6 Marketing Strategies That Helped Small Businesses Convert More Clients

There are a lot of marketing strategies that small businesses can use to convert more clients. 

But which ones work the best? 

And how do you know which ones will work for your business? 

In this blog post, we’ll share six marketing strategies that have helped small businesses achieve success. 

We’ll also provide tips on how you can adapt these strategies to fit your own business. 

Are you ready to learn?

Let’s look at how you can use smart marketing strategis to improve your business. 

Make An Offer They Can’t Resist

Koala was one of the pioneers in the direct-to-consumer mattress market. They launched the brand in 2015, and it grew to $13 million in sales in the first year. 

Their marketing strategy was very simple – an irresistible and laser-focused offer. 

First, they had an offer that was a lot better than what their competitors were offering. 

For example.

All their mattresses came with free delivery, pickup, and a 120 free trial with no strings attached.

Next, they decided to be laser-focused with their marketing efforts. Instead of spreading their marketing across various channels, the marketers at Koala decided to focus on the platform that was delivering the best results – Facebook. 

Here’s what they did. 

They had eye-catching visual ads, and they took full advantage of Facebook’s retargeting capabilities. 

In other words.

They made the most out of the single platform they focused on. This enabled the marketing team to really leverage everything Facebook had to offer in that time. 

Koala shows that marketing strategies don’t have to be complicated. Make sure you provide the best value in the market and don’t spread yourself too thin with marketing channels. 

It’s almost always better for small businesses to focus heavily on one marketing channel than to try too many. 

Leverage Existing Platforms

Sophia Amoruso started Nasty Gal as an eBay store in 2006. She built a stand-alone eCommerce store in 2008 and managed to hit $28 million in sales in 2011. 

In 2012, Nasty Gal reported $100 million in revenue and started opening physical stores. 

Here’s how the brand grew so quickly. 

The brand initially sold exclusively on eBay. Part of the success the brand had was thanks to the loyal followers they had on MySpace. For those that don’t know, MySpace was the social media platform of choice before Facebook came to power. 

Sophia was taking full advantage of eBay and MySpace users. She did split tests for all eBay auctions. She made sure that all her models sold her clothing and shared her brand story. 

Thanks to her social media following, she was able to move Nasty Gal to a stand-alone shop when her eBay store got shot down in 2008. 

It gets better. 

She managed to transfer her existing audience to other social media platforms and continue her growth. 

Here’s what we can learn from this case study. 

It’s easier to start a successful business if you leverage the customers on existing platforms. 

Go where your potential customers are instead of waiting for them to find you. 

Try E-Mail Marketing

Your Therapy Source is an online hub for pediatric therapists, teachers, and parents. Margaret Rice, the founder, started blogging and building the platform way back in 2007. 

Back in the day, she sent bulk emails to their subscribers. Because of the limitations, she could only send 25 with each bunch. That’s when she decided she had to make changes. 

And changes she did. 

She started implementing e-mail automation in the marketing workflow. 

Not only was she able to keep her subscribers engaged, but she was also able to free her time and focus on other things. 

Today, around 50% of their sales come from the weekly newsletter. Another thing that delivers amazing results for Your Therapy Source is cart abandonment automation. 

Here’s how that works. 

Every time someone adds an item to the cart on the Your Therapy Source website and doesn’t complete the purchase, an automation trigger gets set that delivers an email to the person that abandoned the cart. 

This simple automation accounts for 30% of their automation revenue. 

We know what you think.

This sounds very technical, and I’m barely able to keep my website running. But, thanks to email automation tools, triggers like are very easy to set. 

We always recommend small businesses to implement email marketing into their workflow. It costs very little and delivers great returns. 

Create Amazing Content

Porch.com is not a small business. In fact, they have more than 300,000 active home improvement professionals on their website. They are connecting these professionals with people that need help with their home improvement projects. 

Small businesses can easily copy the marketing strategy porch.com is using. We’re talking about content marketing. 

Let’s look at what they did. 

The marketing team decided to create amazing content that would get noticed by potential clients. They made sure that the articles they produced were the best online. 

And they didn’t just publish on their website. 

They understood that effective content marketing relies heavily on content distribution. Because of that, they managed to secure top expert positions for porch.com executives. 

This strategy netted them more than 3,500 individual press mentions from online publications, national TV shows, and other media outlets. 

It’s important to note that porch.com outsourced some of the work to an agency that did the heavy lifting for them. 

But there’s no reason why you can’t do content marketing on your own. 

It’s fair to assume you know a lot about your industry. All you have to do to stand out is create the best content out there. 

We know that doesn’t sound easy. But it’s doable. 

And creating amazing content won’t cost you anything except your time. 

Get High In Search Engines

AppSumo is a popular software marketplace where startup founders and entrepreneurs promote their products. The company was founded by Noah Kagan, a well-known marketer, and online personality. 

The team behind AppSumo decided to lean heavily on organic traffic to bring in fresh leads.

What is organic traffic? 

Organic traffic is the visitors that come to your website from unpaid sources. When we talk about organic traffic, we usually mean people who come to the website from search engines like Google and Bing. 

It’s important to note that the AppSumo team also used other marketing channels, but we’ll focus on what they did with organic traffic in this section. 

The approach they took involved four steps:

• Research
• Strategy
• Production
• Promotion

In other words. 

They searched for targeted keywords. Created amazing content and promoted that content outside their website. 

Their goal was to rank for the targeted keywords. And rank they did. 

The simple process grew AppSumo’s organic traffic by 843%. 

And not only that. 

They also managed to grow the revenue from organic traffic by 340%. 

There’s no reason why any small business can’t do the same. The hard part is finding the keywords to go for. 

We suggest you stick to low competition keywords first. They might bring in less traffic, but you’re more likely to rank for keywords with less competition. 

You don’t want to spend too much time creating content for high competition keywords only to later realize you can’t yet compete with authority websites in your niche. 

Ads Can Help You Win

The Recycled Candle Company is a business that gives life to old candles. Prior to the covid pandemic, their main revenue source was wholesaling their candles. They also had a physical store. Both these revenue sources dried up as the pandemic hit. 

The company was already thinking about its online presence before that. The pandemic just urged them to act quicker.

Here’s what they did.

They contacted a PPC agency to help them prepare an actional advertisement plan. For those that don’t know, PPC stands for pay-per-click. Pay-per-click advertising is a method of driving traffic to websites where an advertiser pays a publisher when the ad is clicked.

The agency prepared a detailed plan that helped them tackle online ads. 

The initial ad runs were a smashing success. During the Black Friday weekend, they hit sales that were 45% higher than their initial goals. The campaign delivered more than 11x return on ad spend. 

What does that mean for you?

It means that ads still work. The hard part is knowing how to create ads and target the right people.

While you can always learn these things on your own, we usually recommend you outsource PPC advertising to an agency that specializes in digital ads. 

The main downside of this strategy is that it costs money. You have to spend money in order to earn money. 

Conclusion

We covered six different marketing strategies businesses use to increase their conversion and improve their revenue. 

We shared real-world examples to get you motivated for your marketing campaigns. All you have to do is get the ball rolling. 

Follow the tips we shared, and you’ll have a good chance of succeeding with your company.