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Small Business Marketing Ideas: Give Your Company an Educational Edge

October 30, 2014 / by Paige Gilbert

small business marketing educationYou know that it’s important to educate your current and potential customers about what your business has to offer in order to increase your market share, but how do you do this online? Small business marketing is about creating passion and provision in your company and staying a step ahead of your competition by providing direct avenues to educational information people actually want.

Instead of using traditional small business marketing techniques that pushes information onto people, you provide quality content that pulls people in. You give them the choice to educate themselves or not. Your goal is to use a variety of online mediums to grab people’s interest. With the right SEO strategy in place, when people search the specific keyword phrases the goal is for your small business to appear. Here are some small business marketing ideas to get you going.

Downloadable Offers

Write about a specific subject people are commonly asking about in your industry or a common problem you see among your customers and create a free ebook to download (in exchange for contact info – at least an email address!). For example, if you own a heating and air conditioning company, a common problem is that homeowners don’t service their system often enough. Write an offer about why seasonal maintenance is important. You could also provide a second tips sheet with a maintenance checklist. Take it one step further and write blogs pointed to that offer. For instance, the blog topics for a heating and air company might be: “Why does my system run and run, but never heat my home?” or “Should I use a programmable thermostat?”

Videos

Some people learn by reading, others learn by watching. Videos are content too, and show that you know your stuff if you create them well. They don’t have to be anything fancy. Simply creating a 3 minute how-to video with your smartphone, showing how to change an air filter would be great. Like this guy did:

Did you know? 80% Of Your Online Visitors Will Watch A Video, While Only 20 Percent Will Actually Read Content In Its Entirety. (Digital Sherpa)

Emails/Newsletters

The best small business marketing idea we can give you is to continue to delight your customers. Once they’ve downloaded an offer, you have their contact info, and they’ve willingly given it to you. Keep your business top of mind (and don’t give your competitors room to sneak in) by sending out a weekly or monthly email newsletter with helpful information like case studies, industry news and trends, and promotions your business is offering.

Small business marketing involves creating online content that will give your business an educational edge on your competitors. Even better yet, if your current customers are happy with what you’ve created, they can aid you in getting more of the market share in your industry when they share it within their circles and become promoters of your product or service online.

To learn more about providing educational content online for your business, contact us at Half a Bubble Out. We are a Passion & Provision Company with a lot of good small business marketing ideas and we’d love to help!

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Topics: Lead Generation, small business, Marketing

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