Trends for Growth and Where to Begin
Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) have their own set of challenges when going to market. Most businesses of this size need a specific mix of marketing tactics and someone to manage it. If you are the owner or manager of a company this size, chances are you are also the Marketing Manager, among other things. If this has fallen on your shoulders, this article is for you.
What qualifies you as an SME? If you have under 20 employees, then you qualify.
Making time for Active Marketing – meaning you are doing something to get the attention of potential customers is the first step. Tracking your results and activities is the second. If you aren’t trying anything and measuring that information, it’s impossible to understand what worked.
SEO – If you aren’t already familiar with this term, SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. If you can’t find the time to act on anything else, pay attention to your website’s SEO. Select a tracking and management tool, input your data and get started today. moz.com, SemRush, Ahrefs and others all provide a robust look at keywords, backlinks, competition rankings and much more. Knowing that people can find you while searching and how they got to your site is gold.
Keep in mind, 75% of searches don’t go past the first page. This ups the competition for all those key phrases that you want to capture. Be creative and don’t be a copycat.
There are many levers involved in maintaining good SEO, so don’t get discouraged. Doing something here is much better than doing nothing and continuing to drop in the rankings.
Videos – At this point, I’m hoping that you are a Zoom expert. Set it up to record, pull your video down, edit as best you can and put it out there. There are multiple apps out there today that allow you to set up and edit easily. Using your SEO tool, create descriptions that leverage your selected keywords and add them to your YouTube channel. Collaborating with a customer or vendor that ties in nicely to your offering will create an interesting conversation for options that are not just talking heads. Not a Zoom fan? Use your phone on a tripod in a quiet place.
It’s not going to be perfect. Edit out the flubs later and keep talking. Learn to get over it.
Spend some money. I fully appreciate that the smaller the company, the smaller the available budget. Find ways to maximize your amount by seriously targeting down where your customers go for related information. This ensures that you are only talking to the people that are going to care about your products.
Instagram is still one of the most affordable ways to highly target your audience. Town, age range, interests, etc. Create two ads and alternate weeks to run them for a month.
It doesn’t have to cost anything. Social media is free and works if you are consistent about it. Running for a month and disappearing isn’t helping growth. Stay out there. Only use LinkedIn if that is the only place your technical or medical or manufacturing company finds leads. Don’t have time to manage it? Use Hootsuite or one of the many other low-cost apps to schedule posts ahead of time. Do them the week ahead and just let them run as scheduled.
Talk to your media reps. Yes, their job is to sell ads. However, not all of those may be good options. Creating a relationship and sharing press release information that backlinks to your site (Hello, SEO) can be highly beneficial for both visibility and rankings.
I’m hoping you have compiled a list or database of past, current and potential customers. Use this to send out a regular newsletter to share news around your business. Not everyone will remember everything about your products or services, so rotating focus is easy and allows for new opt-ins to get up to speed.
I’m hoping that you’ve gained some great ideas to use and test in your situation.
If you are still unsure about what to do, let’s get your no-risk call on the schedule to discuss what you need to do next.
