7 Small Business Marketing Tips for 2021
March 23, 2021
Last year was very difficult for small businesses, and in 2021, many small businesses are still struggling with the same challenges they faced in 2020.
However, it’s important to remember that during a recession, money just doesn’t evaporate. It doesn’t just cease to exist. It doesn’t go away. It just changes hands, it moves from one business to another.
So the question is, are you taking advantage of that opportunity? Brands that continue to market and capture market share are going to be the brands that grow and capture all the customers.
People still need the products and services that you offer. Are you still in the game when it comes to marketing?
If you continue to invest in marketing, you’re going to grow your brand and grow your business, and you’re going to capture a ton of market share since many of your competitors have pulled back.
The number one thing you can do to position your business for success when times are tough is to invest in marketing, continue to sink your teeth into growing your business, growing your brand and capturing market share. If you do that in 2021, you’re really going to see some great results.
Here are a few more things you can do to position your business for success this year.
7 marketing tips for small businesses in 2021
#1. Level up your technology
This is the time to really move your business in a new direction when it comes to technology. Take a look at the marketing platforms and business management platforms out there, and try to find one that has everything you need within one login.
You can’t be great without integrating, which means you need a fully integrated platform that does everything you need it to do, from CRM, payments and social media management to reputation management, ad management and content marketing.
Find a platform with one login that has everything that you need to truly manage and grow your business with efficiency, like Marketing 360®.
#2. Be proactive
Think about your marketing calendar, and get organized. This way, you’ll have a gameplan for promotions and know which things that you’re going to be pushing each month.
Do some research to figure out what kind of content to create. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes. What do they want? What are the most popular services and the products for you throughout the year.
Once you have an idea what kind of content to create, put it on your content marketing calendar each month. You’re going to want to know what you are promoting each month and what the value is for your customers.
With this research, you’ll also be able to create videos, infographics, emails, social media posts, online ads and more to grow your brand.
#3. Create beautiful assets
Once you have your content marketing calendar all figured out, start creating your assets.
Start with the content. It’s important to write professional, original content, whether it’s about the product or service you’re focusing on that month, or about a specific promotion.
When you have your written content, you’re going to want to create some social media posts and email campaigns, and maybe even add it to the email newsletter that you send out every month. Plus, create videos, update your website and think about potential landing pages you could create.
Having beautiful assets makes your brand stand out. You want to be like the Nike of your industry for your hometown, which means that you want your brand to be absolutely beautiful.
The more proactive you can be about creating the assets you need, the higher the quality will be, which is why you need your marketing calendar upfront.
This way, you can then go back and start sinking your teeth into the design of your assets and making sure that your brand looks really, really good.
#4. Schedule out your marketing
Once you have all your assets designed and created, the next step is to get everything scheduled out in your marketing platform.
You’re going to want to have all of your email campaigns scheduled and ready to go and sent to just the right list at just the right time. You’re going to want to have all your social media posts scheduled and ready to go in advance, your advertising campaigns scheduled and ready to go, and your budgeting all planned out.
Everything you need is in the Marketing 360 platform, and it’s automated to make small business marketing easy. Once you’ve created and scheduled out your content, it will be automatically published.
This way, you don’t have to spend time posting on social media, creating marketing emails and building ad campaigns every single day. Instead, you can focus on running your business.
#5. Think about your audience
Before you can market your brand effectively, you need to truly determine who your perfect target audience is and where they are spending their time. Are they on Instagram or Facebook? Are they on Google searching for certain things? Are they watching videos on YouTube?
When you really start to understand your customers, you can target them organically and with online advertising.
Marketing, in the simplest form, is just being where your customers are. Think about where your customers are and how you can be there in order to build awareness, drive sales and improve the return on your investment.
#6. Track your results
You want to make sure that you know how everything is performing so you can make changes as needed. But more importantly, at the end of the year, you want to be able to use all of that data so that you can make improvements for the next year.
By doing this every single year, you should see improvements with your marketing and your return on investment because you’re always doing more of what’s working and less of what’s not. This is a huge game-changer.
You want a marketing platform that’s going to be able to show you all of the metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators) that you need, so you can track the results and make changes to get better and better over time.
#7. Provide an exceptional customer experience
The brands that will do best in 2021 are going to be the ones that are able to drive an exceptional customer experience and create raving fans.
Providing a great customer experience is key to growth because it means getting more reviews online, which will ultimately build trust and help you drive more sales.
It’s also going to lead to more referrals. You’re going to get more and more of your happy customers telling their friends and family about you and posting on social media about you.
Think about something that you can change to improve your customer experience in 2021 — one or two things that you can do to make your customer service stand out and be different.
You want to provide the level of service so that, when your customers are getting their haircut or standing in line at the grocery store, they’re telling everybody about the experience with your company because it was different and memorable.
If you can blow your customers’ socks off and they tell everybody about you, that’s free marketing.
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