Five top tips for marketing your business

At BHP we work with SMEs to help them drive profile, orders and profitability via their marketing activities. Here we pick our top five activities which make the most significant difference to marketing results.

1. Constantly update the content on your website

To increase traffic to your website it should feature an area where you can share new, relevant content, like an ‘updates’ or ‘latest news’ space. This will increase your SEO rankings, particularly when you feature relevant keywords. Search Engine Optimisation is a technique for pushing up your website’s ranking in search engine results. It improves your content visibility and accessibility to anyone searching for particular keywords or similar terms.

Ninety per cent of modern consumers start their research into a new product, service or business using a search engine. Google alone is processing more than five billion searches a day. That means a website that includes content optimised with current keywords will have greater visibility to your target audience. You can find the keywords which are relevant to your sector or products by using web tools such as Google Search Console, Google Keyword Planner and Ahrefs Keywords Explorer.

When you link your social media posts to this optimised content on your website you should see a spike in traffic reflected in your website analytics.

2. Email marketing

The widespread use of email makes this a powerful way to engage with potential customers. With almost every adult in the world having an email address, it’s a leading channel for providing brand awareness and customer acquisition opportunities. This means it’s a marketing priority, and crucial that you create and maintain an email database of people who are in your target audience (in compliance with GDPR regulations). Effective marketing is simply a numbers game: the larger your store of relevant email addresses, the greater your number of conversions is likely to be. Before the average consumer starts recognising your brand messages and responding to them, they’ll need to see your content at least five times.

Your email marketing should always include a strong call to action to encourage someone to click through to your order page, or a landing page on your website.

Tracking the results of your email marketing will help you to understand what content most resonates with your potential customers; we encourage all the SMEs we advise to analyse open rates and click through rates, ideally weekly, and as a minimum monthly.

3. Social media channels

Once you understand and can pinpoint your target audience, you’ll be able to locate them on their favoured social media channels. LinkedIn is a must for a B2B business, as is Twitter, while Facebook is still important for a consumer-facing business. However, audiences are fragmenting as other channels grow, with Instagram and TikTok now replacing some of the more traditional channels.

You should edit, or tweak your content marketing for optimum effectiveness on each social media channel, as each has a different audience and algorithm. Tracking the success of each of your posts should help you shape your future marketing content creation.

4. Paid social

You can also use your content marketing to try out paid social. Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn all provide the ability to target audience groups in a simple self-serve model. With only a small budget you can discover what content is attracting the most interest and, as you begin to learn what works, you can further refine your audience selection. This can provide data about your ideal audience which you can feed back into your marketing content strategy.

5. Why tracking is important

Tracking your progress is an important part of your marketing strategy, which helps to ensure that you’re achieving the maximum ROI. A simple dashboard can be set up to track your total audience reach including web traffic, email click-throughs and unsubscribes, social media engagement and conversions/orders from each of these. We recommend setting targets and revising them upwards as your confidence and success grows.

Want to do more marketing for your SME but not sure where to start? Get in touch with us today .