This blog article is a short overview of B2B small business marketing in the digital era.
As a small business, you don’t have anywhere near the amount of resources to develop a marketing strategy as your large business and Fortune 500 competitors.
That being said, the democratic nature of the internet means that even the smallest businesses have the chance to compete and grow. In other words, a viral marketing video is just as likely to come from a five-person start-up as it is an enterprise, if that startup has taken the time to understand their customers and produce content that speaks directly to their needs.
There are many ways you can go about small business marketing, and they pretty much all involve the internet. Here are several basic marketing tactics that any small business can leverage to find and connect with more customers:
Search Engine Optimization
You’ve probably heard talk about “how to improve your SEO,” which simply means getting higher on Google results pages. Google and other search engines have specific formulas for determining what pages rank the highest for each keyword. They take into consideration factors like keyword density, urls, meta descriptions and more when ranking pages for specific search terms. In order to show up higher on results pages, you need to “optimize” every page of your website to make it easy for Google to know what each page is about.
Understanding the rules of SEO is somewhat complex, but not impossible. Simply changing the urls for all of your blog posts might get you from page three to page one.
Social Media Marketing
For many small businesses, social media has been the best thing since sliced bread. That’s because pretty much all of your customers are already on social media, waiting for you to connect with them. Using social media networking sites sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google+, you can create profiles and push marketing messages within communities that are your ideal market. Social media marketing also helps to humanize your brand and allows your customers to get to know you better.
Blogging
Blogging can be considered both an SEO strategy and a social media strategy, depending on your goals. Starting and maintaining a company blog gives you much more space to optimize keywords for search engines. Each blog post you write can have a slightly different keyword variant, allowing you to reach a wider customer base. Blogs can also be considered social media, as your prospects and customers can “follow” or “subscribe” to your blog to receive updates every time you publish something new. You can also post links to your blog articles on your Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles. If your content is valuable enough to your readers, they may share your content with their friends or followers, which becomes free advertising for you.
For more on small business marketing for B2B, click here. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.
