With all the blood, sweat, and tears you pour into your small business, we believe you should be seeing an incredible return on your investment! But if that’s not the case, we’re here to share our top 7 marketing hacks to help your small business succeed.
When it comes to marketing hacks, a little effort goes a LONG way. Even if you take one or two suggestions from this list, you’ll still see results over time.
Let’s get started!
7 Marketing Hacks for Small Business Success
1. Create a brand guide & follow it religiously!
In case no one has told you, your brand is SO much more than the products or services you offer. In fact, there is a ton of internal guidelines and concepts that must be discussed in order to create consistency in your business.
The first step involves brand guide creation, so we’re going to break it down for you in simple terms so you know exactly where to focus your efforts. The top components of a brand guide include…
Brand Design
While this may be the most involved part of your brand guide, it is absolutely essential. After all, you don’t want to lose sight of your original dream as you expand and grow over time. Creating a brand guide will help you set a precedent for visual representation when it comes to logo, font, color scheme, and design elements.
You have to remember that, at the end of the day, this is how people will see and recognize your brand, so you shouldn’t be afraid to plan specific details and enforce consistency along all platforms!
Brand Personality
The way your brand communicates with your audience is heavily dependent on brand voice and tone. Every small business brand guide should include a section outlining exactly who the brand is and how they talk to people.
For example, some small businesses choose a very sassy and cheeky voice, while others are more professional and direct. Without a brand personality set ahead of time, people (including internal staff) will never know what to expect.
Brand Audience
Last but not least, you’ll need to identify brand audience using demographics like gender, age, interests, careers, locations, lifestyles etc.
This way, you can decide who your clientele is and better adapt your website, social media, branding, and more to fit that audience.
2. Claim & optimize your Google Listing.
When someone searches for your brand online, one of the first things they’ll see is the Google Business Listing to the right of their search results. Optimizing this profile is a great small business hack that will pay off in no time.
This provides basic information about your small business to help people determine location, hours, contact information, and more. You can see now why claiming and optimizing this listing would be highly beneficial. You’ll want to do this right away!
3. Marketing hacks to update & audit your site.
When people land on your website, you want to create an incredible user experience that encourages people to come back, make a purchase, or take a desired action.
This, however, does not happen if someone has a negative experience on your site. To avoid these issues, you’ll want to do an audit regularly, checking for broken links, unusually slow load times, low image quality, and page misdirects.
By eliminating these roadblocks, you improve the credibility of your business and increase the likelihood of reoccurring visits. This simple practice will save your business big time!
4. Set up a Google Analytics account and install tracking.
You will not want to pass up this small business marketing tip, because Google Analytics is a super useful tool for tracking website metrics – and it’s free to use!
Simply create an account, familiarize yourself with the program, and prepare your site by installing tracking pixels on all pages, then you’ll be able to start taking advantage of the data.
Using Google Analytics, you can see how many people visit your website, how long they stay, what pages they land on, how they discover your website, where they live, and so much more. This marketing hack is truly an invaluable tool for strategizing and adapting your approach!
5. Establish a social media strategy.
These days, it’s not enough to create your social media accounts and walk away. These platforms must be nurtured in order to grow and gain traction, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
First let’s make sure that your profiles are set as business profiles with a bio or “about us” section that includes your business location and mission statement. This is also a great place to include a link your website or shopping link!
Next, we can focus on engagement – because everyone knows a stagnant social media account does nothing for your brand! Communicate with your followers often, providing relevant and valuable content about your business, brand, or subject matter. And if you want to level up, we highly recommend posting social stories and video content, as those get the most engagement.
Basically, treat your social media followers like friends, sharing and connecting frequently and encouraging interactions like tagging and sharing!
6. Include SEO in your strategy in order to rank higher.
One small business marketing tip to explore is SEO, otherwise known as Search Engine Optimization. Establishing an SEO strategy will not only help your website to show up in someone’s top Google search results, but it will add value to your site as a whole!
This positions your website in such a way that Google identifies it’s value and shows it to more people. Essentially, the rankings are heavily based on the content of your website. Do you use terms that people are actually searching for? Does your website provide valuable information about subjects that people are seeking out? Do you provide valuable content for certain words or phrases?
In order to get a higher ranking from Google, consider some keyword research in order to identify what words people are searching for and how you can use those words in your website copy.
In addition to naturally integrating some targeted keywords into your website, you can also add blogs and individual web pages to target more specific phrases that might be more difficult to include on your site organically.
You don’t have to focus all your time and energy into SEO, but this marketing hack is definitely worth exploring!
7. Ask for reviews to improve review ratings.
Let’s face it: people care more about public opinion that personal promotion.
That’s why it’s so important to maintain high ratings and reviews – on social media and on Google. Chances are, most happy clients or customers won’t think to leave a review, so it’s always a good idea to encourage and nurture this kind of feedback!
When you ask for review, you have the opportunity to improve your review ratings and business credibility.
And one more bonus small business hack for good measure?
After reading through our top 7 marketing hacks for small businesses, you might decide that you don’t have the time to tackle any of it. That’s totally fine! In that case, you can always hire a local marketing agency to do the work for you! Hint: Brindle Digital Marketing offers all of these services and more, including social media marketing.
Employing an outside agency will take the pressure off of you and ensures that all the work is still being done! Just know that whatever you choose to do, you’ve got our support. We are lucky to work with several small businesses, and we think they’re just the best. Follow our blog for more marketing hacks!