Smart Marketing Strategies for small businesses

As an entrepreneur, you understand the significance of targeting and promoting your offerings to potential customers. However, with limited resources and budget constraints, adopting savvy marketing strategies becomes crucial.

At Wise, we have marketing experts from diverse backgrounds, including those with years of experience in leveraging paid activity on search engines, email marketing, and managing budgets to form collaborations and partnerships. In this article, our Wise team shares best tips to help take your small business's visibility and success to new heights.

Starting out with paid online advertising

Paid online advertising has become an indispensable tool for businesses aiming to maximise their digital presence and drive growth. It not only helps grow your customer base but also increases your understanding of their behaviour and interests.

Paid search marketing involves placing ads on search engine results pages (SERPs) and other platforms to attract traffic to a website. Here are some of the objectives a business would have when placing a paid ad on a search engine.

• Increase Website Traffic: Attract more visitors to your site through targeted ads.
• Generate Leads: Collect contact information from potential customers.
• Drive Sales: Convert visitors into paying customers.
• Brand Awareness: Increase visibility and recognition of your brand.

Channels for Paid Online Advertising

1. Search Engines: Google Ads and Bing Ads are the most popular platforms for paid search and display advertising. They offer several ways to reach your audience, depending on your overall goal:
   • Pay-Per-Click (PPC): You pay each time someone clicks on your ad.
   • Cost-Per-Thousand Impressions (CPM): You pay for every thousand times your ad is shown. Often used in display advertising and social media.
   • Cost-Per-Acquisition (CPA): You pay when a specific action is taken (e.g., a sale or sign-up). These are used for more targeted campaigns.
2. Social Media Platforms: Meta Ads includes Facebook and Instagram ads and offers extensive targeting options, including age, demographics, or interests. X Ads promote tweets and accounts, while LinkedIn Ads are ideal for B2B marketing.
3. Other Platforms: Amazon Advertising promotes your product listings within the Amazon marketplace. YouTube Ads are managed through Google Ads and target your audience with video content.

Christopher Smith, the Paid Search Manager at Wise, says having strong data is essential when starting out with paid activity: “You need to be feeding accurate data into the platforms, with conversion actions that allow you to bid towards your business objectives as efficiently as possible. For example, bidding towards a purchase instead of a sign-up.”

Effective attribution and reporting mechanisms are vital to accurately tie investments back to the correct channels and campaigns: “This allows you to accurately tie investment back to the correct channels and campaigns, allowing you to then scale up where you see the most growth opportunity, whether that's internationally or domestically” Chris says.

Adopting a robust test-and-learn approach is really important for paid advertising. Chris acknowledges that not all tests will succeed but views each one as a valuable learning opportunity. “Accept that a significant proportion of your tests will fail, but as long as you are gaining learnings and insights, it's never a total failure.”

Maximise your business reach with social media

Email marketing on a budget

Email marketing is a powerful tool for small businesses to reach their target audience and drive conversions. And the best part is, you don't need a big budget to make it work for your business! Here are some smart strategies to do email marketing on a budget with insights from Wise Junior CRM Manager Tiffany Masbou.

Some of the most popular email marketing platforms for small businesses include Mailchimp, Constant Contact, HubSpot, Sendinblue, and ActiveCampaign. These platforms offer customizable templates to create visually appealing emails with consistent branding. They provide tools to maintain brand elements such as colour schemes, fonts, and styles. Features like drag-and-drop email designers, sophisticated automation for consistent customer journeys, and in-depth analytics to track and adjust.

''Working in CRM (Customer Relationship Management) myself for some years now, I can't vouch enough for its benefits. CRM aims to deliver personalised and targeted messages directly to customer's inboxes, thereby effectively engaging and retaining them. It's also something we experience ourselves as users and customers very often, if not on a daily basis.''

Encourage website visitors and social media followers to subscribe to your newsletter through opt-in forms, offering them something valuable in return, like exclusive discounts or useful content.

Three tips to optimise your email campaigns

Define clear goals: Tiffany emphasises the importance of defining clear goals before implementing any email activity. “Identify specific goals and objectives. Understand what you want to achieve, such as improving customer service, increasing sales, or enhancing marketing efforts.”

Leverage automation: “Use your CRM system's automation features to automate and schedule repetitive tasks, such as sending welcome or follow-up emails.” Tiffany says.

Monitor performance: Tiffany also underscores the importance of monitoring performance: “Regularly review CRM analytics and reports to track performance against your goals. Use these insights to identify improvement opportunities and adjust your strategies accordingly. Test and test again.”

Crafting your Business Website for International Success

Collaborations and partnerships

Collaborations and partnerships can help small businesses unlock new growth opportunities. Emily Wendt, Affiliates Executive at Wise, says that by teaming up with other brands, small business owners can tap into a wider audience base, share resources and expertise, and ultimately foster mutual success: “Influencer and affiliate marketing can be a super powerful tool for small businesses.”

One of the primary benefits of partnering with influencers is their ability to enhance brand awareness and endorse a product or service to their loyal following. Emily points out: “Influencers have the power to increase brand awareness, reach a large audience, and build trust, as well as credibility with their audience.” This means that a single well-chosen influencer partnership can open the door to thousands, if not millions, of potential new customers.

Trust and credibility are invaluable in the world of business, especially for new ventures. Consumers are naturally sceptical about unfamiliar brands, but influencers bridge this trust gap: “People tend to trust their favourite influencers,” Emily explains, “and therefore are likely to trust your product or brand more if it is presented to them by someone they like, which can be especially helpful when growing your business brand internationally.”

Lastly, selecting the right influencers is critical to the success of such partnerships. “It is crucial to choose influencers who align with your brand values and audience so that it seems authentic to your customers,” Emily says. An influencer who genuinely resonates with the brand will create more credible and impactful content, leading to more meaningful engagement with their followers.

Key takeaways

In the competitive international market, it is crucial for small businesses to implement smart marketing strategies that are both effective and budget-friendly. While paid activity can provide a wide reach, it is important to test and align with your target audience. Email marketing can be a cost-effective way to engage with your customers and build brand loyalty. Collaborations and partnerships with complementary businesses can help expand your customer base and increase visibility. By joining forces with like-minded entrepreneurs, you can tap into their existing customer network and create mutually beneficial relationships.

Remember that every business is unique, so it's essential to experiment and find what works best for you. With careful planning and execution of these smart marketing strategies, businesses have the potential to thrive in the international landscape without overspending on their marketing efforts.