There are many times when small businesses start struggling when it comes to growing or sometimes even operating because they’re not able to attract the right customers. Fortunately, with marketing and public relations efforts, even the smallest businesses have a chance to reach their target audiences and connect in a way that will generate growth.
Audience
Plenty of smaller companies end up making the mistake of not even targeting the people they need to reach.
For example, a company that provides video production services to consumers might end up creating content that’s focused on the different types of video production, or similar subjects, when it shouldn’t be creating that type of content. By creating content about the company’s business, none of the target consumers are going to be interested, because they’re not looking to learn how to produce their own videos.
What that business needs to do is create content for the audience, not other similar businesses like it. That means the first step in attracting more potential consumers to a company is researching the target audience and figuring out how to market to that audience in an effective way. If a company has already conducted audience research and developed a few different buyer personas that will fit with each segment of that target audience, the entire process becomes a lot easier because the company already knows who it needs to reach with its marketing efforts.
To connect with customers in a more personal way and continuously nurture the relationship the company has with them, companies can create an email newsletter and ask customers to subscribe to it. In this way, the only people that will be receiving emails from the company are the people that have explicitly expressed an interest in receiving them.
Although email efforts tend to be an older strategy, it’s incredibly reliable in terms of marketing and public relations efforts. That’s because social media platforms rely on algorithms to show the right content to the right people, which can make things a lot more difficult for businesses. However, through email, companies get a chance to communicate with their target audiences whenever they need to.
To create an email list filled with subscribers, companies must convince their customers or even website visitors to subscribe to the newsletter. The best way to get website visitors to do that is by providing them with something of value in return for their email addresses. Companies can provide their website visitors with some sort of gated valuable content that the customers can only access if they’re willing to share their email addresses.
Search Engine Optimization
According to research, over 50 percent of all the website traffic that’s generated around the world is generated through organic search. That means if a company wants to reach more potential customers, especially if it’s a small company with a local brick-and-mortar store, it must find a way to rank on search engines, and more specifically, Google.
Long gone are the days when companies could only need to create a simple website and have it rank almost immediately on the search engine results pages. These days there are several different strategies that companies have to follow so they can increase their chances of ranking highly and showing up in users’ search results.
One of the most important strategies that companies have to rely on to be able to generate more organic traffic is to focus on search engine optimization (SEO). Search engine optimization is an industry in and of itself and takes a lot of work and it takes effort for companies to do it right. However, even small businesses can invest some time and effort into improving their ranking on search engines if they’re focused on figuring out what the target audience is already searching for, and which keywords they’re all using when they come across the company or its solutions.
After that, the company needs to optimize every page it has on its business website to make it as clear as possible to the search engine that the company’s website is the best possible result for the keywords that potential customers are using. The final thing is to get other websites to mention the company and link to it on those pages so that the company can generate more backlinks.
Content
Companies can generate more organic website traffic and improve their ranking on search engine results pages with the right type of content. Companies have to create content that is going to cater to the needs, interests, and wants of the target audience throughout every stage of the buying journey.
However, it’s important to remember that not every single piece of content a company publishes is going to end up ranking immediately. But that’s perfectly fine because the company can always continue creating its content, or even update the old pieces of content and then re-publish them to have them rank higher and attract more website traffic organically.
The best way to identify if a piece of content needs to be updated and then re-published is if that piece of content isn’t performing as well as expected for the keywords that are being targeted through it or if there are any other blog posts from other industry competitors that outrank the company’s own content piece on that subject, and if the piece of content is over a year old. If all requirements have been fulfilled, then the company can go ahead and update its content on a specific page, and then re-publish it to get it to perform much better and reach more people.
