Do you know how to market your business? I know that may sound like a trick questions, but do you?

I know at the beginning of my journey as a business owner, I didn’t know how to market my business. I still wouldn’t say that I’m amazing at it. However, it’s a process, and you can take steps to market your business effectively.

There are things to take into consideration when planning your marketing strategies. These factors include what type of business you have, your target audience, and budget. In this post, I’ll be discussing marketing strategies for small, creative business owners such as photographers, graphic designers, website designers, wedding professionals, social media strategists, copywriters, etc.

That being said, here are a few tactics that may be effective for marketing a business in 2023:

Market Your Business: Leverage social media

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn can be powerful tools for reaching and engaging with potential customers. Regularly posting relevant and engaging content, interacting with your followers, and potentially running ads can help to build your brand and attract new customers.

If you’re planning to use social media for business, it’s important that you have a strategy. Being consistent is the key and you can decide the intervals for which you post. Find something that is sustainable for you to maintain and keep up with. There’s no quicker way to burn out than trying to do everything, everywhere, all the time.

Need help with social media strategy? Recommended vendors: The Miller Social

Market Your Business: Use email marketing

“They” say the power is in the list. Email list, that is. Email marketing can be an effective way to stay in touch with your customers and promote your products or services. Building an email list and sending regular updates or promotional emails can help to drive traffic to your website and generate sales. Come up with an enticing opt-in (for your target audience) to encourage them to join your list. Then serve them with valuable content and sell when you have something they can benefit from.

Need help with copywriting? Recommended vendors: Ashlyn Writes and Jess Jordana

Market Your Business: Invest in search engine optimization (SEO)

As technology evolves and advances, everything changes. For example, Google is moving their analytics from Universal Analytics to G4 Analytics and come July 2023, if you haven’t changed over, you’ll be left without working analytics.

Ensuring that your website is optimized for search engines can help to increase your visibility on search engine results pages and attract more organic traffic. This can be achieved through tactics such as keyword research, on-page optimization, and building high-quality backlinks.

Working on your SEO is especially important if you are a local-based business. Whether you have a brick and mortar storefront or work with clients in your area, being able to be found as a local business is paramount. Be sure to also use your Google My Business listing.  You can even now implement AI SEO and make the process easier.

Need help with SEO? Recommended vendors: 13 Emeralds Marketing

Market Your Business: Collaborate

Partnering with other businesses for an event or project can be a great way to get more visibility for your business. When you share or exchange audiences (depending on your type of business), you’ll be able to get in front of more people that otherwise may never have heard of you or come across you.

For example, if you’re a wedding photographer, you could collaborate with other wedding vendors for an Open House at a venue. If you’re a portrait photographer, you could partner with a local cupcake shop to host mini sessions for Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day.

This could also look like being a podcast guest on podcasts that you ideal client listens to. When you pitch a podcast host, be sure to offer value first. What can you talk about that will benefit the listener?

I’ve seen creatives partner together to create a complete solution for a client. This looks like a web designer, copywriter, and SEO expert working together to contribute their expertise that results in a complete solution for a client. The client then does not have to go find each vendor individually.

Look for win-win solutions when it comes to collaborating with another business. Offer value, show what you bring to the table, and make it a no-brainer decision to work with you.

Utilize content marketing:

I think content marketing is an often overlooked, often underestimated marketing channel for small business owners, and has the longest lasting return on investment. But, it’s not immediate results. Creating and sharing valuable, relevant, and consistent content can help to attract a clearly defined audience and drive profitable customer action. This can be through blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts, and other forms of content.

You can create a YouTube video, blog post, or podcast episode once and people can find it, essentially forever. And the longer that the content “lives” on the internet, the more it has the opportunity to move up in search results.

The key to successful content marketing is consistency. You have to tell Google (the world’s largest search engine) and YouTube (the second largest search engine) what you do and what you’re about. You can do that through writing, making videos, and recording podcasts (with a transcript!). In order to see results you have to be consistent and committed. It’s not going to work if you create a piece of content a couple of times and then abandon it. Content marketing is a long game.

These are just a few tactics that may be effective for marketing a business in 2023. It’s important to find what works best for your business and to be open to trying new approaches and adapting to changing trends and technologies.

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