Small Business Marketing You Can Quickly Do Each Day

If you're running a small or medium-sized business, you're probably extremely busy. But while it can be hard to find time, you can integrate two or three quick and easy tasks to help your marketing become much more effective.

You might manage all promotion yourself, or have someone like us to help you. But either way, the more you can build quick and simple steps into your business, the better results you'll get.

And they'll not only help with your digital marketing and driving traffic to your website, but you'll also have more material available when you want to promote your company offline as well.

Customer Service:

It's never been more important to respond quickly, politely and helpfully to customer complaints and queries. The internet means that a problem can escalate quickly - spreading across forums, blogs, and social networks.

The answer isn't to try and avoid the internet altogether - that doesn't stop your customers being able to talk about your business, whether good or bad. The best action is to respond quickly and catch potential problems before they become a bigger issue.

Around 70-80% of customers will put their trust in online reviews and make purchases based on them. So it's a good idea to be aware of what's out there.

Fortunately it's quick and easy to monitor. If you have business profiles on social networks, then make sure you have notifications set to alert you when someone gets in contact and you check them regularly. Meanwhile to check for new mentions of your company on the entire internet, you can use Google Alerts.

If you're getting good reviews already, then it'll be a pleasant task to take a look at lunchtimes, or the end of the working day. And if you do have an unhappy customer, then respond courteously to resolve the issue. Even if you believe that the complaint is unfair, getting into an argument online never ends well. But if you can explain the situation, solve the problem, or even just demonstrate that you're listening, that can pay big dividends.

Especially as people who have converted from negative to positive views about a brand often become their biggest promoters.

Grab Photos Throughout The Day:

Not everyone works in a glamorous office surrounded by models. Or feel comfortable having their photo on the company website. That's why stock photography has become so widely used.

But even finding the right stock image takes time. And while it will solve the problem for generic office photos, it's harder to find the right image for specific work tasks. Plus they don't display what you've achieved, or work so well on social media (including Instagram, which can be great for small businesses).

The simple solution is to make sure everyone in your company knows they should try to take photos of any work in progress, happy customers and anything else interesting during the course of the day. It doesn't require a professional photo shoot - just a quick snap on a mobile phone camera is generally good enough quality, and they can then be emailed or uploaded.

If you're taking photos of people, it's worth printing out some image release forms, and making sure you have permission to use those shots in your marketing. You can always incentivise permission with a freebie or a discount for future purchases, and having real customers pictured in your promotions is much more likely to attract new customers.

Ask for Testimonials After Each Good Job:

Customer or client testimonials are also a great way to add content to your website or marketing that will help you win over new business. Encourage your colleagues to ask for testimonials or recommendations after a good job, and you'll build up a ready supply of good quality testimonials for future use.

Again, you can reward anyone taking the time to submit a testimonial. Just make sure it's purely for their time, not a bribe for them to be kinder than they might have been!

They're not just useful for testimonials, either. Make sure you're asking how people found your business and why they chose it for informal survey information to help you spend your advertising and marketing money wisely in the future. And asking whether they'd recommend you in the future is a great way to see if business is likely to keep improving in the future.

10 Minutes Marketing Per Day Soon Adds Up:

It doesn't take a huge time investment to start making a difference, especially if you're also working with some like us to handle the majority of your marketing. Spend just a few minutes checking reviews and taking pictures each day and it'll soon start making a difference. And even just a couple of new testimonials each week will keep your website and promotional material refreshed throughout the year.