Image by mohamed Hassan from Pixabay

By Lizzie Weakley

You can have a great product and excellent service and still fail as a small business owner. In many cases, the inability to properly market a company or product leads to that business’s eventual downfall. If you want to avoid this fate as an entrepreneur, you need to learn how to expand your outreach to as many potential customers as possible. A wide customer base is a surefire way to ensure your business’s sustainability. Below are a few different strategies for expanding your small business’s marketing and outreach efforts.

Harness the power of social media

Today, there is nothing quite as powerful as social media in regards to giving you direct access to scores of consumers. Having a social media account is one thing. However, you should go beyond that by developing strategies to increase your follower counts and engagement numbers with your posts. One smart idea is to develop relationships with social media influencers that already have large followings. They can help direct new customers to your business.

Work with professionals

Something that may be preventing a small business from reaching their maximum potential is unprofessional marketing. Advertisements and other marketing materials that look unprofessional can be off-putting to consumers. They may assume this lack of quality also reflects the quality of your products and services. If your marketing materials lack that appearance of authenticity, consider working with a creative agency on fine-tuning your branding and marketing materials so they can better reach the consumers you need to convert into paying customers.

Perform market research

There may also be more fundamental flaws in your marketing strategies that you are completely unaware of. For one, marketing should never be uniformed. Instead, it should be a more data-driven process. To achieve this more scientific approach, you will need to perform market research. You need to know exactly what groups would be most interested in your products and why. With that information, you can fine-tune your marketing materials to better reach those demographic groups. If your business has interests in various groups, you can create different marketing materials for all those groups.

Focus on SEO

These days, a very large portion of consumers find products they want to buy and businesses they want to patronize by performing quick searches on their smartphones. If your business does not come up near the top of such searches, more savvy competitors will siphon off a good percentage of your potential customers. Instead, put a lot of effort into your search engine optimization efforts. Make sure you are optimizing the right keywords and that your web-pages are designed in a way to attract good rankings from Google’s search engine spiders.

Your business will fail without effective marketing. If your marketing efforts are failing to reach the customers you need, you should certainly rethink what you are doing. This may require completing market research, improving your SEO, creating an effective social media strategy or collaborating with professionals to bring your marketing materials up to par. Overall, put in the effort required to reach more consumers.

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Lizzie Weakley is a freelance writer from Columbus, Ohio. In her free time, she enjoys the outdoors and walks in the park with her husky, Snowball.