Marketing and online marketing in particular could be highly effective for small businesses. However, it is a constantly changing environment and keeping up with the upcoming trends is simply a must.

No matter if you have a long-run marketing strategy for your small business or searching for new channels and ways to stay competitive here are five tips that could give you a fresh look and help you keep successful business in 2017:

Google My Business

Google My Business (GMB) has been here for a while but still many people don’t realise the real power of this free and easy-to-use Google product. GMB has been created to help businesses maintain their presence across Google and in that role it’s a great opportunity for every company, contractor or organisation to stand out and present products and services to bigger and more important locally-targeted audience. And that is just one of the benefits.

  • GMB is cost-effective as listings are absolutely free and in the same time they give access to the one of the biggest (or simply the biggest) search engines.
  • GMB gives is a boost to online visibility. Google My Business profiles appear in the local pack as well as Google maps and it’s worth mentioning that local pack is usually placed just after the paid results, which means on top of any organic websites.
  • GMB profile could be claimed and optimised. Ensuring that the main company information (name, address and phone) in the listing is accurate, keeping it consistent in all online sources and adding details in the profile like working hours, pictures are all things that google take as signals to determine if the listing is relevant to users and respectively show it in the local results for certain searches.

Obviously GMB is not something new but as well as everything else related to Google it changes a lot. With the last updates on the product in 2017 Google introduced Posts as well as a new messaging opportunity. These are two more ways to promote your business, services, offers and interact with customers. To help yourself make most out of these new features just read the guides prior. Kindly provided by Google they are very detailed, will save you time and even show you some tricks for better performance.

The Importance of Mobile

Mobile just has to be in the focus of every marketing specialist as in the last years its impact on every aspect of digital advertising constantly increase. People not only own phones and smartphones, people use mobile for browsing, sharing, research. Just an example – in 2016 the number of people accessing the Internet through desktops have been surpassed by those using mobile devices.

Based on that it is good idea to think about options like text message marketing. Redirecting more resources and efforts to create better experience for customers on mobile devices is also a good way to go. Mobile-friendly websites, fast and good-structured pages, dedicated applications – there are plenty of options to take advantage of but in all cases you need to develop a mobile marketing strategy and keep an eye on the trends.

Blogs and Blogging 

You don’t need a vast of experience in the marketing industry to know that blogging is a working strategy. Especially when talking about small business it is largely adopted and applied. There are hundreds of articles, best practices, DOs and DONTs and guides online to help juniors create and maintain a blog that not only adds fresh content to their website but also utilise SEO practices and get the business noticed.

Well-planned blogging strategy could bring more visitors to your website, popularise your brand and services, increase your leads, etc. What’s important in 2017 is not to forget that quality is what matters. Frequency of posting, length of posts, keyword targeting with specific topics – it is all worthless when not done with expertise.

Content needs to be valuable for readers or you’ll lose their interest in the blog. In some cases it may be better to hire a specialist in the area or make a schedule with enough time for research topics. Informative and exciting content is the base of blogging effectiveness and that’s where efforts should be focused.

Visual

In 2017 video rocks. It’s not only on Youtube anymore but simply dominating social media. Video is a powerful marketing weapon just need to find the right way to use it. In fact you don’t have to be a professional videographer, what matters is to get comfortable with shooting, have fun and find a creative way to share your message.

Graphic design is also something we need to pay attention to this year. It is still very important when you want to stand out, now even more because of the shorter and crowded feeds and all this diversity of styles.

Personalised Marketing

To take this road – personal approach – has always been a good practise. In 2017 this won’t change but will only be more effective for social media and email marketing. What’s more customers now expect personalisation as a standard. Do not disappoint them. Getting to know your clients will help for better communication but also is a base to create more personalised services. And giving people exactly what they want and need will make them happy. Sometimes personalisation is in the small things – using client’s name in the emails or creating special service configuration. Or you can go bigger and track customers behaviour on social platforms then use the information it for better advertisement targeting.