Most small businesses have equally small budgets when it comes to marketing. While a small business can have a nice client base and steady revenue flow, revenue is often focused on operations and put back into the business or has to go to shareholders and investors after operations are covered. This pull on the small business income leaves little for the business owner to use towards marketing efforts. However, marketing is crucial to all businesses, large or small, and should get your attention, if not your business budget.
Having a low budget for marketing does not mean you do not have some marketing tools to build your business and budget. Online marketing provides multiple options, most of which cost nothing and a few of which have a minimal cost. All you need is some creativity and some marketing strategies, and you can increase traffic, revenue, and client base in no time. Here are six amazing online marketing strategies for small businesses that are sure to increase your bottom line.
Create an Optimized Website
First, just having a website alone is essential as it provides credibility when a person searching for what you offer can see it with their own eyes without ever stepping foot in your business. Your website can further be used to drive traffic that would otherwise never even know you existed. You can spend a bit of money and have someone build your website and host it for you as well as guide you in all you need to know to make your website effective, or there are free website building sites that are fairly user friendly that can guide you in building your website and how to optimize it to drive traffic.
Research Your Competition
It may sound a little on the stalker side to track down what your main competitors are doing or to search out businesses in your same niche that are successful and find out what they are doing to get those dollars you are after, but it’s not, it is good business sense. Since competing businesses have existed, competitors have actively sought out what makes their competitors get business over them. Online you can do searches for what your business offers and see what competitors come up with. Analyze their site and find out what their online presence is and how they use it. This research will provide you the opportunity to drive business your way by taking on the best online marketing practices of your competitors.
Run AdWords ads
Running some AdWords ads will take a bit of your budget, but you can set a cap, and even if you can only afford a bit at first, this will give you a lot of bang for your online marketing buck. AdWords ads help you to boost your site even more than without it based on keyword optimization on your website. Utilizing the optimized website without AdWords ads will have your site doing a slow climb up in the Google ranking for search terms used on your site. AdWords ads speed up this process, so it is worth the money if you can afford to do it for even the lowest level or length of time.
Link Building on Other Optimized Sites
An extremely effective free online marketing strategy is to have links for your website on other web pages. While there are versions of this idea that would cost you to pay a site to have a link to your site on theirs, if you have friends, family, or partnerships with websites, most will easily allow you to link to your site. You can offer a little quid pro quo and have links to their site on yours in some cases. The more your site is linked from other sites, the more optimized your website becomes and ranks higher in Google searches.
Social Media Marketing
While everyone uses social media to advertise and market their businesses for free or paying for ads, it is still an effective marketing strategy to drive business your way. Even if your connections or those who find your business through hashtags and other social media marketing efforts don’t need what you offer now, they will easily know that you offer that product when they do or know anyone else who does or service when they need it.
Conclusion
Marketing doesn’t have to be expensive to be effective. Some of the most successful online marketers spend little budget but have a lot of impacts. Using these five online marketing strategies will increase traffic and let customers know about your business and what you offer, therefore expanding your business and growing your bottom line.
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