small business marketing tips

Small Business Marketing Tips 2020

Small Business Marketing Tips 2020

Do you feel like your small businesses has had the most challenging year ever?

We’ve pivoted and adapted our business models, we’ve initiated safety protocols, we’ve tip toed around the political divisiveness, we’ve worked hard to get every single customer, and we’ve given blood, sweat, and tears to keep them loyal to us.

Whew.  That’s a lot!

Now it’s time to take a breather and re-group.

Fall is here, the leaves are changing, and the holiday season is around the corner, a lot sooner than we think.  Your small business digital marketing plans are ready for a refresh.

As a marketing consultant, I am constantly learning about the newest innovations in Social Media, SEO, Email, and websites.  And by sharing these tips with you, my hope is that your business reach will expand.
I’ve outlined some simple ways for you to amplify your marketing to the next level.

Try these tips:

  1. Add a website chat bot with Facebook messenger.

Facebook messenger offers many automations for your business page so why not tie those automations and personalized conversations to your website.

To do this, Facebook has made the process fairly simple.

Go to your Facebook business page and click on Settings.

Then go to Messaging.

Scroll down to where it says: “Add Messenger to your website” and click Get Started to get the code for your website developer.

And voila.  Start chatting with website visitors via Facebook Messenger.

Go to HighKeyImpact.com and look for my FB messenger Chatbot in the bottom right hand corner.

  1. Animate Social Media Images

 Moving images and video are known to have better reach than flat post images.  Here’s a little insider secret to know if you don’t use Canva.com yet to create images.

For beginner and amateur graphic designers, their platform helps you look like a real graphic designer.

Canva went several steps further in this Summer and POW—they created the ability to animate social media images and elements— way beyond my basic beginner graphic design ability.

Now Canva offers animated image options to create images AND text to move, pop, hop, and jump around.  Well, not exactly jump.

Try Canva with text and photo animations.

Their platform’s animation features are mind-blowing to amateur graphic designers like me. You’ll feel the same way!

For example….

  1. Manage your company’s online listings

There are several listings’ management platforms where you can pay a monthly fee to get listed on Yellow Pages, Yelp and similar website listings.

If you devote about 1 hour/month to your listings management, it’s a simple DIY project.

First, find the relevant websites where your competitors are listed. Or go to these websites.

Look for your business and if it’s not listed, sign up for a free listing.  If it’s there, take ownership of the listing and optimize it with the current information about your business.

Listings are everywhere including:

Foursquare
Mapquest
Opentable
Google
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn
Bing
Waze
Yahoo
Uber
Yellow pages
Amazon Alexa for Business
Touch Local
AOL
All in One Search
192.com
2 find local
Ab local
EZ local

And more!

Online listings are also considered backlinks to your website URL.  And that is where some key strategic search engine optimization (SEO) comes into play.  Google likes websites with many incoming backlinks and the search engine will reward it with a higher search ranking.

4. Start an authenticity campaign

Talk about the why of your business.  Why did you start doing what you do?  What does it mean to you?  How does it make you feel?  Where do you see it going in the near future?  What are your grand plans?

Get rid of the stock photos and start using your own images and video.
Ask customers to take photos or video of them with your product.
Get permission to use their photos in your marketing materials or digital marketing.

When the image of your business uses ‘real people’, you will be amazed at the engagements and interaction from new prospective customers and existing customers.

Being authentic and showcasing your business in it’s true light gives prospective customers a sneak peek into what it’s like to purchase from you.

The more true you are to your brand, the more likely people will follow, like, comment and buy from you.

With these 4 marketing tips (Small Business Marketing Tips 2020), we hope to see you elevate your small business digital marketing reach.  If you need a hand, reach out to us at cheryl@highkeyimpact.com.