Marketing

MarketingSBDC Advisors can order a custom advertising and marketing package for a clients’ business from our SBDC Research Team –ask your SBDC advisor, it’s no fee.  Are you trying to determine how to build your lead list?   SBDC advisors have resources to help you identify the market.  Paris SBDC advisors may also provide you additional tools to build the SEO of your online marketing plan.  Ask us how!

SBA Marketing Plan your marketing strategy should be a part of your business plan which you adjust periodically to the goals.  Your budget should include advertising as ongoing cost of business.

Know the difference in branding, marketing, and advertosing.

 

Why market? It’s a low-cost, high-time investment way to:

  • BUILD awareness
  • ATTRACT new clients
  • CONNECT with current customers (build relationships)
  • DRIVE  traffic to your website/store
  • LEARN industry, business, and consumer trends
  • PROVIDE customer service
  • SPY on your competitors
  • MEET “influencers” (media & industry experts)

How to Market Your Business Tips/Resources:

  • Print: Business Cards, Signage, Trifolds, Billboards, Newspapers,Logo
  • Online: Website; Business Listings; Social Media; Ecommerce
    • Get a security certificate for your domain – most times this happens automatically when you buy a domain. Even if you are not taking a credit card, ecommerce, recommendation to have a security certificate
  • Communication Tools: Social Media; Email Marketing (Constant Contact), Mailchimp, VistaPrint, mail merge from Word; follow DMA Guidelines
  • People: Networking, Referrals, Chamber of Commerce, Associations
  • Tips:
    • Keep logo across marketing channels for branding recognition
    • colors speak, images & videos suggest and compel -align with target audience
    • Use at least 3, takes more than 1 channel and multiple ads before results increase
    • Use browser to test resizing per user device type

 

Free Resources:social media

  • Google My Business – put on map by category, Listing for location or service area, Web, & Free Post too! Respond Reviews – See Instructions from Google
  • Social Media Pages -advice from The Marketing Lady on best media per industry (p13) , you can’t be everywhere
  • Yelp
  • FYI – some of the website templates above are free until you link your domain and add hosting. Google gives a free page with a GMB listing, very basic,

 

Schedulers:

It is hard to do everything!  Use schedulers to plan your marketing messages for content on your pages consistently.  You will find it more efficient and allow you to use your time following mentions and responding.

  • Hootsuite – charges a minimal fee
  • Later – recommended to schedule posting with your instagram, ticktok, LinkedIn
  • Sprout Social
  • Constant Contact – schedule your emails and maintain your subscribe list as well as social posting
  • Buffer
  • Post Cron
  • Tweetdeck
  • Facebook scheduler inherent, however it’s just 1 platform so try some of the other choices to make your time more efficient and use other tools available to enhance your posting.

Hashtags insight – Join the conversation – not just for twitter

Check these out to determine hashtags to use, using hashtags isn’t intuitive for everyone 🙂
o Hashtagify.me
o RiteTag – size audience following
o Sprout Social
o Twitter native – see whats trending
o Trendsmap.com – trending hashtags by location
o #tagdef – provides definition of a hashtag
o Tagboard
o Keyhole.co

Content Tools (images, web/mobile apps)

  • Canva (great for various sizes of messages) or Adobe
  •  Unsplash
  • Ripl – videos or Promo
  • Open AI – create a message by specify platform, base of message, and tone

Phone apps to help you take the photo and use on social:

o Collage
o Typorama
o Text on Photo
o Photshopfix
o LightroomCC

Snapseed  is another good resource for iphones

Need to resize your photos? PicResize – an online free tool

More to come on SEO

Find Tips/tools at 

We support local. If you have a local marketing business serving our region, please contact us now so we can refer you! We refer at least 3 businesses as applicable of an industry.

Contact us for more information.