Infusionsoft recently released a small business market research report about sales and marketing. It is quite informative and I highly recommend reading it. I will only focus on a section of it since it would be to lengthy to discuss all of it here.
First a little background so that you know this is a decent report. It was conducted in August 2014, and was focused on small business owners. Over 800 entrepreneurs participated.
I have rarely met a small business that wasn't working with a shoe-string budget. Heck, I still work with a shoe-string budget and I'm always looking for ways for my strategies to do more than one thing. This creates problems like a house built on sand that often falls apart or even worse, does all tasks mediocre. But that is a different story for a different time. The bottom line is that small business owners need every dollar they put into a strategy to yield tangible results.
The chart above is incredibly telling about what is the most bang for your buck that a small business can do to get results. The first is a no brainer. We all know that customer referrals and word of mouth are always the most effective strategy, but email marketing is number two and many people don't utilize this. Of over 800 respondents, 34% say that this is the most effective way to market for their business. Then 24% say that Social Media is the most effective way to market.
This means that if you as a small business owner will start an email list and email out updates, sales, etc... twice a month and maintain a presence on some sort of social media platform, then you can guarantee an increase in tangible results. This should be music to your ears. Another beautiful thing is that the costs are minimal.
It is worth finding the time to invest into these digital channels. To get you started into email marketing take a look at MailChimp or Constant Contact. These are inexpensive or free depending on the size of your email list and the number of emails per month you want to send. You can even copy and paste code into your website that will allow you to have email signups that will automatically import them into your respected account. One step closer to making it easier to communicate with your customers.
If you have any questions or comments please let me know. I'm always here to help.
David Doughty
Multi-Media Storyteller
daviddoughty.com
@daviddoughty83