We are days away from the second quarter of 2021. As a small business owner, your business planning for these following months is likely to include new marketing trends. This trends are often needed to give some direction to business affairs.
Utilizing effective marketing trends for small businesses will help you reevaluate what you’ve done in your business so far. It will also present you with the opportunity to try something new.
Marketing, especially for small businesses in Africa, is sometimes not an easy thing. This is not just because running the actual business operations demands a lot of time and effort. There is also the fact these SMEs in Africa, hardly have enough budget to fully achieve their goals through marketing.
It’s hard to build a marketing strategy as a small business owner. Between the million things you need to do every day and the administrative concerns, getting creative with advertising and social media may seem like a waste of time. The goal of marketing is to connect your business’ value to the right customer base. It’s a simple concept but it can take on a million different shades.
What is a Market Trend?
A market trend is a perceived tendency of financial markets to move in a particular direction over time. Defining a trend can be very subjective because they vary from sector to sector. Regardless of your industry, marketing trends for small businesses continue to evolve at an amazing pace.
Now, we’ve entered a new phase with an increased emphasis on personalization, seamlessness, and automation. It’s not uncommon for something you’ve been utilizing for several years to become out of date, or even counter-productive. There’s also the fact that not every marketing trend is suitable for every small business.
The good news here is that with the right sense of direction, consumer understanding, and the use of technology, successfully marketing your SME in Africa is not beyond reach. Effective marketing trends can help you work smarter, by reaching a receptive audience through mediums and messaging they love.
In this post, we offer 5 inexpensive & affordable marketing trends for your small business in the second half of 2021. These are the trends we feel are most deserving of your time and would most likely help sell your products or service.
Facebook Advertising
Many SMES in Nigeria currently advertise on Facebook because it’s an inexpensive but effective way to market to any audience. The great thing about Facebook ads is that they excel at advanced targeting. Put differently, they allow you to target a specific audience based on their location, interests, age, sex, online behavior, and various other factors.
Creating Facebook ads is very easy. You just provide a solid headline, a little description of your business, one image preferably of your product-, and a link.
It will take some practice and persistence on your end but to go further though. Facebook has produced numerous business tools that can help your SME in Africa succeed.
For instance, if you decide to use Facebook as a marketing trend for your small business, you could utilize a tool like AdEspresso to run your campaigns. It will help to speed up your journey. If your business run has a strong visual component, it might be worth trying out Instagram Ads instead.
As a subsidiary of Facebook, Instagram Ads benefit from the same data base and targeting options, while allowing you to connect with an audience that is better primed for visual sales.
Content Marketing
Many successful SMES in Africa and beyond have repeatedly attributed their success to content marketing. Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content. This is often done to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience and drive profitable customer action.
Unlike paid advertising, content marketing focuses more on long-term results. The initial payoff tends to be low, but the long-term, sustainable growth in visitors, leads, and customers can single-handedly carry a business.
No matter how long you’ve been in business, you probably have some interesting tips and explanations you can share with consumers. Blogs and long-form content are great ways to get readers on your website to stay. However, sometimes shorter, more easily digestible content can help get them to your site. The important thing here is to make sure you’re doing something that you can commit to for the long-haul.
Content marketing can do a lot of good for your SME but it’s important to understand that when it comes to content quality matters. Yes, your podcast could be weekly, but there are plenty of successful podcasts that publish bi-weekly. Meanwhile, if your blog isn’t getting the readership you hoped for, maybe it’s time to switch modes and go to video.
Content is not limited to blog posts. It includes videos, podcasts, online courses, and a host of other mediums in which people consume information. If you are considering this strategy for your own business, make sure you carefully map out the time you need to start and stay consistent.
Use free design tools online to create visuals you can easily upload to social media or emb on your blog. Focus on finding the free and affordable tools that let you do more with less, and start your journey from anonymous small business to household name. For instance, you can vlog your daily life while running your business.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the best marketing trends for small businesses. The reason for this is that it remains the cornerstone of digital marketing in a world obsessed with all things digital. Most of the people who visit your site will not buy from you immediately. Capturing their contact info for additional marketing and “lead nurturing” is the best way to sell. For this reason, email marketing remains the highest converting channel for interacting with leads.
Even though it’s not as fast as social media or instant messaging, nearly 50% of customers enjoy getting weekly promotional emails, There are lots of tricks you can use to increase sales via email. Email marketing often begins with a “lead magnet”. This is something compelling you offer your website visitors in exchange for their email address.
Possible options include a free digital download, a free service trial, or an exclusive site membership. Affordable email tools like MailChimp or GetResponse will also help by giving you greater control over your marketing campaigns. This way, you can focus on tweaking your email offerings to get more clicks back to your site, and eventually more conversions.
Free Google marketing tools for small businesses
Climbing up the ranks on Google searches organically can be tough. However, thankfully, Google has already provided your SME in Nigeria with several amazing tools to help you do it on your own. Google Analytics, for instance, lets you see how visitors interact with your website and where they are coming from.
Google Trends is a free Google tool that helps you stay on top of buzzwords and trending topics so you can join larger conversations while drawing attention to your business.
For its part, Google My Business (GMB) is a simple feature that enables customers to find your business on Google Maps. It also helps them to access your operation hours and learn more about your business. It is a great way to improve your visibility, get more information about who is looking for your business, and improve your SEO and AdWords strategies.
All these tools are already available to help you target your marketing at your customers old and new. They help by keeping you focused on the websites, blogs, and other places where your audience is coming from.
All you have to do is make use of them.
Zero In On Your Target Audience Through Social Media
The more you know about your audience, the easier it will be to market your business to them in the most effective manner possible. This is one of the most important marketing trends for small businesses. Our mobile devices remember our preferences for so many things. Some of them include; who we follow on social media, our home address, the places where we normally order takeout, and more. It should come as no surprise that we expect the same from our marketing.
As a small business owner, you need to be strategic when using your social media to market to people who you want to convert to customers. This means going beyond curating good social media posts or captions. You need to take a close look at not just how your customers are coming to your website but the other data they leave in their wake as well.
How did they find you? How do they most often get to your website? Look at these important tells, and you’ll be able to figure how best to reach them with an offer that converts.
By understanding the needs of your audience, you’ll be able to better craft your brand’s digital content to meet their needs. In other words, you’ll be able to offer them the informational content that they’re actually looking for. By doing this, you’ll be able to build trust with your audience, making it more likely that you’ll be able to effectively market your business to them..
Conclusion
Planning can be very exciting for a small business, especially when it involves grasping and running with some new marketing trends. Some of these trends could put you ahead of the competition and reap great rewards.
As we slide into the second half of 2021, many more SMEs in Africa will keep trying to figure out what marketing trends to follow to simply stay in business.
Do your research. Find out which of these marketing trends for small businesses would suit your business needs best. Once you select the marketing trends for your SME, shift gears and apply them. That is the best way to pivot into new opportunities and continue to grow and thrive within your business environment.