Starting up a small business is a dream for a lot of people. But not many realize the problems that a small business has to face until it succeeds. The most common problem that small businesses face is tough competition with bigger ones.
The sad thing for them is that the bigger ones have the means to promote themselves. Therefore, they get higher chances to succeed in the market. As opposed to the bigger ones, it is hard for smaller businesses to raise their brand awareness and make their voices heard. Some smaller businesses do not make the cut and simply close down. Yet, there is a way to keep the company running with smart marketing tactics.
How to Grow A Small Business
The advancement of technology made small business entrepreneurs’ jobs much easier. Most importantly, it gave accessibility to hundreds of online resources to promote their products and services throughout the world. Here are some of the most popular and useful ones.
Social Media Marketing
Social media is one of the best ways to engage with your customers. Thus, it comes quite handy when advertising a product or organizing a PR event. Social media features and capabilities enhance day by day.
Currently, social media stories are on the rise in terms of popularity. They are short and engaging without wasting too much of a potential customer’s time. Entrepreneurs can easily take advantage of this and make short and catchy video commercial as their social media stories.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence can build patterns of consumer behavior and even suggest better marketing plans. It can also gather statistics regarding what the customers liked and establish customer preferences based on that. Similarly, it can predict who your potential customers can be and what their preferences are. Aside from this, the advancement of AI created an opportunity for businesses to directly connect with customers and know their needs.
Chatbots
Chatbots are programs with artificial intelligence which guide the customers and answer their inquiries. Chatbots are a great way of customer support. The customers don’t even have to bother to make a call or write a question. The bots do all of that for them and make their customer experience much better. This, in turn, increases the company’s profit in two ways.
First, the quick response time increases customer satisfaction. This is indeed a pledge that the customer will stay loyal to the company. Second, chatbots replace customer support specialists. This means that the company pays just once and then the AI does everything for it.
Programmatic Advertising
Programmatic advertising is yet another invention of AI. It allows targeting a specific audience based on their previous preferences. It takes just a second for AI to understand customer preference. Next, it places an ad that a customer is highly unlikely not to see.
The nuance with them is that lots of companies use the system. Thus, sometimes the customer may receive too much information and not pay attention to them anymore.
Email Marketing
Good old-fashioned emails are still one of the best and cheapest marketing channels. Combined with AI, you can send triggers and promotions based on the preference of the customer. A little personalization shows extra customer care which can raise the sales potential to a certain degree.
All of these marketing channels are effective and easy to use, especially for small businesses. They allow to take advantage of the latest technologies and enlarge the number of customers. However, there is one more channel of marketing communication, which is more practical than others.
SMS Marketing
SMS marketing is a form of communication with customers through direct text messages. This communication can include information about new products, ongoing discounts or anything else related to advertising the company’s services. People always carry their mobile devices with them. Hence, text messaging is one of the smartest ways to grab their attention.
SMS marketing just needs a smart planning of right time, right customer and right content. They need to be short, catchy and useful with just one or two sentences. Once they follow these guidelines, they can be much more successful than any of the abovementioned channels.
There are a couple of more things that SMS marketing campaigns need to follow.
It is crucial to mention the company’s name in the message. Giving a short link or contact to get back to is important as well. Additionally, SMS marketing planning has to consider the time of the day. It is a bad idea to send out promotional campaigns in the middle of a busy working day. It is not a good idea to send late in the evenings or on weekends.
Some may consider SMS marketing as an outdated way to promote your services. Yet they don’t notice the obvious advantages that it has. As opposed to emails, people don’t check text messages once or twice a day at most. Most of the customers open them right away, and because of their briefness, they are more likely to read the whole message.
Same with the programmatic advertising.
As much as it is targeted to a specific audience, it does not completely guarantee that those customers will click on the ad. However, SMS marketing directs certain customers, who opted in before. Therefore, it has more potential to attract consumers.
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