The 5 Tools You Need To Create A Powerful Small Business Marketing Plan

If customers are what you want, you must market your business – that’s the bottom line. But not everyone has the cash to throw around like the world’s ending tomorrow. So you’ve got to be more strategic and disciplined with your Small Business Marketing approach. My aim in this post is to be both informative and non-biased concerning which approaches I think are best. Of course, some will disagree with me. There are more methods to market your small business than there are seconds in a day (it seems). In my experience, however, there are some champions on the list, and there is also some big-time money drains on there too!

So if you’re a huge fan of throwing away money, ignore this informative post. There’s some ocean-front property in New Mexico calling your name right now I’m sure. For the rest of us, it’s time to take a little stroll down “Profitability Lane.”

Here’s Your List Of 5 Most Strategic & Profitable Ways To Market Your Small Business…

1. Your Website.
When I first got into the digital marketing space years ago, it was by designing websites. Admittedly, I couldn’t scale that to the degree I wanted so I pivoted into full-blown digital marketing.

Every business needs a website just like every pair of feet needs shoes. You can’t quantify how helpful and essential a site is for your business in 2018 (And this is coming from a guy who will tell you not to send your paid traffic to your website… More on that in a minute.)

There are ways and methods to turn your website into a converting machine, that’s true. In fact, there are several remarkably helpful books written that inform you how to make your site become a lead-generating behemoth. One such book I recommend is by Chris Smith. It’s called “The Conversion Code.” You won’t be disappointed if you decided to read and study that book. I have it on Audiobook and revisit a few times a year!

Why does your small business need a website? Here are a few reasons.

– It is a tremendous tool to send “in-person” encounters to. Let’s say you’re attending a Chamber of Commerce Event and someone wants to learn more about your services. Of course, you’ll exchange business cards. That’s still a thing, right? But because you’ve taken the time and come up with a short and SEO friendly website address, it’s going to be super easy to say “Hey, just check out my website. It’s “very easy name to remember.com!” BOOM… Send them on to your online brochure and into your awareness funnel to get the ball rolling on a turning that interested party into a customer.

– It is a free treasure trove of traffic (when done right). Have you ever thought why people blogged? Sure, some do it because they love it and it’s a passion they can’t do without. Others hire it out to a VA or freelancer and completely pass the responsibility on to someone else. But not me! Ohhh, not this guy… I’m up at 10:41 pm writing out this bad boy for you to enjoy. Why do I do it? Well, first of all, I don’t mind writing too terribly. Secondly, I blog because I wish to be considered an authority in my field and blogging is a way to establish that. But thirdly (and may I say – most importantly), I write a blog because of the SEO value it brings to my website.

Before any post is written, I do keyword research and find several long tail keyword strings that are searched thousands of times a month on search engines. Then I find a way to create content around those search strings organically. Yes, I chose the title of this post strategically because of the SEO weight it would bring my website. I like free traffic, how about you?

– You want people to find you if they are either [a] searching for your business by name – or – [b] looking for your services in your serviceable area. A website will take care of both types of traffic with no fuss.

– For people who land on your website, getting in contact shouldn’t be hard. The standard site of today includes the home page, contact page, hopefully, a blog page (see benefits above), and easy to find contact information on EVERY page. Oh, and it wouldn’t hurt to feature some testimonials if you’ve done a great job and aren’t afraid to admit it.

2. Email Marketing.
To this day it still surprises me the number of businesses that don’t use email marketing. I will share with you something that was taught to me by a guy named Russell Brunson in his book “DotCom Secrets.” The reason why email marketing is so imperative for your business is that it allows you to finally give yourself a tremendous gift: traffic that you OWN.

When you want to market your services to others, you have to pay to do it. Whether that’s through radio, television, the newspaper, social media, or banners flying behind airplanes, you have to pay to reach out EVERY time. And, If you wanted to reach that same group again, you would have to pay AGAIN to knock on their proverbial door and invite them over for a visit. But THE moment someone signs up on your email list, you will never have to pay marketing fees to reach them anymore.

If you want to learn email marketing, I have a few recommendations for you. First of all, I recommend hopping over to Udemy.com and pay $10 – $15 for a course that teaches it to you. Many business owners get by just fine with Mail Chimp, so take a class on how to use it. Then you implement! Start coming up with clever ways to ethically entice people to join your email list.

Whether it’s with instant savings or even a lead magnet your target audience would want to download, come up with something that is ethical and valuable and you’ll have no problem moving your ideal clients onto your email list.

Then use that list to engage with your clients, inform them of specials, and even reach out every once in a while just to say “Thanks.”

3. Social Media Marketing.
What we construct for our clients at Notice! Marketing is a machine. With this machine, we can put in “x” amount of dollars and normally “2 – 3x” amount of dollars shoots out the other side. Many times, the offer resonates powerfully with the target audience and the profit goes up substantially higher.

Right now, Facebook Ads are the gas we pour into the machine to get our clients leads, customers, clients, and ROI. Should another traffic source pop up that provides more opportunity at a lower cost, you better believe we’re going to turn to that source of fuel. But for now, good ole’ Zuckerberg is backing up the Brink’s Truck, that’s for sure.

Keep in mind though that you have to be purposeful with Social Media Marketing. This isn’t a fool’s errand where we throw money at a “boost” and hope it works out well. No, we track EVERYTHING (even down to the phone calls you receive from the campaign) and can pretty quickly determine true return on investment. That’s a gift Notice! Marketing gives our clients. You no longer have to guess if your marketing is working. You’ll know the metrics straight away.

4. An Offshoot: FB Messenger Marketing.
I’ve included this opportunity separately because it is an entirely distinct traffic source from the usual buying of FB ads.

I met a man the other day who didn’t like money! He was a business owner and I noticed he was marketing with Facebook Messenger ads. But he was using them wrong (another blog post for another time, I promise). I mean, I was happy he was investing in the medium of messenger ads because right now they are some of the most affordable around. However, messenger ads are a consideration to use when you want someone to message your FB page.

For those who maybe didn’t know, when you choose Facebook Messenger Ads as a consideration, FB will, in turn, serve that ad to people who have indicated they communicate mostly on messenger, or have in the past reached out to a business through messenger. Yes, Facebook is that smart. They know who uses the messenger platform more than others.

But to make a short story long, this guy said he didn’t want to consider using a Facebook Messenger Automated Assistant because he preferred the personal touch instead of the automation. Unfortunately, this is not the first time I’ve heard this reasoning.

Here’s the sad part, though. When I reached out to this business owner, it was through Facebook Messenger. It took him FOUR HOURS to respond back. It doesn’t matter what tone you use, personal or automated, if you don’t respond to your clients within 15 minutes, that interest is TOAST. Time kills EVERYTHING.

An Automated Facebook Messenger Assistant would have messaged me back instantly, in his particular methodology of words (because we help our clients insert themselves into the assistant), and continued the engagement. I would have either [a] left my info for the business owner to call me [b] drove over for a visit (yes we can give directions with these things) [c] indicated for the owner to message me back directly or [d] decided to move along because it wasn’t a good fit for me as a customer.

For the record, there are hundreds of other things your Automated Assistant can do, but for the sake of time, I only chose those four actions for me, as a customer, to take. You can sell your products with the Automated Assistant. You can use it as a type of help desk to walk your clients through the buying process and so many more opportunities.

I firmly believe we’ve only scratched the surface to how elegant this technology can become for the small business owner. If you’d like to know more about an Automated Messenger Assistant, check out my latest special for those bad boys this month.

5. A Landing Page.
Do you remember earlier when I said you shouldn’t send paid traffic to your website? #5 on our list is why.

When your target audience is online, you can rest assured they’re like the rest of us; they have IADD (Internet Attention Deficit Disorder). Please don’t misunderstand this comment. I’m not in any way making fun of or belittling folks who have ADD. I believe I have it as a matter of fact. I also think most guys do, but that’s another topic for another time.

But really, when we’re spending time online either through a computer or our mobile devices, we have an attention span shorter than a goldfish’s. We’re bouncing around here, there, and everywhere. The slightest notification takes us away to an entirely different planet as far as what we were doing just a second ago is concerned.

If you are sending paid traffic to your website, I can tell you right now your campaigns are not performing nearly as efficiently as they could be. Why? Because when Mr. Thompson visits your full website by clicking on an ad for a particular offer, he wants to see the continuation of that offer mentioned on the next page. If he doesn’t see it, Mr. Thompson bounces. When he lands on your site, he’s literally presented with 3,000 things for him to do. “Ooh, there’s the about page. I wonder if they look like honest people? Where’s the “Meet Our Staff” section?” As my little boys say “Boingy, Boingy, Boingy – he’s bouncing around!”

When using a landing page, you’re echoing an offer that was attractively presented with an ad but now expounded upon with your landing page. (Example here) Professional marketers call that “ad scent.” The same lovely smell that caused your future client to click your ad is also found in an exact manner on your landing page. That’s the proper way to optimize social media marketing today.

It’s been said that Microsoft was the first company to utilize a landing page. They did so to better market their then-fledgling “Office” products. Since there were about a billion things to do when visiting their website, they felt the main reason why sales were tanking was due to the message of their “Office” products being drowned out by all the other options. So Microsoft designed a page which gave their “Office” prospects two choices: buy MS Office or leave. As they say, “The rest is history.”

A landing page is just as necessary to marketing a specific offer online (which is how your profits can be tracked and measured) as air is to our lungs.

You’ve been warned. Please don’t send anymore paid traffic to your website! Get yourself a landing page designed specifically for that offer and see the conversions and profits on your campaigns go up tremendously.

In closing, each of these marketing tools can be provided to you when you bring on Notice! Marketing to handle your next digital marketing campaign. I’d really enjoy the opportunity to present exactly what we offer to you. Reach out via our contact page or sign up to hop on a strategy call to see if we’re a good fit. Talk soon.