5 Essential Steps to Help Keep Your Small Business In Front of the Competition

Small Business Marketing

Anyone who’s tried understands that small business marketing is not for the faint of heart. Promoting your small business depends on doing certain things and doing them well. The amount of competition we face these days is astonishing, and understanding how to get your pages delivering online is tricky.

Here are five significant actions to keep you in front of the competition!

1. Create a Marketing Plan - A detailed marketing plan is key to success. You don’t want to leave anything to chance. It should be well thought out. Map out every marketing element, and exactly how you plan to accomplish it. At the minimum, it ought to paint broad strokes to success.

2. Social Media Marketing - 91 percent of experiences social marketers generate improved website traffic and 79 percent generate more quality leads according to MediaBistro.com. Just how do they do this? They do not waste time with their social media marketing. Map out a strategy for social media an stick to it.

3. Build a Mailing List -So many businesses make the mistake of not collecting customer and prospect emails from the start. Email is far from dead. MarketingProfs.com tells us that email averages a return on investment of $40 for every $1 spent, far outstripping banner ads ($2) and keyword ads ($17). If you opt to neglect it, you’re leaving a large part of your potential profits on the table

4. Video Marketing -Connect to all the local traffic that’s out there trying to find your business. Video marketing in this space is a relatively untapped vein, and having a quick video advertising your wares on page one of Google may result in tons of traffic and authority coming your way! According to the research company Forrester, any given video stands about a 50x better chance of appearing on the first page of Google than any given text page.

5. Gain a Mobile Presence - Microsoft reports that by 2014 mobile browsing will overtake desktop browsing. If your company does not have a mobile presence, you will become invisible. Therefore your small business’s website better start optimizing for mobile users and it should get it done quickly. Right now, the numbers are encroaching on the 50 percent mark. Are you prepared?