The marketing arena has changed so much over the years. The marketing techniques that worked wonders even a decade ago are almost obsolete now. It is an ever-evolving field that keeps businesses on their toes. After all, business is not as much about a great product or excellent customer service as it is about getting the word out about your company’s existence. 

When it comes to marketing, small businesses have had it tough for years, because of a budget crunch. But the tides have turned towards small businesses now with online taking precedence over traditional marketing practices. The best thing about online marketing is it pits large organisations directly against SMEs because digital marketing is more about strategies than budget. 

One of the most important parts of online marketing is content. In this article, you will learn how you can use content marketing to create brand awareness and bring in leads to your small local business. 

What is Content Marketing?

Just like the name suggests content marketing is marketing with the help of content. But how does it help in bringing in leads, you are asking? 

Well, picture this. where do you go to if you require information regarding, say, a property related legal concern? Google! People now turn to the internet to solve their problems, from looking for information to finding products and services. 

So, continuing from the example above, if you run a law firm and have been farsighted enough to have a website, you should make it a point to regularly share search engine optimised content regarding various legal matters common in Australia. By doing this, local people will find your website when they need information, will begin to trust you, and see you as a thought leader in the industry. 

So, how does this profit you? When people who follow your blogs have legal matters they need to discuss with a professional or have someone asking them about such matters, who do you think will come to their mind? You! Because they have seen how you really know about the law in Australia. 

Indeed, it is not as simple as how it is written here, because there are a lot of different steps involved before a reader of your blogs can turn into a paying customer. Nevertheless, it’s a start. 

Content Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

Before we get into what you should be doing, let us be done with what you should NOT be doing. Here they are:

• The very first thing on the list of what not to do is plagiarise or copy. Be original when it comes to writing content for your website. Copying will not only turn your readers off but you will be penalised by Google, which will lead to you losing valuable traffic. You can of course take inspiration from other relevant blogs but make sure you give your own professional inputs.
• Another mistake that you should definitely avoid is irregularity. Your ranking will suffer and so will the traffic to your website. Knowing how frequently Google crawls your website and updating your blog accordingly can work wonders to bring in traffic. 

Now, that we got that out of the way, we can move on to content strategising tips for small businesses:

• Content marketers agree to the fact that it is not writing a blog that is difficult, but coming up with the ideas for the content is what gets them ripping their hair out. Don’t fret! Here’s an easy solution for you to start your blog with. Use the frequently asked questions section from your website. Just create content that answers these questions. Another strategy is to ask your readers for their opinions on what they want to know about or read about next and then proceed to use these suggestions as your topics.
• Use relevant keywords. This point cannot be emphasised more. Your content will still receive traffic even if you don’t use proper keywords, but if you want to be found by the wider audience, your content needs to be rich with content. Take the help of online tools like keywordtool.io to find the most searched keywords relevant to your blog topic and use them strategically, as per Google’s instructions. 
• Write original content that will genuinely help people. Yes, writing and updating content is a marketing technique. But it is an inbound marketing technique, which means you attract people to your business by giving them the information they need. Content marketing is not a hard-selling technique, so don’t try to lure people into buying from your business with the content. Just create a place for your business in the minds of people with useful content and they will trust you enough to convert into customers. 

Grow Your Small Business with Content Marketing

There is so much more to content marketing than could be written in just one article. Having said that, do use this article as a guide to kick start content marketing for your business. For more tips and tricks, keep a lookout at this page since we will keep adding new content regarding useful content marketing strategies for small local businesses.

Finding the right web hosting for your Australian small business can be difficult due to the myriad of choices available to you. So what we will discuss here are the main points for getting the best web hosting for your Australian small business website. It’s also important to understand that the web hosting should be considered completely separate from the website, or the web design itself and it is much better to keep it that way. Web designers often have their own affiliations or reseller hosting plans, which may not be the best hosting for your business needs.

So let’s delve in to these major points which will be hopefully be useful, regardless if you are just starting out and haven’t got any web hosting yet or if you are simply looking to change or upgrade your existing hosting.

Web hosting location

For most Australian small businesses, getting your web hosting located in Australia should be a priority. There are two main reasons for getting Australian web hosting; speed and SEO.

It helps my SEO?

It sure does! With Australian web hosting your website will automatically be given an Australian IP address. So this already alerts the search engines that you and your business are Australian without much effort at all!

If your website is hosted in Australia, then you will be able to serve the website to your Australian clients and customers much faster. Now this isn’t talking about the speed the server we will discuss that further down, this is simply about getting the information on the web page to your customers device quickly and efficiently.

It doesn’t make that much difference?

Oh but it does! Maybe not a decade ago when we were living on plane old HTML and CSS files to create our websites but now with all the CMS’ s e-commerce stores the majority of websites now have a good 100 file requests per page (html, CSS, images, fonts, multiple JavaScripts, analytics for Facebook & Google). So even the smallest fraction of time delay can multiply very quickly. These time delays along with the sheer distance that the data has to travel (along the 5 submerged data optic cables connecting Australia’s internet to the rest of the world) simply means, that to serve your Australian clients and customers properly, you need your hosting base to be here in Australia.

If we look at one of our simple web pages here we can see the time delay quite clearly:

Here is a view of how our blog page loads from Australia, with our Australian web hosting, as seen by GTmetrix. This is a simple 1mb page, with 44 requests. now lets see how Canada sees it…

So we see that the fully loaded time is now 1 second slower, simply down to the distance that data is travelling. In order for us to be able to serve the website to the rest of the world, we would need to add a CDN to help with the page loads.

Try it with your current hosting. Check your page speeds around the world, and check the performance of your current web hosting.

So Australian businesses looking to serve Australia only, you need Australian web hosting, if you’re looking to serve clients around the rest of the world then you will need a form of CDN to add your Australian hosting.

Scalable web hosting

Being able to upgrade your web hosting with extra memory, web space or database space & i/o increases, are also important factors to look into when we are choosing the right web hosting for your Australian small business. Most small business owners do not have the time to run and maintain their own standalone, or cloud server. Most small businesses don’t need that either.

With cost at a premium, we need to be able to start relatively small, but be able to increase space and speed over time as the business and the web traffic grows, but without the complications of having to move the whole website to a different company.

Our website here at Small Business Near Me, is very heavily database driven, as a lot of your websites will be if you have self-hosted eCommerce stores, or event/booking websites, and we are grateful to be able to upgrade our hosting at the click of a proverbial button.

Choosing the right web hosting for your Australian small business. 

Customer Service in Australian time.

As we are all aware, occasionally things go wrong! If we need to be able to talk to support, then we want to be able to do that quickly and easily and on our time frame. I would certainly want to get the full support here, rather than when the other side of the world has its support desk occupied by one man and his dog!

Exchange rates & costs

This one is a little more straightforward! Not quite knowing what price you will pay for your web hosting from year to year, or month to month is a little off putting. Let’s just keep it simple, and get our web hosting invoices in Australian dollars.

Australian hosting for Australian businesses

If you run an Australian small business, then Australian web hosting is the way to go. It helps you, and it helps your customers!

• Speed of service to your customer base
• Your web ip location recognised to help your SEO
• Australian time zone support when you need it
• Payments in AUD

Small Business Near Me hosts this website with Encompass Web Design, and we can recommend the web speed, price and service. Contact them to see if they can help you.

We hope this article will help you to see the benefits of some Australian web hosting for your website, or maybe just check out your website speed and performance at GTmetrix. Write your comments below!

Feature image by Jack van der Spoel on Unsplash

In the digital age of marketing, proper online strategies can make or break your small business. It is important to understand and learn the most effective optimisation techniques that can boost your business performance. There are tools that can help you in the process. By utilising such tools to craft effective online marketing techniques you can successfully grow your small business.

To help you get started, here are three free tools to help you ace your online marketing game.

 Spyfu

Spyfu is a free tool that you can use to research your competitors’ business. It is important to analyse how similar businesses are attracting customers, where they are getting the traffic from, and what they are doing right so that you can implement the same strategies in your business to stay ahead of the game.

Say, you are a small business that sells handmade products in Australia. In that case businesses like CCraft To Consumer or Love Australian Handmade would be your competitors. All you have to do is visit Spyfu and insert the link to the business website of these competing companies in the search tab and voilà! You will have all the necessary information such as organic vs paid inbound clicks from Google, SEO keywords, ranking history (both national and global), PPC (pay-per-click), and organic vs paid competitors, at your fingertips.

Some key advantages of this tool are:

• Keep an account of your competitors’ business practices through the domain search
• Easy comparison with your own business using monitoring tools
• Overview of the pros and cons of certain keywords and promotion strategies
• Drive clicks to the AdWords or SEO campaigns of your business

Note – The free version has limited features which are sufficient to start with. But you can choose to obtain more features with the paid version.

 Social Blade

Social Blade tracks statistics and analytics across an array of social media sites including YouTube, Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. A major part of the traffic to your website comes from your social media accounts. Hence it is crucial that you keep an eye on how those accounts are doing and implement the best social media practices for your business.

For instance, you could easily look up your social media accounts on Social Blade and get an in-depth insight into all the accounts’ average performance. You will not only get an idea of what kind of content the audience is engaging with most, but also what kinds of posts are driving maximum traffic to your website. From subscriber and follower count, estimated earnings, engagement rate to detailed graphical and numerical data, Social Blade can assist you with all your analytical needs.

Some key advantages of this tool are –

• Easy access to statistics and analytics of your social media accounts
• Insight into the engagement rate and overall performance of your posts
• Optimisation of future content and subsequent improvement of social media performance

 Google Trends

Google Trends is an online tool that can help users discover trends regarding people’s search behaviour across all Google platforms. As obvious as this one is, it is an extremely useful, free tool when it comes to reviewing the success of a company’s SEO strategies, especially in terms of keyword implementation.

Any small business could easily use Google Trends for effective keyword searches. This tool allows a clear view into search volume, relevancy and competition of a particular keyword, which can be further filtered by country and time period. Take for example a Sydney based hairstyling business, a long-tail keyword like “hair salon in Sydney” would yield more results than simply “hair salon” or “hairdresser”.

With Google Trends, SEO optimisation for your website becomes hassle-free. Some key advantages of this tool are –

• Know the latest trends
• Find sites for getting back-links
• Identify high-interest areas based on keyword search volume
• Choose the best performing keywords for your business
• Competitor check

Are You Ready to Grow Your Small Business?

With everything that is involved in setting up and running a small business, delving into the world of social media marketing can be a daunting task in itself. But, without a prominent online presence, businesses can’t stand a chance of surviving in this digital age. Especially small businesses with a low marketing budget.

Social media can be your best friend in this regard. When used wisely along with the above-mentioned free tools, it can do wonders for your business. A well-performing social media strategy can highly boost traffic that can lead to sales. With the knowledge of such essential techniques like assessing competitors, analysing website performance and keyword implementation for search engine optimisation, small businesses can achieve high profits at zero cost. Use these tools and you will see the results for yourself.

 
Feature Image by WikiImages from Pixabay

Customer reviews are powerful. So much so, that researchers found around 63% of people will look up reviews on Google before considering a business, and 94% people say they have been convinced to avoid a business by online reviews.

No wonder customer reviews are so important for any business. They are probably even more crucial for small businesses since local businesses depend a lot on word-of-mouth for marketing their products and services.

But did you know that the reviews you get from your customers can also affect your local SEO rankings? In fact, it comes into the top three factors that influence your ranking on search engine pages. The reason is, apart from relevance to search keywords, search engines prioritise user experience above everything else. And, reviews are genuine proof of real customer experiences.

Hence, authentic and positive customer reviews work in two ways to help your local small business. They attract more customers to your business while also increasing your visibility through local SEO.

Now that you understand the importance of user reviews, this article will tell you how to garner more positive reviews and the factors about reviews that can affect your local SEO rankings.

How to Get More Reviews for Your Business?

1. Ask for reviews from your customers – The simplest and the best way to get more reviews is to just ask. When your customers purchase something from you ask them to leave you a review. Especially if you have offered great customer service. By asking for reviews instantly, the chances of getting a positive one increases.
2. Follow-up with your customers – Remember that your customers are purchasing from other businesses too and hence it is quite possible to slip their mind to write a review for your business. Follow-up with the customers after a few days. Don’t be pushy, instead, just ask them how they are enjoying their new purchase. It will help in creating a personal bond with the customer and they would be more likely to leave a positive review after this.
3. Offer benefits – Leaving a review for your business doesn’t benefit the customers in any way. If anything, they will be spending precious time to write a review that only benefits you. Hence, to make people want to spend that time, you can offer some kinds of benefits. It can be a discount voucher for their next purchase which will be profitable for you in two ways: you will receive a review and you can be sure of a return purchase.
4. Share the reviews on social media – Use your social media account to share the good reviews that you receive. Customers love it when they get special mentions and attention, so they will be more prone to leaving you a good review to get featured on your account. The feeling will be reinforced if you can share the pictures of the customers as well, of course with their permission. And, when new users see so many great reviews they will be inclined to make a purchase from you too.
5. Have a dedicated page on your website for reviews – Having a dedicated place for reviews allows your customers to leave one when they find it most suitable. It also allows new users to directly find the reviews for your business when they visit your page or website. Always keep the page optimised in such a way so as to show the positive reviews on top.
6. Have your business listed on review websites – Reviews work like backlinks when it comes to local SEO. The more reviews your business receives on various websites and platforms, the better rank you will have. So, list up your local business on as many review websites, such as local online directories, as possible. The first one on your list should be Google My Business.

Things to Know About Reviews and Local SEO

1. Authenticity matters – Search engines take the authenticity of the reviewer into account when ranking websites based on their customer reviews. For instance, Google removes anonymous reviews and businesses with such reviews actually rank lower on Google.
2. Content of the reviews – The content of the review is crucial for your website’s ranking too. Reviews that mention the keywords that relate to your business and your location are most helpful in getting you a higher ranking on search engines. But, since you cannot influence users to write such reviews, you have to deal with the situation in a different way, which is by answering FAQs on Google My Business with proper keywords. For example, when a user is looking for a restaurant and asks which one has parking, answering the question can improve your visibility.
3. Engagement is important – Many small businesses make the mistake of not replying to their reviewers. This not only turns off people from leaving a review in future but affects your ranking as well. The more you engage with your customers, the better search engines will rank you. Reply to both positive and negative reviews. In fact, by replying to negative reviews and offering a solution you can change the customer’s opinion and they might be more inclined to change their mind and leave you a positive review in future. The more positive reviews you receive, the better are your chances of featuring on top of a search engine results page.

Crave reviews

Hopefully, this article has helped you to understand the importance of positive customer reviews and its connection to local SEO. Utilise the information shared here to grow your small business.

Feature Image by 2649771 from Pixabay

In recent times there has been a lot of talk about changing customer behaviours and how it is impacting businesses worldwide. There is no denying that customers are the centre point of any business and all activities revolve around the consumers. Thus, to stay afloat businesses need to constantly stay focused on the latest consumer trends and evolve according to changing customer behaviours and expectations.

It is easier said than done though, especially for small businesses, since sometimes the changes require investing a huge amount of money. For instance, one of the recent changes in customers’ behaviour is expecting faster delivery of online shopping orders. Where it was normal even a few years back to wait eight to 10 days for an online order to arrive, customers today not only expect same-day delivery but sometimes within hours as well. It has cost large supply chain corporations millions to strategise and keep up with this changing expectation, including automating certain processes to reduce dependence on human labour.

Having said that, fortunately, most of the recent changes in customer behaviours have proven to be profitable for small businesses. Here is a list of changed consumer behaviours and how they have impacted small businesses.

Increase in Online Shopping

These are tough times. The global pandemic of covid-19 has affected everyone in some way or the other. The biggest change is probably that people have been forced to turn online for all their shopping needs. Even baby boomers who have mostly avoided doing anything online, have turned to online shopping portals to get their necessary supplies.

This spells good news for many small businesses that mostly operate online and have a presence only through their website and social media channels. While large enterprises are scurrying to create an online presence almost overnight to cater to this need of the moment, small businesses that already have digital presence can benefit by just working to make their marketing game stronger.

The advent of Social Media Shoppers

Social media has emerged to be a powerful marketing medium. So much so that social media channels such as Facebook and Instagram have even started marketplaces to allow small scale entrepreneurs to run their businesses from home. These marketplaces even allow individuals to sell.

There has been a marked increase in the selling and buying on social channels with people turning to these marketplaces to buy from local sellers. This change in consumer behaviour, of course, bodes well for local small business owners who can just start their business with nothing but a page on social media.

Customised Products and Services

Consumers today demand better customer service, faster delivery of the orders, customised and high-quality products and everything in between. In simple terms, they want everything but at a lower cost. Small businesses are well-placed to provide everything the consumers need and at the price they would be ready to pay. Especially customised products and services such as handcrafted kangaroo leather products or home-cooked authentic lamingtons.

This puts small local businesses at a much advantageous position over larger enterprises who can rarely provide much personalisation beyond a certain point. Another advantage of owning and running a small business during this changing customer behaviour is the ability to connect individually with each customer on a personal level.

Community Engagement

People are more informed nowadays and it has a marked effect on their shopping behaviour. Shoppers are keener to shop from local small businesses as they understand the impact on the economy. That is not to say that consumers only care about the community. They are also well aware of the fact that local small businesses operate at a much lesser profit than their larger counterparts.

Today’s consumers are smart and informed. With most shopping done online now, people are spending even more time learning about businesses first before they make a purchase. If you can get quality, oftentimes handmade products at half or even one-fourth price, why should they run after a brand name that is anyway intangible? This doesn’t mean small businesses shouldn’t focus on creating a brand identity. It just means small businesses can do so by engaging more with the community, offering personalised products and providing excellent customer service.

It is a Good Time to Own a Small Business

The changing consumer behaviour considerably tips the scale in favour of small businesses. There is and will be no better time than now to be a small business owner. Take advantage of these changing customer behaviours to grow your small business.

Feature Image by Prashant Sharma from Pixabay

When starting a small business, the most important part is to create a website that is attractive and easy to navigate. Your website is the face of your business because that is where your visitors will flock to know more about you. It should also contain relevant content about your business and how you can help your target customers. But just creating a website with great content is not the end of it, you need people to find you.

Even with a great website and useful content, you find that your website is not receiving the traffic you expected it to. By looking for your website on search engines you find that the reason is your website doesn’t appear until, say, the 12th page of the results.

How do you fix this?

While it is not easy to get a website to appear on the first page of search engine results, here are three tips you can utilise to get your website to start to perform better on search engines:

How Do Search Engines Rank My Website?

To make this simpler, let’s just talk about Google and how it ranks your website. All search engines, including Google, crawl through websites and index them. If your website is not indexed it will not appear on Google search results.

So, how do you know if Google has crawled your website and indexed it? Try doing a site: search for your homepage on Google. If it returns a result then yes, your website is indexed and now you can move onto the next step.

If you do not see a result it means your website has not been crawled by Google. What should you do? You submit a request to Google for crawling your website. Now all you should do is wait. Remember that it can take any time between a few days to a few weeks for Google to attend to your request and crawl your website. In the meanwhile, what you can do is work on improving your website as per Google suggestions.

Make sure you check out your website through Google Search Console. It can provide invaluable information on how your website is performing and what steps you can take to further improve the experience of the visitors to your website.

My Website is Indexed, Now How Do I Rank?

To rank on Google, you need to know how it works. When Google crawls a website, it looks through the content to understand what the website is about. To rank on Google, make it easier for the search bots to understand what you are offering. How do you do that? Simple, through your content!

• Use simple, easy to read and understand page headlines relevant to your business.
• Use short, simple, meaningful and easy to decipher page titles like About Us, Contact Us.
• It is better to use more text content than images or videos. Even if you do use images and videos, make sure you include Alt Text to make it easier for the search bots to crawl through.

So, How Do I Rank Higher?

User experience or UX design is a very crucial part of all kinds of business now. UX design is making your website as user-friendly as possible. Google too gives much importance to UX, and hence just having a website with relevant content is not enough. You have to give equal importance to maximising positive user experience to better your rank on Google. The things you should take into account are:

• Make your website mobile-friendly. You can use Test My Site to find out how the mobile experience of browsing your website is.
• Improve the page loading speed of your website.
• Make your website easy to navigate with useful links and relevant call-to-action.

You can take the help of this Webmaster Guidelines to find out how you can improve the UX design of your website to rank higher on Google.

Be Found Where You Matter Most

Running a small business means you need more local people to find you. You need to rank higher on search results like best restaurants near me or best hair salons near me. How do you do that?

Have you noticed how the result for ‘best coffee’ will be different when your location changes? The websites on the result page will differ depending on if you are searching from Melbourne or New York.

To make your website locally findable, you need to get your website registered on Google My Business. Make sure all the information you add are relevant and don’t forget to include your local business keywords.

Are You Ready to Start Ranking?

By utilising the above hacks, you can optimise your website to rank better on search engines and be findable by potential customers. So, what are you waiting for? Get started now!

Feature Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

The year 2020 has been very unkind. Many businesses, small and large, have suffered losses with some even compelled to shut down completely. However, this year has also been a learning lesson. If you are to survive, you have to constantly evolve. Indeed, age-old businesses have realised that it will not do any more to stick to brick and mortar stores. Instead, it is time to embrace the new and go online.

Businesses that have switched to digital have managed to stay afloat for the moment, but it doesn’t guarantee anything. In fact, if this year has taught anything, it is that as a business owner, you have to keep up with the changing consumer behaviour, their buying habits and global trends. And, it is even more crucial for small businesses.

With businesses that had minimal online presence gearing up their digital strategies aggressively, the competition in the digital market space is set to increase as well. But like every cloud has a silver lining, every threat is actually a hidden opportunity. Take this time as a challenge to strategise new techniques to increase your market share. Here are some marketing strategies to grow your small business post this year.

Examine Your Present Marketing Techniques

What is your primary marketing technique, is it online, traditional or a mix of both? Where do you get most of your queries and customers from? Take a look at what you have been doing till now and if possible, have an approximate audit. Even if traditional marketing has been working well till now, you have to spend more efforts on online marketing hereafter.

Most people are turning to online shopping, and this behaviour is unlikely to change. A survey done on 3700 consumers worldwide reveals that most people said they will continue shopping online even after the pandemic is over. So obviously, you must go where your customers are, and it is online.

Be Super Active on Social Media and Engage

Social media marketing is the way forward. It is the most important platform to engage directly with your customers. Spruce up your social media presence. Even if you have been active on your social media channels, it is time to level up your game and go all out.

Be bullishly aggressive in engaging with your customers. Remember that most people do not buy from a business, they buy from people. There’s a reason people prefer to deal with small businesses over their larger counterparts, and this is it. Tell stories, ask for feedback and really connect beyond the platform with as many of your customers as possible. You will see the list of your loyal customers increase manifolds, and any business owners know that customer loyalty is invaluable.

Consistently Create and Post Great Content

The new-age marketing is all about content, be it written articles, pictures or videos. However, don’t just create content for the sake of it. Yes, search engine optimisation is important to show up on the search result page of potential customers. But more important is that these new as well your existing customers find your content useful, something that adds value to them.

Create different kinds of content based on the channel you are posting on but make them crisp and engaging. It is also crucial that you keep posting consistently. So that your audiences know that you are striving to add value to their lives constantly and search engines find you too.

List on Local Online Directories

The importance of this cannot be emphasised more. Update your business on Google My Business as well as local online directories; as many as you can. Make sure the details (Name, Address and Phone number) of your small business is consistent across all directories.

More and more people are turning online for information on local businesses. How many times have you searched for a nearby restaurant on your Google map? Like you wouldn’t find a restaurant if it isn’t listed on this map when you search for it, your small business will not be found either if you are not listed on Google My Business and local online directories.

Online local directories help search engines authenticate your small business. Hence the more place you list your business on, the better are your chances of getting found.

Keep track of the changing trends

This year has been the year of changes. Moving forward. nothing will remain the same, and we must all get used to the new normal. At this time and scenario, the only tip that would help you to survive is being vigilant. Keep track of the changing trends and update yourself continually. This is the only way to stay afloat now as well as in the future.

Feature Image by wertyfy2 from Pixabay

Listings on local business directories increase your website traffic

Business directory listings increase your website visibility. This is a straightforward transfer of trust. The more trust, the higher your ranking and visibility, and therefore more calls to you and your business and more clicks to your website.

Trust and Authority

The more online directories that have your accurate small business information, the more trust and authority you will get from the search engines, such as Google™ & Bing™. The higher your trust and authority is with these search engines, the higher you will be ranked in their search results.

So, not only will your website traffic increase with a higher search position, you will also get the additional traffic from the online directory itself. Local directories will have their own rank in search engines in your area, or in the case of niche directories their ranking for certain niche keywords that are crucial to your own business niche.

Add Keyword Searches

You will often find that directories will add keywords to how you are found. Niche directories such as The Australian Small Business Directory at smallbusinessnearme.com.au will add search terms such as  “local businesses around me” and “small businesses nearby” adding new ways for potential customers to find you via their directory and keyword ranking.

Search engine visibility

Search engines crawl websites and directories with their own crawl bots. As this business information is read by bots, it’s really important to make sure all the relevant information is accurate and matching from directory to directory. We do recommend gathering all the info together beforehand and copying & pasting this information into each directory.

Business Listings

Ultimately, it is your customers that need the accurate business listing contact information. Maintain your listings if you move or change phone numbers. You can often continually add images or videos for new products or services. Some directories allow direct customer messaging from the directory listing, test it and send yourself a message and make sure all is still working.

Check your reviews

If the directory has its own rating system, or recommendations & reviews, check that you will get a notification so that you can respond to it. Responding to all reviews, good or bad, shows a business with its finger on the pulse.

Local SEO & The Google Map Pack

Now you have listed your small business on a variety of online business directories you should start to see some upwards movement on your Google My Business ranking on the Google Map Pack, or 3 Pack. This can be dependent on more than directory listings, such as the quality of your website and your Google My Business optimisation, but your trust level will move the needle on your local search ranking.

Increase Your Local SEO Profile

Spending the time to get listed in as many business directories as you can will take a little time, but is certainly worth the effort. Niche directories, local directories, national & global directories are all important to you and your business in one way or another.

Gather together your business info, images, videos and of course your main NAP (name, address & phone number) and start increasing your Local SEO profile today!

Feature Image by judyback from Pixabay

It is not easy to run a business. You have to manage a lot of things, from finances to marketing, with the latter being one of the most crucial aspects. Nevertheless, it is extremely fulfilling if all this hard work leads to success. But to be successful, your marketing needs to be on point.

With advancements in technology, the marketing landscape has been completely revolutionised. But this change has only made it easier for small business owners to compete with larger organisations when it comes to reaching people. As a small business, you cannot spend a fortune but must reach as many people as possible. This is made possible by digital marketing. All you need is a proper strategy to maximise your return on investment. How? Let’s find out.

Content Marketing 

No one can deny the fact that the focus of people has shifted online. Nowadays, people look up information, product reviews and even health concerns online first. And hence, the best way to reach these people is through online content. From creating brand awareness to convincing them to invest in your business, content is the only way to get across to them. Small businesses that utilise contents sensibly to market their products or services can experience exponential growth within a short while.

Social Media Marketing

The power of social media as a marketing tool is acknowledged by most small business owners. It is a medium that allows you to interact with your customers closely, which lets you better your customer service. One of the biggest advantages enjoyed by small businesses over their larger counterparts is this, the close and personal bond they get to share with their customers. Social media is the place that makes it easier to build such relationships as well as nurture them.

Analytics

Following Google analytics for your website and social media analytics is a great way to know how your business is progressing. It helps you analyse how you are engaging with your audience, how people are reacting to your posts and how much traffic you are receiving. The analytics also help point out which of your online marketing campaigns are working and which needs reconsideration. Although analytics do not directly contribute to marketing, they offer invaluable insight as to how you should proceed with marketing your small business.

Influencer Marketing

This is a very smart online marketing technique since people believe real people, especially people who they follow or idolise. Influencers are people who are popular on social media. It is like when you pay a celebrity to endorse your product. Social media influencers are celebrities in their own rights and when they endorse a product or a service, rest assured that people will give it a try. You can be sure of a good ROI if you can rope in an influencer to advertise your business on their social media platforms.

Paid Campaigns

Set aside a small budget for marketing, if possible and invest in social media ad campaigns, search engine optimisation (SEO) and pay per click (PPC) ads. If you can do these yourself, the amount you need to invest is minimal, but the returns are higher. However, experts would do a better job since they know the right techniques for handling these online marketing techniques. For instance, SEO requires you to use the right and proper keywords to work well, i.e. to show up high on search engine pages. You can choose to do it yourself with the help of different free tools available online, but it might not work out as well as when a professional does it. At Small Business Near Me, we get our SEO from Encompass Web Design, which we can recommend.

The above 5 are some of the most trusted online marketing techniques for small businesses because they work without burning a hole in your pocket. Make sure you try them and utilise them to take your small business forward.

Feature Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Indeed, marketing is essential for any business. But marketing can only let people know that your business exists. How do you grab the attention of your audience long enough for them to consider investing in your products or services over your competitors’?

Small Business marketing techniques

The trick is to invest in marketing techniques that will help you to stand-out in the crowd. Especially now, with so much information available and so many businesses selling the same things in different packages, it becomes essential to do something that catches the eye of the relevant people.

Depending on where your business stands in the market, here are five techniques that you can consider. These are tried and tested marketing techniques that, if applied smartly, will definitely make your brand look different and special.

Stage 1 – This is the ideal stage for any business. It means you are the only one offering a brand-new product and service, and hence have no competition whatsoever. The good thing is however you market your brand, being the only one in the market, people will buy from you. The bad thing is because you are the only one you have to build that knowledge and trust among people about your product or service.

Let us take an example to explain all the stages. Say, you are selling a face mask. If you are the only one selling it, you have to convince people that it is indeed good, effective and without any harmful side effects. But saying things like “A face mask to make your skin look radiant” should make the cut.

Stage 2 – At this stage, other businesses have noted how your brand is doing well, so they start to enter the market as well. Since there is more than one brand offering the same product, you would have to market your business in a different way to stand out. So, at this stage, the strategy is to make bolder or bigger claims.

Taking the face mask example, you might have to say things like “A face mask that instantly makes your skin look radiant and makes the glow last forever”. The claims like instantly and forever glow are the words that would make people notice your brand over your competitors.

Stage 3 – This is the stage where all your competitors are making bold claims so the previous technique does not work anymore. What do you do? You go deep into explaining the mechanisms of the product that makes it different than your competitors’.

Talking about things like, “This hand-made, organic and antioxidant rich face mask gives an instant glow to your skin by attacking the free radicals”. Note how you incorporate the workings of the face mask into your marketing content.

Stage 4 – So now everyone is following your technique and talking about the mechanisms of your product. At this stage, the smartest move would be to do the opposite of what everyone else is doing. When everyone starts listing down the benefits and mechanisms, you do you and take the road of simplicity.

For example, in a market full of ‘radiance-boosting’ ‘glow-enhancing’ ‘antioxidant-rich’ ‘organically crafted’ face masks, just simply say “An easy to use, everyday face mask for a clean skin”. The simplicity of this marketing is what will catch the attention of your audience, among all the noise of tall claims and mechanisms that few truly understand.

Stage 5 – This is the last stage where nothing else works. This is where you appeal to the individuality, emotions and identity of your audience. This is a marketing technique that will help your audience feel good about themselves when they buy from you or invest in your business.

The best example of this is what The Body Shop does. They make sure to let people know how they help the community, practice fair-trade and are against animal cruelty. It appeals to people. Similarly, you can promote your brand through a tagline like, “Become truly beautiful with our face mask. With every pack you buy you help another woman smile”. Maybe you can mention that you donate the proceedings to domestic abuse survivors or refugee women.

The above are very brief descriptions and examples of how to make your business stand out through five stages of marketing. Research, study the market and apply these techniques smartly to help your small business grow from strength to strength.

Feature Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay