Competition is fierce and marketing is hard. Holding a promotion without any marketing is like throwing a party without sending any invitations.
As a small business owner, you’re everything to your business, even the marketing manager. So here’re 6 steps to help you market your business and grow your sales.
Start small and grow your budget based on your successes. Don’t spend more on marketing than you can afford, but generally you’ll want to put between 7-12% of your annual revenue towards marketing.
11 November is China’s Singles Day. 14 February is Valentines Day. 25 December is Christmas. There’s Cyber Monday in the US towards the end of the year, and Mother’s Day and Father’s Day too. These are all great days to build a campaign around. Choose two promotional things you want to do – like free shipping, gift with purchase, a limited number of special edition products or any other offer you can create – and come up with a campaign (a series of messages, follow-ups, tasks and to-dos) to support those two promotions.
AdWords, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, local ads, emails, billboards and newspapers are among the many places you can spend your marketing money. If you sell flowers, LinkedIn might not be your best channel. But if you’re a freelancer it may very well be. Once you’ve decided on one or two channels, you can focus your efforts and money there.
When you’re running a promotion, you’ll want to be driving traffic to your website. It’s important to revisit your search engine optimisation (SEO) practices and make sure your site is optimised. Try to build time into your schedule to focus on this at least yearly as things are frequently changing in the search world.
Smart business owners learn early on to focus on what they do best and outsource the rest. Try to budget for a marketing expert to help you, even if only on a short-term contract or freelancing basis. That way, they can apply their knowledge to do things they know best while you do the same.
Whether it’s clicks, views, responses, downloads or actual sales, marketing data can help you learn important insights about your shoppers and which campaigns perform best. In the end, never forget your marketing is meant to generate leads which in turn creates business revenue. So make sure your metrics are focused on that one important goal.
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