2014 New Years Checklist: Small Business Marketing Tips

To help you be successful in 2014, I’ve put together some small business marketing tips to help you plan for your coming quarter and year. From email marketing, social media, and now content marketing, there are many things that can (and should) be included in your marketing strategy.

So as you start planning out your 2014 marketing strategy for your business, make sure you go through this helpful checklist.

1) Brush Up On Social Media

It’s 2014. Social media is here to stay, both as a channel to communicate with friends and family and also as a way for businesses to engage their audiences. Whether you’re just getting started to social media, or have been using it for a while now, it’s always good to brush up on your basics.

Below are four links to white papers I’ve put together to help you out with social media. The most important thing to figure out for your social media usage is your goal. Whether this is referrals, website traffic, or long-term engagement, be specific in planning your goals, put a plan in place, and stick to it.

• Getting Started with Social Media for Small Businesses
• Getting Started with Twitter for Small Businesses
• Getting Started with LinkedIn for Small Businesses
• Getting Started with Facebook for Small Businesses

 

2) Setup Your Facebook Business Page

It’s also hard for you to have a social media presence if you don’t have a Facebook Business Page. An easy way to think about this is that your website is more of your static content and business overview. Your Facebook Business Page is your active voice for your business and the more human/conversational side. Through your Business Page, you’ll want to be actively sharing relevant content to your industry without actually “selling” so to speak. By sharing things that people are interested in and care about, you’ll be able to stay top of mind and more importantly, top of their News Feed.

For a complete walkthrough on how to setup your Facebook Business Page, check out this tutorial I put together.

3) Update Your LinkedIn Profile

Think of LinkedIn as your publically facing resume of your professional career, strengths, experience, and overview. Use it to connect with past customers, current clients, and all professional connections. You never know where your next referral or lead will come from, so it’s important you look sharp.

Check out this blog post for a complete list of everything you should update on your LinkedIn profile right away.

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4) Review Your Current Marketing Strategies

How much are you currently spending to acquire new customers? How successful are the marketing efforts you’ve invested in and how are you measuring that success? What’s the lifetime value of a customer for you? These are all important questions to ask and if you’re marketing efforts aren’t able to let you see the answers to these questions, then you might want to reconsider your plan.

A while back, we put together a blog post to help you figure out the lifetime value of a customer for promotional products distributors. The math is universal and this is always a good metric to keep in mind when investing in additional lead generation activities for your business.

5) Revisit Your Email Marketing Newsletters

Email is a resilient medium and those who know how to use it properly can do great things with it. A lot of the industries that we work with have longer sales cycles so email marketing is a great way to help you stay top-of-mind with past clients and customers.

For your email marketing and newsletters, you should keep a few things in mind:

• Always be writing emails that include critical success components.
• Make sure you’re writing emails that convert.
• Be aware of words and practices that get you marked as SPAM.
• Write your emails to be full of rich content.

6) Follow Up With Leads

Something that might sound simple enough can actually be a bit more troublesome that you think. A lot of our customers get leads through their email marketing and social media marketing efforts but don’t actually take the time to follow up with them. That’s just leaving money on the table.

We did a webinar a while back to teach you how to correctly follow up with leads you might be interested in your product or services. Here’s that video recording.

7) Seek Advice From Experts

You cannot possibly know everything there is to know about marketing and why should you? You’re an expert in running your small business, not marketing. That’s why you should always keep the company of those smarter than you around so you’re getting the best possible results from your marketing efforts.

And if you every want to have someone simply take over the hard work for you, we’re here to do your email, social media, and content marketing to make your life easier.

 

With us already into the first week of 2014, what sort of marketing strategies have you decided to use this year and what are you stopping? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

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