Small businesses tend to have limited financial resources at their disposal to invest in marketing. For them, the challenge lies in getting good visibility or marketing their products or services adequately despite not having a lot of money to do so. Time and again, several businesses have shown that it is very much possible to market yourself adequately even if you do not have huge financial resources to spend.
Marketing trends keep changing every year. Before spending their money on any kind of marketing activity, small businesses have to make a note of the prevailing marketing trends, analyze them and then, take any kind of step. You have to ensure you are spending your money on marketing devices or methods that are relevant today and have a chance of making an impact.
Apart from finding out who are this year’s up and coming micro influencers, you also have to know the kind of digital marketing practices that are in vogue at the moment and the things small businesses have done to market themselves in recent times.
Here are some important influencer insights for small business owners in the current year:
Every Influencer Is Important
Sometimes, businesses or brands remain fixated on the idea of getting a particular influencer on board. At times, they decide that they will not collaborate with an influencer whose follower count is below a certain number. Such ideas are not just misplaced, they also end up causing a lot of damage to the business.
Collaborating with a micro-influencer could be as beneficial as joining hands with a mega-influencer. Somebody, who has millions of followers, ensures that a brand-driven post gets a certain kind of reach. A micro-influencer, on the other hand, can help in making your products or services popular among a specific group of people.
Ask Them To Buy
Till a few years back, small businesses would work towards creating awareness around their products or services with the help of influencers. With time, consumers’ purchasing power has increased. What a consumer is willing to spend today could be much higher than the amount of money they were ready to spend a couple of years back.
In today’s times, it would not be a bad idea to ask consumers to give your products or services a try. Doing this becomes much easier when you have influencers on board. Many influencers share affiliate links to products. When consumers buy these products by clicking on these links, the influencer gets a commission. The more the number of units an influencer sells, the more they earn.
Launch a Podcast
Every day, you hear about a new podcast being launched. Podcasts are in trend these days and a lot of them are doing very well. Many of the brands have their podcasts as well. Having a podcast is one of the best ways to promote your business in the digital space. You could either get an influencer to host the podcast or feature a bunch of them on it.
Sometimes, businesses struggle to come up with the right ideas for the podcast. They keep looking for ways to make it interesting. If you run a small food business, you could talk about topics or themes related to food on the podcast. Having a podcast on health and fitness would be a great idea for those who are offering health-based products.
Know What Is Trending
If you want to create a distinctive space for your business in digital media, the one thing you need to do is keep yourself abreast of the ever-changing trends. A quick look at social media and the discussions taking place over there will give you a very good idea about the topics that are hot or being discussed extensively.
Creating content around the topics that are trending would help you tremendously in getting a larger number of people to look at your business. People running digital agencies are expected to have the talent or the skills to create interesting content around trending topics. Just knowing what is trending is not enough. You should also know how to create an opportunity to market your business through a trending topic.
Handpick Influencers
A small business cannot collaborate with several influencers in one go. It would cost a lot of money and opting for such a thing might not be the best decision for a small business organization. Instead of collaborating with every influencer you know of or have heard about, you should first be sure about the kind of influencers you want to collaborate with.
While most brands reach out to influencers and familiarize them with their products and services before asking them to promote them, you could do the opposite. If an influencer has publicly acknowledged or spoken about using your products, it would be a good idea to collaborate with them. Since they already have a connection with your brand, having them on board would prove to be helpful.
Influencers Should Have Creative Freedom
We live in a time when digital media has exploded and has taken over the world. When the trend of becoming influencers or influencing the audience started, most people did not know how to go about it. Now, however, things have settled down and most influencers have a very good idea of how to position themselves.
When you collaborate with an influencer, you might want to share some ideas with them and that’s fine. However, you must also acknowledge the fact that an influencer is a creative individual and they could want to execute an idea in a particular manner. During such collaborations, giving the influencer all the freedom they want is important.
Create Video Content
When you browse through social media for a while, the one thing you realize is that the one type of content that is making the maximum impact is video. 12-15 years back, when social media started getting popular, video content was not in vogue. However, now things have changed completely and most people prefer consuming video content over other forms of content.
While YouTube has gotten bigger and bigger with time, other social media platforms, too, now feature a lot of video content. If you are a small business that wants to take the help of influencers to promote its products and services, you should focus on creating video content that is engaging, unique and has the potential to leave an impact.