Our mission at Highstreet Advertising Inc. is to provide small business owners with marketing tips and tricks to help them feel confident as they grow and develop their companies. We have five key marketing practices that every small business owner should be doing right, whether they were launched last week or have been in the game for years.
Follow us along to see if you’re currently implementing these in your small business marketing strategy.
1- Laying a Foundation for Digital Presence
This entails claiming/making a verified business page on Google Business Manager and linking your website, business phone number, and valid address. Google will ask for documentation to finish the verification process. It may sound like a lot, but truthfully, it will take you anywhere from 5-10 minutes to set up if you have all of the required documents prepared.
If you need to build a website, the place to start is either by hiring a design team to design it with you or at least by purchasing a domain name that matches your business name. Based on which route you choose to take, an agency can build it with its process of choice, optimizing it for SEO best practices. You can also purchase your own website builder subscription. After you have a website link (it doesn’t need to be perfect), you can link it to your GMB profile.
Setting up your business profile on Google will help validate your relevance and will be the foundation of your digital presence as a new local business.
2- Establish Your Business’s Brand
After you’ve tackled the basics of digitally setting your business profiles, you can focus on your company’s brand. While a small business’s branding constantly evolves and changes as the company grows and evolves, it’s essential to set guidelines on how you want to be perceived by your potential audience. A business’s brand is more than just a logo– it makes up your personal and visual identity.
You can start by defining your company’s mission, purpose, vision, and values. From there, you can develop the personality and overall brand voice of how you want to interact with your target personas. Remember, your company doesn’t just offer services or products– it develops and nourishes relationships with your customers, who will also resonate with your brand.
After you’ve identified non-visual aspects of your brand, you can better develop the visual elements. These entail:
- Logo
- Colors
- Graphic style
- Content-type
When you’re first starting the bedrock of your company, you’re wearing so many different hats. You may be thinking, “Where do I find the time to develop all of this?” As a small business owner, you’ll quickly realize that outsourcing services outside your expertise will save you time and money. Perfect for when you’re just starting! Hiring a professional graphic designer to help you develop your business’s brand will allow you to focus more on what requires your attention.
Remember, your business’s brand is your first impression to the outside world.
3- Regularly Optimize Your Content – NAP Consistency
Search engines (ahem, Google) are always developing and updating new algorithms for their ranking. It can quickly become challenging to stay up-to-date, but it’s good to set a routine of different content and pieces that need to be consistently updated.
Something all small business owners should monitor is their NAP consistency.
NAP stands for a business’s:
- Name
- Address
- Phone Number
This information has to be listed consistently throughout all platforms for your content and business to be valid in Google or any search engine’s eyes. Accounts you can keep track of your NAP consistency on are:
- Yelp
- Bing
- Apple Maps
- Youtube
- Any social media platform
Outsource the Big Things
While there are different platforms you have control over monitoring, realistically, you can’t keep track of it all. Working with a small business marketing team can help you audit any backlink citations with existing NAP inconsistencies with your business. This will help optimize your content on a backend and frontend level, creating a solid foundation for Google to crawl and rank your website and GMB profile more effectively. What a win for you!
Utilize Website Content
Other areas you can consider for optimization of your company’s web pages. Make sure the the links you have cited in blog posts, leads, and informative pages all stay up-to-date. You’d be surprised how one invalid link could change the overall performance of your whole website. So, take the time to optimize your published information to stay on good terms with Google (and the other search engines, too).
4- Ranking Small Business for Local SEO
Action items you can tackle now include ensuring you make content focused on your relevant industry, demographics, and target audience. This can take time, research, and, honestly put, pure trial and error. Things you can and should research are phrases and keywords your target audience is searching for. This will help you know how to answer and address their concerns and questions regarding your products and/or services.
Our crew at Highstreet Marketing sympathizes with those who put their heads down and work towards achieving their goals. Implementing all of these search engine optimization strategies can be daunting and challenging. If you need help navigating the journey of developing your small business marketing strategy, we are here to help!
5- Create Content on a Consistent-Basis
For example, if you wanted to make social media marketing content for a personal injury law firm, you’d want to research the search trends and patterns of your target audience. What types of questions are they asking? What are their needs? After assessing the data, you can use your services to provide content to answer their questions and concerns.
Some examples for this particular type of business could include an infographic on how to submit a claim, a highlight of which injuries you tend to, and the list goes on. As with most marketing strategies, taking the time to figure out what works best for your demographic and then putting it to the test will ultimately show what type of content is effective and engages at the best scale.
Publishing posts on a consistent basis will help develop a sense of consistency with your audience and showcase your brand in a personal and involved way.
Commit to the growth of your small business
Here at Highstreet Marketing, our goal is to align our mission with yours. We want to take the load off of your plate and enable you to focus on providing the leadership your small business needs. If you want to see your business thrive, we’d love to chat with you to see how we can help address your needs. We look forward to hearing from you soon!
