How do you decide to spend your marketing budget? Are you sure you’re investing in the right areas?
Yes, you need online presence and printed marketing. But are you missing out on one of the most beneficial tools every business should invest in? I call this an investment, not an expense. That’s the power of company signage. Here’s why. Do you have an amazing product/service? Do you want to generate more sales, draw in new customers and encourage past customers to return?
Of course you do! That’s why you need a solid marketing plan! Marketing plans don’t have to be long, time-consuming or difficult to produce. They should be simple and effective. You can even find free tools online to help create your small business marketing plan. Whilst building your plan, remember these simple marketing tips to help give your small business a boost this year and get you moving in the right direction. Does your brand need a new lease of life?
Look at some of the big household names; Netflix, Starbucks, Google, Domino’s and Apple as just a few prime examples. At some point in time all of these brands went through a refresh and a logo overhaul that updated their branding, keeping it current. Just remember that changes to branding don’t need to be drastic. Something simple can make all the difference, whilst retaining your identity. I know what you’re thinking, “Not another New Year resolutions post!” You’re right, they’re everywhere at the moment. We’re three weeks into 2018 and we’re being hit left, right and centre with New Year resolution suggestions for our personal life, work life, family life etc. It’s a little overwhelming.
The thing is - these articles all have a point. The New Year is the perfect time to reassess your business goals and strategies, to reflect on what you learned over the previous year and to implement new ideas that can take your business forward. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that video is big news in marketing. With recent studies claiming that “online videos will account for more than 80% of all consumer internet traffic by 2020”, smart marketers are turning their attention to video as a way to stand out in all the noise currently doing the rounds on social media.
However, other surveys have also shown that “83 percent of marketers said they’d like to create more video content if they didn’t have restraints such as time and resources”. Video creation is often seen as an expensive and time-consuming process that is out of reach for the majority of time and budget strapped marketers. This is a common misconception and with the right approach all businesses can leverage a video marketing campaign to their benefit. In this article, we tell you how. I’ll be honest - I came to content marketing quite late in the game. Although, to be fair, that could be said for most people of my generation, when you bear in mind the fact that its origins can be traced back as far as the early days of the famous John Deere agricultural firm. At first, I was unsure; it just looked a bit like blogging mixed with social media management and email marketing. Then, it clicked! And I haven’t looked back since. Far too many businesses start blogs for the sake of starting blogs.
Unfortunately, this means the web is awash with ghostly wreckages that were once big content marketing ideas. Using a blog to reach a wider audience is something every business should do, but this form of content marketing it’s just as adept at speaking to an existing customer base. If you’re unsure, here’s seven ways to communicate with your customers via a blog: When it comes to LinkedIn, it’s not enough to simply create your profile and then leave it to do its own thing.
Whilst having a fully completed LinkedIn profile is certainly the best place to start, you must do more in order to truly benefit from all that LinkedIn has to offer. In the past, we’ve discussed the importance of posting regular status updates to your LinkedIn profile and how and why you should be posting articles on LinkedIn. Today, we’ll be focusing on LinkedIn groups and how to use them to improve your visibility. If you have a laptop, tablet or smartphone and an internet connection, there are now a wealth of tools that make self-publication an incredibly easy process.
However, it isn’t quite as simple as just typing a few paragraphs and hitting the ‘publish’ button. It takes a lot of time and effort to get your content in front of your target audience. It's not easy but we’ve picked out seven brilliant blogging tips that can help your blog posts stand out in the ocean of content out there. I recently attended a 1-hour networking webinar and it got me thinking about just how useful webinars are for small business.
You can pack so much information into a short webinar, people can engage with you and you can then use the recorded webinar as an additional resource for your clients as part of a course or online library. Over the past 10 years, I’ve attended dozens of webinars. Some were amazing, and others were really bad. |
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