Small Business Marketing Tips to Start The Year Off Right

Another new year is here! Break out the resolutions, the lofty goals, and of course, the short-lived diets. But seriously, along with the arrival of a new year comes new opportunities, especially for small businesses and their marketing efforts. If you want to make this the best year ever for your business, let’s talk about a few ways to kick off the year right!

1. It Might be Time to Re-Do Your Website

We’ve heard that websites don’t matter as much anymore and everyone needs to be on social. Well, we don’t buy that at all! Sure, social is important for most small businesses, but the importance of having a good-looking, user-friendly, super-fast, secure, and simple website cannot be overstated enough.

Now is the perfect time to either update your existing website experience or do a total (simple) overhaul. Your website is a reflection of your company and your brand and often times it’s the first thing customers see. Make sure it accurately reflects your business and provides an easy user experience. It should be highly optimized for mobile viewers.

Don’t worry, gone are the days of massively expensive website builds, at least for the majority of small businesses. dwellTEK offers a fully managed website at a fixed, low monthly cost.

2. Play Up What Makes You Unique

Nobody does what you do quite like how you do it. That’s something that needs to be reflected in the very core of your brand — from the visual style that you’ve chosen to embrace, to the uniqueness of the voice found in every last piece of marketing collateral you create.

Let’s find ways to make your business stand out from the rest by showcasing what makes it unique. It could be a special product or service offering you have that is different enough from your competitors. Or perhaps you’re lucky enough to have the right people within your business and you need to tell the world how awesome they are!

3. Prioritize Repeat Business

Studies have shown that it’s far easier to retain an existing, happy customer than it is to go out and find yourself a new one. Okay, that sounded pretty marketing-esq but it should be common sense, right? Keep your customers happy and they will keep coming back.

So let’s make 2019 the year where you double down on keeping those current customers a major part of everything you’ve worked so hard to build. We can look at content tailored specifically to them, retargeting advertising on sites and social other than yours, social selling and much more. It’s important to stay in front of your customers consistently.

4. The Year of Video Content

Every year is the year of something, right? Well, this *should* be the year of video content for small businesses. The tools and platforms are readily available to make video content work for your business.

Over the next few years, video will become the dominant form of not just marketing content – but any content – on the Internet. Luckily, even modest smartphones like the iPhone already shoot 4K content. If you’re not already releasing videos as a part of your marketing campaign, now would be an excellent time to start.

5. New Year, New Goals

Last but not least, one of the best ways to make the most of the fresh start that a new year represents has less to do with what is still over the horizon and is more about taking a look at what has already happened. Use January as an opportunity to look back at 2018 and assess how far you came regarding your marketing goals. What worked well? What didn’t work as well as you thought it would? Have your priorities changed at all? Are there any new opportunities that you should be working towards that didn’t exist a year ago? Let the answers to these questions inform all of the decisions you’re making moving forward.

Then, come up with a set of new goals for 2019 that take into consideration where you currently are, where you want to be and, most critically, how you’re going to get there. If your marketing efforts are informed by your goals, there’s no limit to what you can accomplish!