Small businesses face an increasingly difficult challenge when it comes to competing for attention with larger brands, especially around the Holidays. Consumer’s screens are saturated with deals, cheap buys and high budget advertisements and often times, small business owners can overshadowed. However, that doesn’t have to be the case. Here are 4 tips for small businesses to catch and hold their consumer’s attention this Holiday season.
Let Images Speak for You
As the old saying goes, a picture speaks a thousand words. Small business need to appeal to their consumer’s emotions with pictures. Having a special for Small Business Saturday? Post that on your social with a picture of your team. Decorating your store/office/space? Post pictures with engaging captions that display your personality and why consumers can relate to you.
Posting personality will both engage your audience but it will form instant connection. So the next time you’re browsing the internet, take note of the advertisements that draw you in and those you gloss over and ask yourself why?
Invest in Paid Social
If you’re a small business and you aren’t putting a least a small bit of budget towards digital marketing, you are setting yourself behind your competition (especially brands like Amazon and Target). Facebook is a great platform for small business to advertise on. If you combine your unique personality, with the fact that you’re a small local business, users will be more likely to engage with you and convert. Paid Facebook may even perform better for your small business than Adwords.
Speak to Segments of Your Audience
If you are going partake in email marketing make sure you tailor your message to individual consumers. It’s a powerful way to stand out among the noise. According to MarketingProfs, personalized promotional emails and personalized online advertising techniques are among the top tactics for prompting consumers to purchase.
A great example of personalization performing well is Coca-Cola. After years of plummeting sales, the company decided to take a new approach with its “Share a Coke” campaign. Their brilliant solution? Putting popular names and labels on their bottles and promoting consumers to share pictures of it. As a result, Coca-Cola gained 25 million Facebook followers.
When It’s All Said and Done
As a small business your advertising efforts will require a little extra strategy, but don’t let that overwhelm you. You don’t need a massive marketing budget to get your brand across. Keep it short and sweet, and relate to your audience on a personal level. Follow these suggestions and you’ll be able to advertise to any consumer and compete with larger brands.
About Rachel:
Rachel Bills is a Digital Strategist at Intuitive Digital. A Michigan Native, Rachel is brand new to Portland and falls more in love with the West Coast every day. She earned her bachelor’s degree From Grand Valley State University in Advertising and Communication with a focus in digital media.
When she’s not dabbling in the dark art of PPC, or creating compelling visual content, you can find Rachel riding horses, camping or rereading Patrick Rothfuss’s “The Wise Man’s Fear” for the eleventy-bajillionth time.
Rachel wants to live in a world filled with scary movie marathons, books that come bundled with dark chocolate and a force field around her keyboard that repels spills and sticky-substances of any kind.
Todd Mintz knows PPC…knows Social Media…knows SEO…knows Blogging…knows Domaining…and knows them all real well. He runs growth marketing for )and is also a Director & Founding Member of SEMpdx: Portland, Oregon’s Search Engine Marketing Association, and he can be found here on Twitter and Facebook.
