Small businesses need marketing just as much as large businesses do (if not more). This is why it is so important to know what you can expect in the coming year in terms of marketing. Here are some small business marketing insights for 2024.
#1 Stop Outsourcing
Outsourcing has now become so common that almost every company uses this tactic to reduce costs and sometimes even to improve the quality of services or products. Even small businesses practice this approach quite often. Nevertheless, there are some cases when using outsourcing might not be the best solution.
The problem with outsourcing your marketing is that you can’t control everything which might be an issue when you need to coordinate different aspects of your campaign in accordance with each other. Consequently, avoiding outsourcing can significantly increase your chances of being consistent with the ads and advertising content you put out.
What you can do instead of outsourcing is to try to manage your marketing campaign better within your company. Redistributing the tasks when it comes to advertising might help you find a better way to coordinate your marketing efforts and focus on the problematic aspects that require more attention and dedication from you.
Try to break up each process into separate tasks or stages that you can do one by one. You can also check if some things might not need as much time as you currently dedicate to them (or as much money, so that you could save some of it and invest it into other departments of your small business).
#2 Create Audio Content
Audio content is gaining popularity faster than you think. In fact, it might soon be as widespread as video content. All the podcasts, audiobooks, and other audio materials released online are becoming more accessible, so there are more people who are slowly realizing that audio content might be the one they want to spend their time on.
The advantages of audio content are quite numerous. For instance, your audience will not need to give as much of their attention to audio than they do to video. This means that they will be more willing to put in their effort and time to consume your audio content than they would while consuming your video content.
In addition to that, audio content requires less investment from your side. You will only need to worry about the sound instead of worrying both about the sound and about the image. Many people are already listening to videos instead of watching them, so it will not be difficult for them to switch from one medium to another.
Audio content also has enough variety of formats for you to choose from. You can start with one type and then move on to others until you decide which of the formats your audience prefers. Alternatively, you could do some research and see what your competitors are doing.
#3 Make It More Personal
While personalization has sipped into pretty much every industry and every aspect of business, not every company has realized that personalizing ads is important too. In fact, it is crucial for the effectiveness and eventual success of your online marketing campaign as well as your offline advertising efforts.
In order to make your marketing more personal, you will need to do some extensive research and gather enough information about your audience to be able to optimize your ads appropriately. Try to get in touch with professional marketers or researchers who could help you conduct such research properly.
You can also put out some surveys for your customers to complete. Their feedback is very valuable to you because your customers are always right and you need to adjust to their needs, interests, values, and so on. Find what they prefer and then stick to that, but remember to always strive to improve nonetheless.
At the same time, don’t forget about analyzing the market and your competitors. Your actions will largely depend on what others are doing. You wouldn’t want to copy others or seem like you are copying others even if you were doing it unintentionally. After all, your business’s reputation is extremely important.
#4 But Also Automate
That being said, automation can still improve your marketing. Even if you think that personalizing your ads will improve their performance, you still need to remember that automation will allow you to optimize your marketing process and improve it in a way that will also help you to redirect your efforts to other departments.
Remember that automation is not the same thing as de-personalization. Automation helps you to make the manual tasks easier by allowing the regular, technical tasks to be managed by computers. This lets your employees think about the creative aspects of your marketing campaign and redirect their efforts.
Carefully review your day-to-day tasks and operations when it comes to advertising and select the actions that can be automated. If you think that there are none, brainstorm this question with other members of your team. You will be surprised by what they have to say and the ideas they might have.
#5 Customers Are Important
Perhaps every business owner knows that customers are important, but not everyone fully realizes what it means to actually listen to what they have to say. As mentioned above, you can collect feedback from your customers to improve your marketing, but that is not everything you can do.
Try to build a bigger audience and establish a strong connection with it. If you have a good relationship with your customers, you will realize that it is much easier to understand what they want, how they think, what their priorities are, what they are looking for, and so on.
In a way, you should be putting yourself into their shoes and trying to feel and think the way they feel. There are many tactics you can use for this which would require a separate post, but the most common ones include collecting feedback, open sessions and events, online interactions, and so on.
#6 Invest in Advertising
Advertising and marketing go hand in hand, but not everyone understands the difference between the two. Of course, the terms can be used interchangeably sometimes, but the key difference is that advertising includes the ads themselves while marketing includes everything as a whole such as content marketing, social media marketing, etc.
There are many kinds of ads that you could place all over the World Wide Web, but you will need to decide which ones you will be using in your own campaign. For instance, you could focus on placing ads on YouTube or you could focus on placing them on different websites with the help of Google Ads.
Whatever you decide, you will need to first do some research to make sure that you are investing in something that will actually work. Try out different ad designs before you settle on the final version that you will use in your campaign.
Final Thoughts
To sum up, each of these insights will help you prepare for your marketing campaign in 2024. Small businesses will need to largely rely on advertising to find new customers, so it is very important that you pay enough time for this.
