04 February
Blog / Marketing
Top 3 small business challenges today?
- staff
- business, business marketing, marketing, social media
- 0 Comments
Website – Do you have one? Do you have think you can the word out about your company to your customers without having a website?
Think again! The first thing that your customers look for when finding a business is an easy to use and an appealing website. This lets them know who you are and the also get to form an opinion about you as a business, so first impressions are extremely important. A study conducted by Harvard showed that it takes consumers anywhere from 50 to 500 milliseconds (up to half a second) to form an opinion about your website.
One major reason that consumers look for a well developed website is reliability and trust. It is very easy to get scammed on the internet, especially with more elaborate schemes showing up everyday, on top of that if consumers have any doubt in the legitimacy of your company, they would rather just not deal with you, feeling that they are better safe than sorry.
Are you a Marketing Monger?
Another major problem that small businesses face is being overwhelmed by the vast amount of marketing mediums available and which ones to focus on. Businesses may feel that all marketing will generate leads and sales however, if those mediums are not being utilized to their full potential, you are not able to show consumers strong, well thought out marketing strategies. What you want to do is figure out what marketing mediums are most useful to attracting your target audience. Is it social media? Email marketing? Newspaper ads? As long as you are able to find the medium and utilize its full potential, even one marketing channel may be more sufficient that 5 or 6.
Think Outside the Box
Budgets can be a huge blockade for start-ups and small businesses that have a lot of drive but not enough funding to fully pursue their business plan. One thing that these companies cut is their marketing budget because they look towards free marketing mediums such as social media. Social media isn’t less of a medium because its free, but you do want to have a medium that works closely with your target audience. If companies knew exactly what sort of sales were generated by direct marketing for every dollar spent, they would rethink their budget cuts. Statistics released by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) revealed how much in sales were generated for each dollar spent on different forms of marketing.
E-mail marketing generated $36.70 for each dollar, social networking marketing generated an average of $13.02 for each dollar spent and different forms of non-email marketing generated an average of $19.77 for each dollar spent.
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