It doesn’t much matter what kind of business you start, at the very start every business owner faces the same dilemma: finding customers. There is always vague business advice like start a marketing campaign, create systems, budget wisely and etc. Everyone seems to be an expert at what to do but no one ever gives advice as to what to actually do. Well ladies and gents, let stalk about how to market your small business by minimizing expenditure.
The best way to do this is to build an online presence. Many small business gurus will tell you to work “on” your business and not “in” it but the truth is when starting out it’s best to wear a few hats yourself. For one you will know what each job you hire for will entail, and two you will make mistakes on a much smaller scale now, to avoid making them catastrophically later. This will be a lot of do it yourself advice so tell your loved ones you will be missing for a couple weeks.
Step One: Get a Website
I know you wish I was in front of you right now so you can tell me “thats to expensive!” or “I know nothing about building websites!” Truth is there is a million tools out there today to help you build your own website. Some “web designers” are taking advantage of people that don’t know this by selling templates to folks for $1,000 to $3,000. Basically what that means is your paying to do it yourself anyway, be very careful who you consult with. My advice is to do it yourself and use WordPress, its absolutely free. Thats right, all you have to pay for is the price of hosting. I recommend watching some helpful youtube videos that can help you build your own site in about 4 hours time.
Now of course it wont be perfect the first go around but you can tweak it and google your way around to make changes. Just don’t get frustrated midway and give up, because it is frustrating, it’s even worse than assembling furniture. Also at this point if you do hire someone else to do the tweaking, you should be paying $20 to $50 vs paying thousands having somebody build you something you don’t like and then have to make changes to anyway. Make fiverr your best friend for this, if you haven’t heard of them i recommend visiting their website.
But I Already Have a Website!
It’s probably crap. I mean that sincerely. Look around at your competitors from those out of your league to those in the local area and see what they are working with. Take what you like, dismiss what you don’t and then make it a gazillion times better. Because in the end you are in the business because you can do it better right? Now if you do look around and you say “hey my website is awesome.” Well then, your one step ahead and just a stud muffin aren’t you?
Step Two: Optimize for the Search Engines
Opta what for the who? All that means is you want to make sure that when people search on Google or Bing the search engines know your website exists and can display it in the search results for keywords relevant to your business. This is called SEO(search engine optimization). Now most people will tell you to hire and SEO expert. Problem is these days most SEO “experts” think that SEO is all about gaming the search engine. Its not, not even a little. After the latest algorithm updates SEO tricks just don’t work so its best to just stick to the rules that Google provides for us to abide by. Create great content and cover the basics to make your website crawlable by the search engine.
Now i know some of you read that and immediately thought, what in the world is this guy talking about. Well this is when the “do it yourself part comes in.” If you’ve gotten this far i assume you’ve mastered the art(or science) of reading. Pick up a couple recent SEO books and scour some blogs about the subject. Once your done begin creating content for your website through the blog thats easy to maintain with your WordPress website. I’ll throw in a few recommended resources that i personally have used at the end of the article.
Start Locally
As a small business you want to start marketing locally, especially online. Typically it would take anywhere from 6 months to a year with consistent emphasis on SEO to start ranking on the search engines depending on how competitive your industry is. Your best bet would be to start trying to rank locally for your given business. This is also called local SEO. Think about this, when you pull out your phone and type in chinese food in the search bar Google will pop up with a few a results of chinese take out and restaurant locations near you. That’s local seo. You should read up on this extensively but here are a few steps you can expect to take to make this successful.
Keyword research
You want to start by doing research on what customers are looking for in your area so that you can target your website content around those particular keywords. Wether it be products or services that you provide. Trying to do this locally will provide you the avenue to acquire customers in your area quicker.
Step Three: Pay Per Click Advertising
If you were wondering when you will finally get to spend some money here it is. Pay per click advertising is exactly what it sounds like. These are ads that you probably have seen in the search engines before and most likely ignore. While most people will tell you to immediately hire an experienced pay per click advertiser, i say, you can do it yourself. It all starts with a little reading. Once you got the basics down you’ll realize all the keyword research data you used for your local SEO efforts will pay off here. You can create a few ads that should cost you no more than a few dollars per click and you can acquire some clients locally by only spending a few hundred dollars a month.
Steps
- Place ads for local keywords
- Go Cheap – especially in the beginning, you don’t want to exhaust your budget all in one day. Instead of using it as a way to flood yourself, see it more as a consistent drip of clients that come in throughout the month.
- Monitor your account
You want to make sure you keep daily track of how your ads, landing pages and keywords are performing and tweak them accordingly.
Wrapping up
This goes against most of the advice you will get out there but sometimes bootstrapping your way will be the best way to go. It makes everything harder and more complicated now but it will make everything easier and less complicated in the future. You will already have made mistakes so you can avoid making them in the form of huge financial losses later. You will also not have to worry about paying back huge loans once a stream of clients starts coming in and most importantly you will know the kind of marketing services to engage in, who to hire, and how much those services are worth to you first hand. Now this isn’t a one size fits all approach, but i think if this fits your business you have already identified that by this point.
Sean Dudayev is the Director of Marketing at Insurechance Inc.