Tried and Tested Marketing Tips for SME’s
In the current economic climate, marketing your small business is more important than ever. In this article we’ve listed a handful of the strategies that have worked well for us in the hope that they might be useful to your business too.
Email Marketing
When it’s done right, email marketing is still one of the best ways to build a rapport with your customers. It is also one of the best marketing mediums for offering a great return on investment, with results almost immediately visible in the form of opens and clickthrough’s.
Building relationships with your customers
Email marketing is a convenient way to keep in touch with your customer base, keeping them up-to-date with any offers or information that may be useful to them. If somebody subscribes to your mailing list, its because they want to hear news from your company – so don’t be scared of contacting them!
Email marketing is the best way to share news with large chunks of your database quickly and easily. You might want to share news of a new product or service launch, news of an event you are attending or hosting, or changes to your business.
Connecting your sales and marketing efforts
When linked with your CRM system, email marketing can transform the relationship between your sales and marketing activities. Here at Softext, we use the Act CRM Cloud with marketing automation, which provides real time response metrics for our sales team allowing them to see opens, clicks, bounce rates and comparative stats for every email campaign that gets sent out.
When looking at a contact record in the CRM system, it is also easy to see which email campaigns the customer has received and how they have responded to them – useful information to have when talking to the client on the phone!
Social media marketing
Just like email marketing, social media is a low-cost and efficient marketing medium. With the right content you can build an audience that cares about your brand or business and wants to hear from you.
Better customer experience
Using social media as an extension of your customer service is a great way of getting value from it. Your customers will see it as a place to find important information and a convenient way to get in touch with you. Many people now prefer to contact businesses using social media so this option should be part of your customer service and marketing plans.
Facilitating contact through social media will also help to free up some of your other resources and ease the burden on sales and customer service teams.
Reach new customers
Social media can also help you to direct traffic back towards your website where you can convert those visitors into new customers. Share content that is relevant to your target audience with information that will entice them to click through to your website.
Additionally, social media is ideal for showcasing your products and services – another incentive to get potential customers to click through to your site. Just make sure that your message and branding is consistent across your social channels and your website.
Customer Reviews
Collecting reviews from customers and asking for referrals is an effective way of building your reputation and gaining new leads. Tools such as Trustpilot, Feefo, and Facebook reviews give you a free, or low-cost way of collecting customer feedback.
Have you found any marketing strategies that work for your business? We’d love to hear them! Please tweet us @Softext