SBDC Advisors can order a custom advertising and marketing package for a clients’ business from our SBDC Research Team –ask your SBDC advisor, it’s no fee. Are you trying to determine how to build your lead list?
SBA Marketing Plan your marketing strategy should be a part of your business plan which you adjust periodically to the goals. Your budget should include advertising as ongoing cost of business.
Know the difference in branding and marketing.
Why? It’s a low-cost, high-time investment way to:
- BUILD awareness
- ATTRACT new clients
- CONNECT with current customers (build relationships)
- DRIVE traffic to your website/store
- LEARN industry, business, and consumer trends
- PROVIDE customer service
- SPY on your competitors
- MEET “influencers” (media & industry experts)
How to Market Your Business Tips/Resources:
- Print: Business Cards, Signage, Trifolds, Billboards, Newspapers,Logo
- Online: Website; Business Listings; Social Media; Ecommerce
- Get a security certificate for your domain – most times this happens automatically when you buy a domain. Even if you are not taking a credit card, ecommerce, recommendation to have a security certificate
- Google Guidance Make Website work for you – (basic guidelines on page and audience)
- Easy Templates to get started: Wix, WordPress, GoDaddy, VistaPrint, Squarespace, Shopify
- Test your page: Website grader, Google Insights, Page Speed Report
- Google Toolbox – consumer trends,Shopping insights, competitive data. Look for livestream online training on this
- Communication Tools: Social Media; Email Marketing (Constant Contact), Mailchimp, VistaPrint, mail merge from Word; follow DMA Guidelines
- People: Networking, Referrals, Chamber of Commerce, Associations
- Tips:
- Keep logo across marketing channels for branding recognition
- colors speak, images & videos suggest and compel -align with target audience
- Use at least 3, takes more than 1 channel and multiple ads before results increase
- Use browser to test resizing per user device type
Free:
- Google My Business – put on map by category, Listing for location or service area, Web, & Free Post too! Respond Reviews – See Instructions from Google
- Social Media Pages -advice from The Marketing Lady on best media per industry (p13) , you can’t be everywhere
- Yelp
- FYI – some of the website templates above are free until you link your domain and add hosting. Google gives a free page with a GMB listing, very basic,
Schedulers:
Hard to do everything, so use these to make your time more efficient and follow mentions
- Hootsuite – charges a minimal fee
- Later – recommended to schedule posting with your instagram, ticktok, LinkedIn
- Sprout Social
- Constant Contact – schedule your emails and maintain your subscribe list as well as social posting
- Buffer
- Post Cron
- Tweetdeck
- Facebook scheduler inherent, however it’s just 1 platform so try some of the other choices to make your time more efficient and use other tools available to enhance your posting.
Hashtags insight – Join the conversation – not just for twitter
Check these out to determine hashtags to use, using hashtags isn’t intuitive for everyone 🙂
o Hashtagify.me
o RiteTag – size audience following
o Sprout Social
o Twitter native – see whats trending
o Trendsmap.com – trending hashtags by location
o #tagdef – provides definition of a hashtag
o Tagboard
o Keyhole.co
Content (images, web/mobile apps)
o Canva (great for various sizes of messages) or Adobe
o Unsplash
Phone apps to help you take the photo and use on social:
o Collage
o Typorama
o Text on Photo
o Photshopfix
o LightroomCC
Snapseed for iphone
Need to resize your photos? PicResize – an online free tool
More to come on SEO
Find Tips/tools at
Training Online Free resources to learn more how-to’s
- Eric Spellman presented at ASBDC and has a library of online training.
- Marsha Lynn Hudson presenter, teacher, digital expert. Visit her website, https://marshalynnhudson.com/ resources to download social media content tools.
- Melissa Forziat presented at ASBDC conference, online for Paris SBDC and will be local in Paris March 2022! Check out her page and resources for marketing on a budget.
Training – need more instruction?
We support local. If you have a local marketing business serving our region, please contact us us know so we can refer you! We refer at least 3 to protect from conflict of interest.
Contact us for more information.
#ParisSBDC #Marketing #SocialMedia #DigitalMedia
