TommyCarey
Level X3
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There are plenty of articles out there telling you how to advertise your small business, but there aren't many that tell you strategies on how to do proper marketing. Advertising can be easy when it comes to a small business because a lot of it is now automated, but marketing is always going to trickier because it takes some out of the box thinking to pull in the right people and prove to them you're amazing.
In this discussion, I'll be going over seven of the top marketing strategies used by big companies to boost their business which you can do as well 
Watch and Learn from your competitors
There will always be companies who came before you, and that means you can watch them see where they messed up. You can watch their ads, you can watch them go up and down within the search engine rankings, and you can see how they're setting up their systems to captures leads and clients.
You can copy everything your successful competitors were doing and put a spin on them to make the weaker spots more solid in terms of lead generation and to increase your sales. If you noticed a successful company not doing much on Adwords or Facebook Ads, there could be a reason for it, or they may not be confident enough to get the job done but you can for your business
Build your presence across multiple platforms
One thing you need to take into account is that there are leads on every platform you can create an account on. I'm talking about Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, etc. You want to make sure your brand is on every platform possible, but you don't have to be active on the ones that aren't for your specific target market. The real beauty of automation is that you can still be active on the platforms you're not targeting by using services like Zapier or IFTTT which will share your content from one platform to the next All you do is link the accounts, share from the primary like Facebook or Instagram, and it will go out to every platform you have linked! It's a huge time saver, you can still target everyone, and you don't have to worry about the platforms with less potential because a 3rd party service is doing the work for you
Always obtain reviews from happy customers
If you get some people coming back and talking to you about how they love your product or service, you should always thank them and ask if they'd be willing to leave a review for you. You don't want to ask, "Could you leave a positive review for us here (link to a specific location)" because that will seem odd, and Google hates that lol.
Instead, ask your happier customers, "I'm excited that you love our product that much! If it's not a bother, would you be willing to leave us a review here (insert link)?". This way you're not asking for a positive review, you seem excited about the entire process, and you're showing you appreciate the customer's feedback
Get in the news if possible
This is one of the more difficult things to do because you'll need to make some waves before a media entity thinks about putting you on TV or their site. If you're trying to get media coverage, be sure you're doing something out of the box that helps others, and that will help you get a little more attention.
Don't get bummed out if you aren't showing up on the 6 o'clock news for your cat shirt company because that likely won't happen. Now, if your cat shirt company is selling shirts for the purpose of getting more animals adopted and building awareness around shelters, then you might have a better chance of getting some coverage
You need to "WOW" your customers
You likely have competitors in your industry who are selling the same products or services, and that means you need to stand out from the crowd. If you sell an SEO service, you need to give them twice as much work as described and be super responsive. If you're selling a product, you need to put more into the shipping container than what was purchased.
Giving people something they weren't expecting will always bring them back for more. I used to order from CSS.com and was super excited to get my products because I knew I was getting a free product magazine as well as a bunch of stickers I didn't have to pay for lol. It's the little things like that which bring customers back for multiple orders
Collect emails from day 1
You MUST be collecting emails and sending out newsletters from day one, or you'll set yourself back. If you have plans to collect customer emails, but you're 6+ months in, you've already lost the attention of dozens or hundreds of clients, and you can't paste their addresses into your email list now.
Use a system like MailChimp, Aweber, or ConstantContact to collect emails and automate your newsletters for 6+ months so you can keep people coming back in. You never want to get too pushy with your newsletters, so send one a week on average. If you have a special announcement like a huge sale happening, your subscribers will welcome another email from you, but don't think that each of your blog posts needs to be emailed out to them lol.
Build an app for your business
This is more of an advanced method, which requires a lot of coding or bringing on a freelancer, but it could help out your business tremendously. Think about all the bigger chain stores and how many of them are advertising their free app (they all are). This is because it's easier to get an app on someone's phone that is linked directly to their store than it is to get them to come back to your website and log into their account to make a purchase.
This is one of the reasons Amazon is so huge! They welcomed the App wave and pushed it as soon as they could! Now they're doing billions of dollars in sales each month, and most of the sales are coming through the app lol
Final Thoughts,
Advertising your business is getting easier by the day, but marketing it will always be a little more difficult because there are things you can't automate as much. You can get things built for you, but the time you invest into your business can't be replicated, so you need to work on everything mentioned above if you want to make your competitors mad lol
Thanks for reading
Tommy Carey
https://www.seoclerks.com/user/TommyCarey
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