibility to your brand so that people can consider being your customer. Visibility and exposure are something that Search Engine Optimization exactly provides, as long as you do it properly.
Here are a few ways you can boost your SEO ranking on the web:
- Create useful content for your target audience.
- Use optimized keywords.
- Create a high-quality and user-friendly website.
- Create a Google MyBusiness account for your local SEO.
With Eight Media’s Expert Marketing Tips for Small Business Owners, You Can Easily Beat the Competition
These marketing tips for small businesses can look intimidating, especially if you are someone who has never done any of them before. Unfortunately, they are also something you can never completely ignore now, especially with the continuous rise of eCommerce.
Do you want to create digital marketing solutions for your small business but don’t exactly know where to start? We can help you with that! Eight Media offers full-stack digital marketing services, from content marketing and social media management to digital ads management and web development. Book a call with us today and we’ll be more than happy to help you out.
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