Remember the “7 Cs”

The 7 Cs” is a guiding framework to help marketers navigate and achieve their goals based on these seven points:

1. Customer: Always put the customer first.
2. Content: Content is the key to your search engine optimization (SEO) success.
3. Context: Build your messaging specifically for your target audience. 
4. Community: Nourish long-lasting relationships with customers. 
5. Convenience: Simplify the customer journey.
6. Cohesion: Provide the same level of quality across all your offerings.
7. Conversion: Track your performance and measure the most important metric for your business.

Now that you know the overall framework, here’s where you can apply each point to your marketing strategy to see long-term success.

Crafting Your Strategy & Attracting New Customers

• Know your Audience: Always put your customer first. Take the time to learn who your customers are and what they need from you. Then, use that information to personalize your marketing based on their preferences and behaviors. This helps improve the relevance of your messages and builds a relationship of trust with your customers.
  
  
• Content Creation: The content you create matters. It’s important for capturing your customer’s interest, but it also helps ensure you can be found online. Start a blog, engage on social media, and produce engaging videos to attract and retain customers. Include a clear “next step” your audience can take to learn more, like an invitation to join your mailing list.
  
  
• Local Targeting: Your community is a great place to start marketing yourself. Think about how people typically communicate with each other in your community – whether that’s bulletin boards at the local library, or another online forum – and jump in. Remember to claim your business on listing sites like Yelp or Google so others can find you and get in touch.
  
  
• Mobile Optimization: Most consumers spend more time on their mobile devices than sitting in front of a desktop computer. Your marketing needs to allow them to easily engage with your business through those devices. Ensure your website is mobile-friendly to cater to on-the-go customers.

Retaining Current Customers

• SMS Marketing: Most consumers check their texts within seconds of receiving them. They are also very open to receiving texts from businesses, so take advantage of that. Once someone opts in to receive texts, you can engage them with timely messages such as offers, coupons and reminders.
  
  
• Email Marketing: Automated digital marketing tools simplify email and text message personalization. You can quickly create customized emails using drag-and-drop email templates and automate tasks for maximum efficiency, leading to improved sales results.

Making Campaigns More Effective

• Social media shareability: Social media is a terrific tool for attracting new customers, and sharing information with loyal followers. The more timely, relevant and visually appealing social media content you feature that others want to share online, the more potential reach you will have for your company. Just remember, social media is typically not a channel that drives much revenue, so make sure to use it in conjunction with other marketing tactics like email and SMS.
  
  
• Savvy Budgeting: Listing the strategies you want to use and their costs is a crucial planning step. If your strategy exceeds your budget, DIY as much as possible and prioritize free tactics like blogging or organic social media.

Advanced digital marketing tactics

When you’re ready to up-level your marketing strategy, here are some tactics to consider:

• Paid digital ads: Consider running paid ads on platforms like Instagram and Facebook to target your ideal customers and make it easier to reach people who don’t already follow you. You could also test out sponsored content where you pay for the opportunity to place an ad in a local news website. It mimics the style and structure of a website’s typical content, however it’s a paid promotion for another business’s products or services. A popular example is affiliate marketing.
  
  
• Get deep into data: Once you move beyond the basics of understanding your customers and executing a marketing plan, it’s time to understand what’s working and where there is room for improvement. Pay attention to which of your marketing campaigns do well, and use reporting tools to figure out what they have in common. The deeper you dive into data, the more you can learn about your customers preferences and habits, which you can later use to send them more relevant messages.

Budgeting for the most effective approach

It’s important to determine what marketing campaigns and platforms convert the most customers and generate the most revenue. Simple methods such as asking a “How did you find us?” question on your sales page can help to compile this data. You can also obtain key data by linking Google Analytics to your website.

You can do this!

It’s important to remember that digital marketing isn’t a sprint; it’s a marathon. Your first steps are an exciting time, so take it slow and don’t get too far out over your skis. With thoughtful strategy and planning, you’ll be running successful campaigns before you know it. You can do this!

The post An Introduction to Digital Marketing for Small Business appeared first on SiteProNews.

Small businesses such as realism tattoo Vancouver and self storage SEO agency stand to gain the most from AI technology, as they already tend to have strong customer relationships. Adding the power of AI to their marketing strategies will enable them to deepen those bonds, elevate their experience, and grow.

From enabling unprecedented personalization to using data to optimize ad campaigns, here are a few ways AI is helping small businesses do more with their marketing and advertising. 

Prioritizing Personalization  

One of the biggest benefits of using AI is the ability to personalize consumer experiences. When you think about the brands you typically engage with, the ones that stand out probably go above and beyond to make their customers feel valued and understood. Every message feels timely and relevant, and that feeling keeps them coming back again and again. AI is a great tool to help create that type of experience.

Salesforce reports that personalization is much more than a preference these days – 56 percent of consumers expect offers to be personalized. Letting AI handle the hard work of analyzing customer behavior can help ensure campaigns are more engaging and relevant to each customer.

Another report shows that companies that grow faster than average gain 40 percent more of their revenue from personalization than their slower-growing counterparts. So, if you want to grow, focus on personalizing your communications to customers. 

Using AI to Create Content

If you’ve ever struggled with writer’s block, or wondered what might make someone more likely to open your email, then AI can bring you a lot of value. As we’ve seen recently with the explosion of interest in ChatGPT, AI has the power to automatically generate content after a few simple prompts. This has immediate implications for small businesses when it comes to creating marketing campaigns. 

Take email marketing, for example. Most small businesses are only marketers by necessity, so the need to regularly create new email campaigns to communicate customers can feel confusing and overwhelming. Luckily, AI technology is smart enough now to automate the writing process, and the resulting copy is often very polished. 

That means small businesses don’t have to iterate for hours about the words for their next campaign – they can create something great in seconds. AI removes the guesswork and speeds up the content creation process so business leaders can focus on keeping everything else running smoothly.

I’d recommend going beyond just email, though. AI is a great tool to help small businesses improve text marketing campaigns, and even generate social media copy. 

Make Ad Campaigns Go Further

AI is also becoming the new norm in the advertising world, and for good reason. Its data processing power is invaluable when it comes to audience identification and acting on a customer’s recent actions or preferences.

While many small businesses don’t do the same amount of advertising as their larger competitors, there is a clear draw for those that do. Using AI to test messages for different audiences, or fine-tune a specific cohort of potential customers is incredibly valuable. It allows businesses to target their ads more effectively and eliminate the outdated one-size-fits-all approach to marketing. 

What Happens Next

AI will continue to reshape the world of marketing and advertising as the quest to understand what makes consumers want to make a purchase continues. The best part about this trend is that AI tools have never been more accessible to small businesses, and there are plenty of tools that were purpose-built specifically for that audience. Time will tell how AI will advance, but it’s clear that it will continue to improve the way we target and interact with customers. 

The post AI and Its Growing Impact on Marketing and Advertising appeared first on SiteProNews.

Translation: Americans want to spend during the holiday season. The businesses who can tap into this strong demand are much more likely to achieve their revenue goals and set the table for a strong start to the new year.

Since 99.9 percent of businesses in the United States are small businesses, this also illustrates how critical the holiday season is to the continued success and viability of the SMBs who power our communities. At Constant Contact, we wanted to better understand how small businesses tackle this time of year, so we polled 500 SMBs across a variety of industries to get their thoughts. We also asked 500 consumers about how their interest in shopping small changes before, during and after the holiday season.

Here are the stats and trends we uncovered, along with some additional findings from our Small Business Now report that help illustrate what small businesses can do to start 2024 on the right foot.

Small businesses depend on holiday sales to hit their annual goals.

• 75 percent of retail SMBs rely heavily on holiday sales to meet annual revenue goals.
• 58 percent of retail SMBs say holiday customers are “extremely important” to the overall success of their business.
• 50 percent of SMBs get at least one-quarter of their annual revenue from holiday shoppers, and that number jumps to 73 percent for retail SMBs.​

However, most shoppers don’t realize how vital their holiday spending is to small, local businesses.

• Supporting small businesses and their communities is the number one reason why Americans choose to visit or buy from an SMB. 
• However, only one-third (33 percent) of shoppers feel that visiting or purchasing during the holidays makes a significant impact on an SMB’s livelihood.

The holiday season is a great time to attract new customers, and fortunately, shoppers are open to being courted.

• The top goals for SMBs heading into the holiday season are finding new customers (63 percent), retaining current customers (52 percent), and planning for next year (45 percent).
• 84 percent of consumers planned to visit a “new to them” small business last holiday season.
• 87 percent of consumers say they are more likely to return to a small business in the future after visiting/buying during the holidays.
• Personalized emails and texts (52 percent), social media ads (42 percent), and sales or discounts (40 percent) are the most popular marketing tactics SMBs use to grow their customer base during the holiday season.

During the last three months of the year, small businesses see waves of new customers both in-person and online. These shoppers are highly engaged and looking for reasons to visit or buy. This makes the holiday season a terrific time for SMBs to capture people’s attention and grow their customer base.

Most small businesses do not have an effective marketing strategy to nurture, retain and convert their holiday customers in the new year, and it could be holding back their growth.

• 81 percent of consumers are more open to receiving marketing messages from a small business after visiting or buying from them during the holidays.
• 93 percent of SMBs feel that retaining new holiday customers into the following year is important – but just 18 percent feel their Q1 strategy is highly effective.
• 14 percent of SMBs have no post-holiday retention strategy at all.
• Less than half (49 percent) of shoppers receive an email after making a purchase, and 27 percent never hear from the business again.

Most SMBs are heavily focused on reaching new customers and growing their lists during the holiday season, but equally important is how those customers are nurtured once the calendar turns to January. The key to making the most of the holiday season is having a good customer retention strategy in place.

So, what have we learned? The holiday season isn’t just a big deal for small businesses — it’s absolutely vital to their success. Every dollar, or sale, goes a long way and might make the difference between a good year and a bad one. Since shoppers are looking for excuses to visit and buy from SMBs during the holidays, it’s critical that those businesses market themselves and communicate their value.

It’s also important to keep marketing once the holidays end. Americans showed similar interest in supporting small businesses in the new year as well, and many were turned off after never hearing from a business again after making a purchase. We see our customers dial up tactics like loyalty programs, events, and contests in an effort to activate their audience and turn holiday customers into repeat buyers in the following year.

The post Holiday Hurrah: Measuring the Impact of Holiday Sales on America’s Small Businesses appeared first on SiteProNews.

Luckily, those goals (and others) are attainable thanks to artificial intelligence (AI) and marketing automation. These technologies can help small businesses work more efficiently, drive more sales, and improve the ways they are marketing themselves – without making it more of a headache or a time suck.

We recently published a report at Constant Contact called, Small Business Now: An AI Awakening, that outlines how SMBs are thinking about AI and automation, and some of the results that early adopters are seeing. With insights from nearly 500 small businesses across the U.S., the study reveals how these technologies can enhance marketing effectiveness and help SMBs save time and money. 

If you’re curious about how AI can impact your business, here are the 10 stats about AI that you should know.

1. Challenge Accepted: 60% of SMBs say their biggest challenge is attracting new customers, while 39% say it’s marketing to their target audience.
2. Peaked Interest: 74% are interested in using AI or automation in their business, and 55% reported that their interest in using these technologies grew in the first half of 2023.
3. Off to the Races: 26% are already using AI or automation, and the top use cases are social media (52%), generative content creation (44%) and email marketing (41%).
4. Proven Success: 91% of the small businesses polled say AI has helped make their businesses more successful.
5. Reaping the Benefits: 60% of small businesses that currently use AI or automation in their marketing say they have saved time and are working more efficiently.
6. First step, Social Media: SMBs say the easiest places to start leveraging AI technology are social media, content creation, and analytics.
7. Financial Gains: 28% of SMBs expect AI and/or automation to save them at least $5,000 in the next year.
8. Increasing Efficiency: 33% of small businesses estimate they have saved more than 40 minutes per week on marketing by using AI or automation.
9. Top Concern: 44% of small businesses noted data security as their top hesitation about using AI.
10. Value Recognition: The more SMBs use AI, the more they value it.70% of SMBs would be willing to pay more to access AI and automation.

So, what do all these stats mean? I’m glad you asked.

AI is here to stay. The small businesses who are currently using tools powered by AI overwhelmingly agree that it is making their businesses more successful. They are working more efficiently, saving money, improving customer experiences, and growing quicker.

So, if you’re an SMB who is either starved for more time in your week, or you want to improve the way you engage with your customers without adding extra marketing work to your plate, don’t write off AI as a passing trend. Give it a try and you might be surprised about the results you see.

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