Small businesses face many challenges the first few years of starting out. In fact, it is reported that around 20 percent of small businesses fail within the first year and around half go under after just 5 years. But there are ways to get around these challenges and succeed at your small business marketing plan.
From finding the right customers, to hiring the best talent and finding a way to balance quality and growth, starting off can be a struggle for a lot of small businesses. Sometimes you need to take a step back, evaluate your business and rethink a strategy that works.
- Find Customers
This isn’t just a small business challenge. Even large companies need to constantly be finding new customers. It takes hard work every day to find new customers and small businesses do not have the luxury of being well-known, so it is not as easy to find customers. First, figure out your ideal customer and spread the word to the right people using the right channels. You can find the right people and channels to focus on by developing a customer persona. Craft an idea of your ideal customer and figure out the best ways to target them. Reaching out to the right group of people to turn into your buyers will improve your results greatly. Create content and put it on the right channels where your target audience will see it.
- Hire Talent
Finding great employees is hard. The cost of hiring is high so you need to make sure you are spending enough time on the process. From writing the job description to screening applicants, you need to be looking for not just good, but great talent. This may take longer, but will be worth it in the end. Just like you did with a customer persona, build a candidate persona. Figure out what you are looking for in each role and how to attract the right people to turn into applicants.
- Brand Awareness
Not every small business turns into a large household name. Many big brands have worked hard only to just fail and see countless rejections. But they took a step back and revisited their marketing plan. They developed new strategies to spread the word about their business and earned themselves a stellar reputation. The first few years of any small business will face the challenge of successfully branding their business. PR and blogging plays a big part in branding your business to the right audience. Focus your voice on the right people and places to market. Build relationships with reporters in the industry and reach out to publications to spread the word about your small business. You need to be consistently posting high quality blogs, which will help drive traffic to your website and convert traffic into leads. Blogs also help with building your email list.
- Generate Leads
Generating leads can be a challenge for any business, but especially small businesses who are just starting up. In fact, 1 in 10 businesses feel that their lead generation efforts are effective. The most important goal of any small business marketing plan is to generate high quality and a high number of leads. This is the best way to turn website visitors into prospective customers. To start generating more leads, first optimize your existing website. Remember, your website may be the most important tool to help turn website visitors into customers. Using a tool that pulls the submissions from your form and place them into a contact database is a good way to generate leads. Adding custom landing pages for each campaign you run is also something that you should be doing. Another important way to generate leads is to use CTAs on blog posts. Focusing on pages that bring in a lot of traffic, like the About page or Contact page is the best place to start optimizing.
To learn more about building your small business marketing plan effectively, check out our other blog post!
