Channels Every Small Business Should Be Looking At To Grow

All businesses have to start somewhere but with nearly nonexistent customer base and the absence of brand recognition. Add a limited marketing budget to those, and you get almost zero chance to grow. To make things worse, there is no business niche that has not been occupied by at least one big company in the market. Inevitable competitions with existing major brands have set great barrier for startups to invade the market with new ideas, products, services, and basically alternatives to the-already-popular names.

Customers are used to the idea of quality begets reputation and the other way around, and therefore it makes little financial sense to invest in unknown company in the hope of getting better customer satisfaction experience. The good thing is that small businesses can afford to sell their goods & services at lower price, giving a plausible excuse for customers to try something new. Another problem comes from the easily agreeable “you get what you pay for” sentiment arises, based on which people are willingly to spend more money as expensive items are usually more convincing in terms of quality and after sale services.

Most startups have to carry the burden of maximizing limited budget without compromising quality. On one hand, you are aware of the fact that new companies will not succeed unless they have the financial power to let consumers know about their products and services. On the other hand, you fully understand that extravagant expense on advertising and marketing can actually backfire and bring down the entire business undertakings because you will have nothing left for everything else.

Marketing is important indeed, but it is not the only thing that matters in business. You have to consider the operational factors too for examples manpower, manufacturing process, and physical resources. However, there is always the sweet spot between a modest and an exuberant marketing efforts; marketing can be effective even when supported by only conservative budget as long as you launch the campaign through the right effective channels. Here are some channels every small business should be looking at to grow.

1. Social Media

With minimum budget for launching your startups, the first thing to consider is to utilize all resources to their full potentials, without spending significant amount of money if possible. The concept of word-of-mouth marketing comes to mind; in traditional sense, word-of-mouth is free marketing platform with which everybody is voluntarily your marketing agent.

They spread the words about company’s goods & services to the public, albeit local, at no cost. Such practices still exist, but the Internet, particularly social media, has transformed that conventional method into one of the most effective marketing global marketing strategies. Thanks to social media, small businesses can now reach millions of people with few clicks only. Choose your platforms:

Facebook: with more than 1.4 billion of users and 900 million of visits every day, Facebook is the most promising platform for startups to get started at minimum budget. It gets easier if you have an existing active Facebook account, too.

Twitter: according to a research published by AdWeek Blog Network, more than half of Twitter users are more likely to make a purchase from brands they follow. Twitter has more than 317 million monthly active users now.

LinkedIn: created with the purpose of facilitating global networking, LinkedIn is the right platform for professionals and B2B startups.

YouTube: about one-third of all people on the Internet are YouTube users. Average viewing session on mobile devices is more than 40 minutes.

Pinterest: in 2015, Pinterest had about 100 million users. Fast forward to a year, there are now 150 million users or 50% growth in just about 12 months.

Most (if not all) social media offers both personal and business accounts. The latter is not free, but the potential return-on-investment far outweighs the cost. Take Facebook for example, on which you have the options to send ads only to specific demographics for more relevant targeted marketing.

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2. Affiliate Marketing

Basic definition of affiliate marketing is that you hire Internet marketers or publishers to send visitors to your products/websites. You pay for that service, but it is still your job to actually make sales. However, there are some details to know as follows.

PPC (Pay per Click): every time user clicks an ad or affiliate link, you pay the ad publisher. PPC is preferable by publishers because they don’t actually have to do anything but sending people to your products. Sometimes they take improper measures to get the job done for examples making false promises to visitors. Strict monitoring is necessary on your part.

PPM (Pay per Impression): measured in thousands, you pay publisher for every thousand impressions of your ads. Impression is not a click; one ads view counts as one impression. You need to make the ads attractive and engaging enough to make visitors click.

PPA (Pay per Acquisition): publishers get paid only when the ads lead to users’ actions for examples filling out forms, subscribing to newsletters, or making a purchase. Commissions for publishers tend to be higher than other affiliate channels.

A lot of major e-commerce companies take advantage of affiliate programs to increase the likelihood of making sales. Explore each affiliate marketing option available to suit your budget.

3. Search Engine Optimization

At its core, search engine optimization (SEO) has only one purpose: getting free organic traffic from search engine results. Many things are involved in the process including but not limited to website designs, navigation, links, and HTML code.

Apart from those technical aspects, one major part of SEO is content creation in accordance to search engines’ guidance. SEO is an elaborate operation that can take quite a long time before you see noticeable results. This is an inseparable part of marketing campaign especially for startups.

4. Content Creation

People visit blogs (both personal and business) to read information about anything they want to know. Business startups need to capitalize on their blogs by providing unique yet relevant contents to keep visitors coming. Regular updates and addressing comments are also necessary to engage conversations at personal-level with potential consumers.

A typical blog with few comments and infrequent updates usually has poor quality contents or badly designed layouts. Professionally designed blogs such as Business Insider, HubSpot, and Moz are popular because they are filled with high quality contents that users actually read.

Content marketing is also a resource-demanding process. It takes proper research to produce quality contents relevant to your business. It is all about understanding what your customers are looking for and providing information for them. Although not necessarily expensive, you need to put time and efforts for successful campaign and bring your startup company to popularity.

5. Email Marketing

One of the most affordable and effective ways to introduce your business to potential consumers is email marketing. It has been used since a long time ago, and is still relevant until today. Most people think of it as relentless flow of unwanted emails into their inbox, but it does not have to be that way.

Email marketing is only effective when the message delivers compelling reasons to subscribe such as offers, events, discounts, or informative contents. Let us not forget that all recipients are simply one-click away for un-subscribing so keep the email short and direct enough. You can also attach explainer videos instead of long instructional explanations about your products. If you can give away something for free (such as e-book), try to inform that in the email as well.

Written by: Jophiel Silvestrone

Jophiel Silvestrone has written 326 posts in the Tech Blog.

Jophiel grew up on a ranch in Paradise Valley, Montana near Chico Hot Springs. Working on the ranch instilled work ethic and self motivation. Filled with this drive, Jophiel started mowing the local school's yards twice a month throughout the summers, at the age of 12. He moved to Billings in 2004, where he has been deeply involved in the local business community ever since. A serial entrepreneur, Jophiel has ran multiple businesses in our local community. The first business, a janitorial and carpet cleaning company, founded in 2005, has employed over 50 locals. Moving on to the media industry, Jophiel and several partners founded Green Directory Montana in the spring of 2007. Green Directory's sustainability ranking software awarded points based on sustainable or "green" actions. These points counted towards a business's total "Green Score," which in turn ranked them against other businesses in their category and throughout the entire site. It also featured a limited edition print version distributed annually. A business acquisition allowed Jophiel to focus on new projects, and a few close business colleagues and Jophiel started Rocky Mountain Mr. & Ms. Magazine, a lifestyle publication for men and women in the Magic City. After a year and a half at the helm of RM3 Magazine, the business was purchased. He now runs a web development company SkyPoint Studios and fathers his son Jaoquin, who plays football, basketball, soccer, and is learning snowboarding from his dad. Recently, has expanded to locations in Havasu, Arizona & Vegas. SkyPoint Studios is a market leader in both Billings & Havasu and Jophiel is working on building that same level of market dominance in Vegas. Specialties: Extensive experience in online and offline business. Especially savvy at WordPress, and operate several sites, one example is the blog: skypointwebdesignbillingsmontana.com/tech-blog. Check out skypointwebdesignbillingsmontana.com for the latest projects from SkyPoint Studios.