Top 10 Marketing Tips For Small Businesses
What are the top 10 marketing tips when it comes to small business marketing? If your service business is lacking in new clients, what can you do to instantly bring in new clients and dramatically improve the marketing of your business?
I have been marketing businesses now for over 20 years, and there are definitely activities which you MUST undertake if you are to have a successful business with a steady flow of new client instructions and you want to avoid the peaks and troughs which normally come from ineffective marketing strategies.
So here are my top 10 marketing tips for your small business (and which I use for my business too).
1. The Money Is In Your List
This is so very true, yet sadly I meet so many small business owners who tell me that they do not have a mailing list for communicating with their clients. Let me promise you this, unless or until you have an email marketing list with all of your clients, past, present and future on it (your prospects), you will never have a steady flow of new client instructions. There is a reason that this tip is number 1 in my top 10 marketing tips for small business owners, because this is how important I know it is for your business.
These days there really is no excuse not to have an email marketing list. For more information, download the free guide at the foot of this page and find out how you can set up your own email marketing list within five minutes of reading my ree report.
2. Committed Marketing Time
This seems simple, yet is so often overlooked. If you want a truly successful business, you must spend time honing your marketing skills. You cannot expect and will never achieve a successful business until you commit to spending some time every day marketing your business. Until then, you will go through peaks and troughs of success, having busy and quiet times. I am not saying that you have to do everything, and a lot of it can be outsourced, but you need to be in charge of your marketing and drive it forwards consistently.
Please do me a favour, pencil in the first 30 minutes of every day for the next 30 days marketing your business, and if you do not see a dramatic improvement taking place I will eat my metaphorical hat.
3. “Perfection Kills Momentum”
This is my favourite saying, as so many service business owners want to make their marketing absolutely perfect before they will let it go live and be tested. This is understandable, as if you are a professional service provider you are used to doing ‘perfect’ work. Most other service business owners I know also take great pride in the quality of their service. However, when it comes to marketing, you absolutely must put it out there and get it working rather than wait for it to be perfect. Once it is live you then need to constantly tweak it to make it produce better results for you.
4. Advertising
So many businesses have completely forgotten how effective advertising can be in terms of producing instant client instructions for them. It seems that the internet has come along and they have forgotten what used to work in terms of producing new client instructions for them. What’s more, because so few businesses advertise these days, there are some cracking rates to be obtained when you do advertise.
In my free guide at the foot of this page, I share with you my secret PASTOR formula which ensures that you can write amazing advertisements that produce new client instructions for you each and every time.
5. An Effective Website
My next few top tips in my top 10 tips for marketing your business revolve around your website. However, unless you have an effective website that converts visitors into clients very well, every step you take will be a waste of time.
I compare it to a leaking bucket; if you have a leaking bucket and put water into it the bucket will never fill up. Well, if you send more visitors to your website and it is terrible at converting them into new client instructions, again it will be of no use to you and your profits will never fill up also.
Your website must have the following in place to provide you with real chances of success:
- A freephone telephone number easily viewed on every page of your website
- A short enquiry form available from the right hand side of every page of your website
- At least 400 words of content on every page so that both Google and human visitors can work out what you actually do for a living. (Let me promise you that this is the biggest mistake made by most small business owners – the assumption that too much content is a bad thing. It never is and until you accept what I am telling you here your website will never work for you).
- OPPP – One purpose per page (i.e. one overriding action step you want your visitor to take at the end of the page they are visiting – e.g. get in touch, download a free report etc.)
- A clear call to action at the foot of every page of your website (repeating the freephone telephone number and link to the enquiry form – do not expect your visitor to scroll back up the page to find the details, they will not. You have to make it easy for them).
Download more information about what your website must have in your free copy of the 8 Ways Report at the foot of this page.
6. Pay Per Click Advertising
I said I like advertising, but I love pay per click advertising. Think about this statement for a moment please:
It brings you NEW clients at the EXACT TIME that they are READY TO BUY your SERVICES
This is why it has made Google so rich and it can and should do the same for you too. Are you using it? Let me show you how when you download your free copy of the marketing report.
7. Search Engine Marketing
Once you have tried and tested pay per click advertising and proved that it works and repays you with lots of lovely new client instructions, you must then invest in search engine marketing; that is appearing free of charge in the Google listings. This takes time but is well worth the effort.
There is much more on website marketing available in the free guide at the foot of this page.
8. Blog
A blog allows you to achieve all of these things and is therefore vital:
- Instantly attracts traffic to your website when you blog about topical issues
- Proves your credibility as an expert
- Is very attractive to Google (Google often crawls my blog posts seconds after I post a new entry)
- Proves your credibility as an expert
- Is the easiest and cheapest way bar none of adding new content to your website (see below)
- Proves your credibility as an expert
Being seen as an expert in the service that you provide is crucial to winning more instructions than your competitors and charging higher costs too. This is the reason I repeated this point several times, as it is crucial!
9. Add New Content To Your Website
You can start marketing your business with a five page website, but if you fail to add more content to it on a regular basis it will never receive more visitors and therefore will not bring you new clients on tap. That would be a huge, wasted opportunity. If you did nothing else but add at least one new 400 plus word article each and every week to your website for the next year, I guarantee that you will be generating a lot more visitors to your website and a lot more enquiries about your services. Will you do it?
10. The Secret Question To Success!
The final tip in my top 10 marketing tips is the provide you with the most successful question I have ever created for business owners to generate new instructions. It is simple, yet so effective at producing new client instructions for you.
Simply enter your details in the form below to receive this question and so much more information which will help you to market your business effectively.