7 EFFECTIVE MARKETING STEPS EVERY SMALL BUSINESS OWNER SHOULD IMPLEMENT

1) KYS – KNOW YOURSELF

What do you want to achieve in the next 12 months? This may seem like an obvious question, but, if you have not set any goals or written down an action plan, you may find yourself in the same place a year from now. Your goal may be to have your own website, to gain new referrals, to create a system to capture potential clients’ email addresses, to make it easier for customers to pay you or to manage your time better.

2) CLIENTS AND TESTIMONIALS

We know how important it is to look after all of your customers but don’t forget those people who are always referring people to you.

Make sure that you give them extra-special treatment. Are you thanking them for their referral? Or if they are your patient are you calling them to check to see how they are getting on? You could send them a thank you card for referring people to you or give them a discount after they purchase a certain amount, rewarding them for their loyalty. A lot of places now have loyalty cards in place, and it’s a great way to incentivise repeat business.

3) Ask for Testimonials

Obtaining testimonials from your customers can prove invaluable. If you haven’t been doing this already, I am going to give you a little challenge…contact your top 3 customers and ask them for a testimonial or a review today.

The best place to have your reviews is on your Google business page, as this will help with your website ranking, the more reviews you have, the more Google thinks you’re reputable website and credits you by pushing the site higher up on the Google search engine. People also take a lot of notice of these reviews when purchasing a product, have you ever been checking out a new restaurant and the first place you tend to go is the google reviews to see what people think.

The only problem with this is the person adding the review need to have a Gmail account. If they don’t have one, I would ask them to add one on your Facebook business page, just send them the link and if they don’t have a FB account (which I very doubt as most people do) ask them to email you a review that you can add onto your website.

4) TRACKING YOUR PATIENTS / CUSTOMERS

How many new patients/customers have you had this month or this year to date?

How are you tracking where they are coming from?

Are you capturing and recording this information anywhere?

Start NOW by asking the question “How did you hear about us?”

Keep a record so you can see what is working for you. Facebook allows you to add a free Pixel which is a powerful piece of coding for your website that will enable you to track all your visitors to your website and that lets you measure, optimise and build audiences for your advertising campaigns. A pixel comes in very useful if you want to do Facebook adverts as you can track and target your website visitors on Facebook, you can even target your email list.

If you are not tracking your customers, I would suggest that you start to do so. It is paramount to know where your patients or customers are coming from so that you can monitor what is working and what you need to work on. If you are struggling with this, I am happy to discuss directly and give you advice.

5) KNOW YOUR NUMBERS

Are you monitoring your patients each month?

Do you know your 3 quietest months of the year?

During the quieter months, you can do some planning, get your books in order, use the time to do some marketing or website updates or even training if you lack certain skills. You will find a pattern and certain months will always be quieter. You can use this time also to plan holidays, so make sure you have a plan in place, so you are not constantly chasing your tail.

6) MARKET YOURSELF TO NEW AND EXISTING PATIENTS

What have you done to market yourself to new and existing patients? Are you sending them emails?

There are some great mailing tools out there which you can use. I love MailChimp, and it’s free for the first 2000 emails. You can also group your audiences by interests, age, demographics etc. If you don’t have the facilities or time, as long as you are supplying material, we can assist in exposing your services to a much wider audience. Once you have their email, you can send them regular updates (but don’t spam them) think more what is useful for them rather than sending them every offer you have which they will soon get tired of and unsubscribe to you.

Creating Ads on Facebook can be very useful, definitely more so than leafleting. You can utilise online ads to reach your target demographic, based on age, interests, location, likes and interests, you can even find out what pages they like and add that into the interests. This will ensure that you are targeting people with similar interests. You can also create ‘Lookalike audiences.’ that will copy your existing audience.

Leafleting is another option, but I think its time consuming we know little to nothing about the people we are handing them to. However, leafleting can still be useful if implemented in the strategic locations or targeting an existing group of customers you already have.

7) SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION (SEO)

SEO is a topic all on its own and there is so much you can do to your website to make it rank higher on google. I will cover this is a separate blog.

As a small business owner, I would recommend you take advantage of FREE tools on offer. Google Analytics reporting and Google Console. These are brilliant tools at your disposal and can tell you a lot about your website, your audience and its effectiveness. They can tell you which pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from. It can tell you which social media platform is bringing traffic back to your website. What pages have high bounce rates?

However, you need to be able to read and understand the content. If you are unsure how to use this, Scarlet Digital provide monthly and quarterly reporting which I am happy to discuss in further detail. Or we can do a FREE website Audit.

Alternatively, we can also arrange training sessions with you, helping you to analyse your own reports.

Good luck and I would love to hear any success stories. Feel free to email me.