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Four Creative Marketing Ideas For Small Business Success

Forbes Communications Council
POST WRITTEN BY
Stephen Seifert

Every small business owner knows the need for actionable marketing. The good news is, there are a number of creative marketing ideas you can employ today.

Why is marketing important? Well, 50% of small businesses fail within five years. This is nail-bitingly stressful, but with the following marketing ideas, you can keep your small business from being a statistic. Here are four ideas to get you started.

1. Get Social

Social media is an essential marketing asset for small businesses. Having a strong social presence for your small business can help you promote products and services, raise brand awareness, increase online visibility and provide your business with a platform for influencer marketing.

How do you capitalize on social success? First, think about who your audience is. For example, if your target market is women, you'll want to be active on Pinterest since 80% of the users are female.

Facebook and Twitter are always great social networks for delivering targeted ad campaigns. And let’s not forget the power of video.

2. Launch A Video Marketing Campaign

The age of video marketing is upon us. If you want to grow your small business in this day and age, video is the way to go. Why? Consumers want visually engaging content. In fact, a HubSpot study found that 50% of people want more videos via marketers.

You can also use videos across multiple platforms. For example, you launch a new product video on YouTube. Now you can post that video on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the product page of your website.

Video development is also fairly easy to do. Consumers don’t necessarily need high-intensity movie-trailer-type videos. You can shoot a video with your smartphone and upload it in minutes. Just don’t forget to optimize the video using a little YouTube SEO.

3. Make Email Marketing A Priority

You probably have a nice list of subscriber and customer emails. It is time to put that list to use! This is where a lot of small businesses simply fall behind. But make no mistake: Email marketing and newsletter campaigns are essential.

If you don’t have hundreds of thousands of emails, you can use a marketing automation platform like MailChimp to do email marketing. Want more conversions? Start firing out those newsletters and promotional emails. One word of caution: Make sure every email or newsletter has a value or benefit for the recipients. Also, try to personalize them as much as possible.

4. Create Infographics

Creative marketing ideas lead to you being more creative. Making infographics is one way to do this. They are highly shareable, which will net you valuable Google ranking links, and they serve up content in an easy-to-digest manner for your audience.

Did you know that infographics are shared three times more on social media than most other forms of content? If your audience is female and you are posting infographics on Pinterest, it’s a recipe for success.

But how do you create an awesome infographic? Well, you can spend hours doing it yourself using a free creative platform like Canva, or you can outsource to a pro using a site like Fiverr.

Make Your Small Business Marketing Creative

The above are just a few easy ways to implement creative marketing ideas into your overall marketing strategy. In most cases, you can get started today with little to no investment. That is always good news for small- to medium-sized businesses.

Forbes Communications Council is an invitation-only community for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies. Do I qualify?