Want to learn how to quickly drive more sales for your small business?
Savvy SMBs around the country use the following tactics to land more clients and drive return business every month.
1. Use omnichannel marketing to boost campaign efficiency
Using a single marketing channel for each campaign is an outdated marketing strategy.
Combining multiple channels and formats into your campaigns delivers much better results:
Plus, omnichannel marketing is no longer as complex or expensive as it used to be. You can use free marketing pixels to create integrated campaigns across several channels.
These days, most SMBs have transitioned to digital channels, as they are easier to scale and track and require no minimum up-front investment. You can pay as you go.
Digital channels:
- Organic social media posts (Facebook, Twitter, etc.)
- Social media advertising (FB Ads, Instagram Ads, etc.)
- SEO and organic search
- Pay-per-click search advertising (Google Ads, Bing Ads, etc.)
- SMS
Some small businesses (both retail and ecommerce) also rely on traditional channels, in particular local newspaper ads, classified ads, direct mail, and ads on local TV or radio. It’s harder to quantify the results of traditional campaigns unless you talk directly with all your customers.
2. Nurture potential customers with email marketing and snail mail
Email might seem like yesterday’s news, but for marketing that couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Even if you reach your ideal customer with the very first ad in your campaign, you won’t see good conversion rates. Follow-up is integral to convincing and converting first-time customers, and email marketing campaigns that target customers who fill up their cart but exit at the checkout page can significantly reduce cart abandonment.
Email is an effective and inexpensive way to reach prospective customers again and again.
3. Sell a subscription service
Introduce a subscription service to your business offerings. While offering subscriptions as a form of “bulk discount” can work, that will lower your margins on each product or service.
Instead, try to develop new offers that deliver even more value to your target customer.
Here are a few ideas:
- Instead of a one-off lawn mowing, offer complete garden care once a month, with fertilizer, branch trimming, and more.
- Instead of selling vegetables by weight, sell a weekly subscription box with seasonal vegetables.
- Instead of selling flowers only on Valentine’s Day, sell a monthly bouquet delivered to your customer’s doorstep.
Recurring upsells are much more reliable than trying to generate repeat customers from one encounter.
4. Improve your local SEO
According to researches, 90% of consumers use the internet to search for local businesses, so improving your performance in search engines is one of the simplest digital marketing steps
you can take towards increasing sales for your online store.
As a result, if someone searches for “business near me” or “business + location” searches, you need to show up or risk losing potential customers. You can do this by creating landing pages optimized for search engines, or through content marketing that targets local keywords.
For your business to show up in these results, you need to optimize your Google My Business listing.
Here’s how to do that:
- Take and upload professional photos of your business, including your product.
- Include a menu or all other relevant information.
- Encourage satisfied customers to leave reviews (in a post-sale email campaign, for example).
You should also invest in relevant content marketing, answering common customer questions rather than just having a static homepage.