What do you do to attract new customers to your business?
Most of us cannot attract customers with a colorful merry-go-round, and so we turn to marketing plans.
There are two general categories of small business marketing:
– Outbound or the old “PUSH” marketing – sending out advertisements on websites, in e-mails, on flyers, in magazines. Based on past experiences with outbound marketing, fewer people react to words like “New!”, “Sale!”, “Amazing!” and other overused terms, and it is more difficult to get the attention of your prospective customers in the clutter.
– Inbound marketing – attracting people to your brand and your products with engaging content – attention getting, interesting, useful, helpful information, supplemented with nice, related images and videos.
There are three main points to remember for successful Inbound Small Business Marketing:
1. Make a social connection, using one or more social media platforms for your business. Use social media that you are comfortable with. Remember to add regular updates, and occasionally mention your product or service, or a special event you are hosting, but not all the time.
An optimized business Facebook page is a great way to start. For some tips on optimizing your Facebook page for small business, take a look at this Search Engine Journal article.
2. Get more attention for your message with interesting, topic-related images and videos.
- Create a YouTube video channel for your short, optimized business videos.
- Then share those videos in your website blog articles can be a real boost for your site’s ranking.
- Ask clients to send in videos of themselves using your product.
If you post interesting or helpful information about your business on your company FB page and Profile, your followers will share the information.
3. After attracting these potential clients, don’t forget to provide a CTA (Call To Action). As excited as you may be to get hundreds of visitors reading your blog article, remember you also want to get them to engage with your business. Ask a question and invite them to share an opinion, Ask them to share their experience in a similar situation. Tell them if they have any questions about the information you’ve shared, you’d be glad to provide your insight and make sure your telephone number and link to your Contact page are prominent on your website.