How to Market a Small Business in a Big City?

Published on: 30 December 2020 Last Updated on: 20 November 2024

Big cities tend to have a highly competitive market base. As such, small businesses based in large cities like New York might find themselves at a loss when trying to develop a marketing strategy to engage a large audience with a relatively unknown brand. Market a Small Business in a large city like NYC requires a multi-faceted approach, and your plan should not merely emulate that of larger brands that may have much larger budgets.

There are plenty of effective marketing strategies available for every budget. Working with a professional digital marketing agency will give you an excellent return on your investment if you have a limited budget. If your business is based in the Big Apple, you may want to consider having a New York digital marketing company help you perfect these strategies as they know how to serve the market best.

1. Research

Conducting thorough and comprehensive market research services in Singapore should be the first step in your marketing campaign. The data you collect reveals vital information about your potential consumer base as well as your competitors. You can then use this information to tailor your marketing strategies to reach your audience best and stand out amongst the crowd.

Singapore is a global business hub known for its pro-business environment, making it an ideal destination for entrepreneurs. If you’re wondering how to set up a business in this city-state, the process is straightforward, with efficient registration procedures and minimal bureaucracy. With its strategic location, robust infrastructure, and favorable tax policies, Singapore provides a strong foundation for both local and international businesses to thrive.

So, research more!

Here are some of the objectives that market research aims to achieve:

Know Your Audience

This involves general information about your target audience—their demographic information, location, what they do, what they like, how they act, etc.

Identify Your Competitors

Knowing who your competitors are is vital to building brand awareness. Knowing your competitors means knowing what products/services they sell, their marketing strategies, and what kind of audience they target.

Spot Emerging Market Trends

Stay up-to-date about your target consumer base’s latest developments and mold your marketing campaign to remain on-track with those developments.

2. Create Quality Content

Content marketing is the strategic use of high-quality, relevant, and on-brand content like blogs, videos, or articles to market your brand or a product to a well-defined audience. Typical content marketing strategies include, but are not limited to:

This involves the consistent uploading of a relevant content on various social media platforms. This content can include images, videos, animations, stories, or even live customer service videos.

Blogs

Blogs are one of the easiest and cheapest ways to produce content on the web. It is essential that your blogs are creative, engaging, and contain original copy, not plagiarized from other websites. They should be well-researched and tailored to the specific audience that your brand is targeting.

Paid Advertisements

Sponsored ads require financial investment, but they can be a great way to reach a broader audience and ensure that your brand remains visible and relevant on the web.

Content marketing is an excellent way for small businesses to market their brand or product with a minimal investment.

3. Leverage SEO

Search Engine Optimization(SEO) is another vital aspect to consider when developing your digital marketing strategy. SEO involves curating your website and its content to rank higher in a search page result. With more and more businesses developing a web presence, having good SEO scores should be high on your marketing strategy’s priority list.

SEO isn’t always cost-prohibitive; the price for SEO implementation depends on who is setting it up and working on it. The initial investment can range from cheap to spendy, depending on what level of ranking you desire for your site.

If you decide to do SEO yourself, start by researching relevant terms and keywords for your industry. You can then add internal links and secure backlinks (another facet of content marketing), produce quality, highly-legible copy, write blog posts with numbered lists, and add relevant keywords throughout your website. Properly implementing SEO will establish your site as an authority and drive more traffic directly to you.

4. Have a Strong Digital Presence

When digital ads account for half of all ad spend, developing and maintaining a strong web presence is imperative for any serious small business. A robust online footprint includes both your business website as well as social media pages. It is a cost-effective way of building brand awareness in your target market base.

Developing and maintaining a business website should always be one of the top priorities of your marketing campaign. Your site will serve as the primary representation for your brand on the internet, which is crucial in building consumer loyalty and brand reputation.

For top-notch website creation, there are several options for you to consider. The first one is using CMS like WordPress. The second one is custom web development. For this, you can hire RoR developers, a UX/UI designer, and a project manager.

Additionally, social media can serve as an excellent digital marketing tool to reach a broader or more specific target audience. Social media serves as the vehicle to transport your brand to the masses and increase its visibility.

5. Generate Leads

When your marketing campaign loses its potency on a specific target audience, you’ll need to generate new leads that you can then use to either find a new audience or expand the one that you’re already targeting. Here are some ways to generate new leads:

Optimizing Your Landing Page

Use landing page strategies like implementing Call-To-Actions and write compelling headlines to improve your website’s traffic and conversion rates.

Lead Generation Software

As the name suggests, this software identifies and collects new leads from multiple sources. With the right software, you can generate quality leads that significantly boost your conversion rates and sales.

Data Validation Software

This is similar to lead generation software, but instead of crawling the internet for leads, it validates the information you already have. It works in one of two ways; it can either complete a batch validation analysis of a lead data spreadsheet or live as an API on your site’s contact forms and checks the data’s accuracy in real-time as forms are submitted. This can save time and effort when pursuing new leads.

Email Marketing

Email marketing remains one of the most cost-effective ways to generate brand awareness and boost sales. These include implementing newsletters, sign-me-up forms, or generating automated email ads for specific audiences.

Budget As a Tool, Not a Barrier

Small businesses should develop a very different marketing strategy than large corporations in a big city like NYC. Approaching marketing from a small business perspective is the best way to ensure the most effective use of limited budgets and resources. Your finances should never be a hindrance to achieving your marketing goals. With proper strategies and a bit of creativity, your marketing campaign can be just as impactful as your competitors’.

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Content Rally

Content Rally wrapped around an online publication where you can publish your own intellectuals. It is a publishing platform designed to make great stories by content creators. This is your era, your place to be online. So come forward share your views, thoughts and ideas via Content Rally.

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KF Documentary: Tips For Small Business To Learn From KFC’s Brand Turnaround

It wasn’t that long ago that reports about KFC’s sales falling were drawing a rather dismal picture for the brand. And yet today, it’s standing strong as ever, proudly taking the title of the second most popular fast-food chain on the planet. Today in this KFC documentary, we will look into the strategies KFC used to regain its position. The turnaround this brand managed to accomplish in a handful of years is rather miraculous in the world of business, and many can learn from its example. Some of the techniques used by KFC in its road back to the top can be adapted for small businesses that are working their way up their own niches. KFC Documentary: Brand Revival After KFC fall to the ground and fail to satisfy their customers with their product in 2013, they decided to connect with the customers on the emotional levels and started marketing business once again. This time they took the help of the digital platform to reach out wider bandwidth of audiences. 1. Make Advertisements Branded And Fun Ads are annoying, and people skip them, right? Well, KFC managed to create a series of ads that people were really looking forward to watching. Each was an entertaining clip featuring ‘Colonel Sanders’ in some new interesting role. Colonel, the founder and greatest asset of KFC, is the embodiment of the brand today. On the contrary, the company is immortalizing him by turning him from a real-life showman and marketing genius into a fictional hero who has his own fan club. There are even books about his rise to the brand icon role now. A small business will not be able to launch a multimillion campaign with fancy ads, but you can create a character that will give a personality to your brand. Choose something or someone that your target audience will be able to relate to. Your goal is to make your marketing seem less like self-promotion and more like a friend or idol offering advice. 2. Make Your Customer Feedback Count One thing that KFC has always been focused on was delivering a top-quality customer experience. One of the main methods the brand uses to achieve that is directly asking for feedback and actually using it. All you need to do in order to share your opinion and be heard is to fill up the KFC survey. Have you ever done this yourself? Did it help improve the service or address any issue you had? Did you feel like you can contribute to the betterment of your favorite fast-food restaurant by taking that survey? Considering how smoothly the KFC customer service runs, the answers to those questions are most likely ‘yes’. And that is what a small business owner should learn from KFC. You need to establish a way for your customers to provide feedback (a customer satisfaction survey is a good start). Then, you need to pay attention to that feedback and follow up on it immediately. Today you can find or develop specialized solutions that will process this information to make this easier. That’s why the survey format is optimal for small companies that cannot hire a full-time call center service. KFC Documentary: Final Thoughts Of course, there was more to KFC’s triumph, like leveraging humor as well as extensive work in local market research and launching dozens of localized projects, like traditional menu changes. However, as a small business owner, you need to start with things that can bring tangible results right away. Read Also: Basic Small Business Tips for Noobs Who Want to Start a Venture in 2020 Cost-Effective Custom Mobile Accessories Packaging for your Small Business How To Empower Your Small Business through Digital Marketing? How To Sell A Small Business Without A Broker

Employee Monitoring Linked To Business Growth

The name “Spy App” itself sounds awfully notorious like something out of a James Bond movie, but according to the state law, its use is quite legal. As long as employers follow a few basic rules regarding spy apps, they are perfectly authorized to monitor employees by using the said apps. Spy apps like; TheOneSpy is quite helpful in keeping track of employees’ various activities, online and offline. They indirectly can also serve as a great medium of business growth strategy. According to various surveys, companies lose millions of dollars every year due to non-work related internet surfing as well as idle employees who slack off during work hours. This is where turning to spy applications can serve greatly in terms of business growth strategy in the following ways: Read Also: What Does Business Law State about Monitoring Employees? You Can Increase Employee Productivity Most businesses use video surveillance to keep an eye on their employees. Video surveillance was enough at a time when if the boss saw that the employee was in his cubicle, it meant that he was working. But now, with unlimited access to the internet, employees can browse through various blogs and videos at their leisure while they pretend to be working. Such a coupe can seriously damage the productivity of such an employee since their work vs. time ratio doesn’t add up. If such employees learn that their employer has his eye on every single keystroke they make on the company sanctioned computer, it greatly reduces the chances of them slacking off during work hours. Additionally, this way you can easily work out the slackers and identify the hard workers they have in their business firm. Keep Confidential Information From Being Leaked Humans are fickle beings by nature. They can be the best people you have ever met and yet at the same time, they can turn out to be the worst people you can have the misfortune of ever coming across. We meet thousands of people every day. When we meet them, we can never know at a glance whether they are worthy of our trust or not. The same goes for employers when they hire an employee. At first, even the most notorious people seem fine but when given the time, such people show their true colors. Spy apps can serve as a brilliant medium to catch such people early on since spy apps allow you to: Take a look at their browsing history. Keep an eye on the emails being sent or received. Get detailed logs about every single keystroke being made by the employee. This way, if you keep a close eye on a certain suspicious employee by using the spy app, you can not only prevent confidential data from being leaked but also catch such a thing from transpiring early on. Keep Internet Abuse At Bay Since most companies conduct most of their business interactions and other things using the internet. They use high-speed internet connections to make sure that an important business deal is not hindered by bad internet connection. Such high-speed internet bandwidth is equivalent to a shot of cocaine to an internet junkie, who’d rather watch funny and cute cat videos all day long instead of actually doing work assigned to them. Such slackers do not only abuse the unlimited internet access companies allow their employees, but it also reflects badly on the company if they are not on top of all the work assigned to them. Spy apps help company owners out with this problem as well. Since spy apps allow employees to block certain websites from being accessed by the target device, they can easily block the websites their employees are obsessed about to get them back to work. Keep Employers From Stalking Co- Workers One of the biggest setbacks being faced by business owners is employees manipulating the use of office hardware and bandwidth to stalk co-workers. Since almost all the official data is accessible by certain employees, they can use this data to harass their co-workers which may not reflect nicely on such a business if the local authorities are informed of such occurrences. Therefore, it is in the best interest of business owners to use spy apps to discover such obsessive behavior and immediately nip it in the bud before it can become much worse. The Bottom Line A business and its success completely rely on the people working for it. Unfortunately, as mentioned earlier, humans are fickle by nature and such fickle nature is bad for business. Therefore, investing in a good spy app is in the best interest of business owners since they can serve as a great pair of eyes and ears on troublesome employees. Read More: 5 Major Tips To Increase Employee Engagement In A Call Centre Industry How To Get What You Want At Work By Strategic Negotiation

What Are the Alternatives for Small Business Startup Loans?

An investment can yield fruits or fail. There are so many risks involved when starting businesses and investors will always wish for the best. Small business startup loans are essential for your business to grow smoothly. However, where there is a less risky option, no one would hesitate to consider it. This is especially the case when it comes to financing startups. Small business investors may be reluctant to review the loan options for good reasons. For example, a loan is an obligation that has to be obeyed. If the investment does not yield profits, the owner must repay using other alternatives. In many cases, these loans have very high interest rates, and the total cost of borrowing may be too expensive for small investors. It is imperative to reduce the risks involved in borrowing funds, especially for startups. You come to think of the adverse effects a loan may have on your financial profile, and it becomes necessary to consider alternative options for financing your venture. Let us examine the scenario portrayed earlier. If the investment fails to be successful, it means the business cannot repay the loan. If you do not have alternative ways of settling the debt, you will default. As a result, your credit score will be negatively affected, and this reduces the chances of securing other loans in the future. Suppose you do not default but repay late, your credit history will still be damaged. Because of all these risks, it is important to consider alternatives for small business startup loans. Alternatives for Small Business Startup Loans: Alternative small business loans are more flexible with good credit requirements. Statistics show many small businesses are turning to alternative financing. As a business person, you will be confronted by situations that demand instant funding. Even though bank loans are perceived as the best solution in such cases, the truth is banks are often unwilling to offer loans to startups. That is why many are checking legit online loans like Instant Loan for fast-approval financial loans. Still, your venture might not meet the conditions required by banks, and if you are not careful, you may not salvage your business situation. You can turn to your retirement funds, dispose of a personal asset, or use your credit cards. Develop proper plans that can work well in your favor. While these options may help, several alternative funding options salvage the conditions in the best way ever. The following are some of the best alternative options for startups: Asset-based lending: In this arrangement, the asset you intend to purchase is held as collateral for the funds borrowed. Put differently; the lender becomes the owner of the asset until you repay the final payment. The two standard options in this category of financing include leasing and hire purchase. Business Angels: These are very wealthy and experienced individuals in the community who are often willing to invest in new businesses. They usually have prior understanding of how the industry operates and this is a significant factor in their decisions to invest in new ventures. The main problem with this type of financing is matching investors with small business owners seeking finances. The only ways the two can connect is through friends, family members, and business networks. The best thing with business angels is that they never seek control or management positions in the firm. They only perform advisory roles, and it is expected that they are consulted. Venture capitalists: If the risks involved are too high, the best alternative financing option is venture capital. It is always perceived as early phase sponsoring of new and young firms with the potential of growing quickly. Unlike business angels, venture capitalists are supposed to be involved in the management of the business. They always take some shares in the business. Their primary interest, though, is on the business growth and would be glad to see new small firms grow and become large. Nevertheless, venture capitalists do not finance all small businesses. They have criteria for determining which firm to fund. The following are some of the things they look for in a business before funding it: The quality of management Efficient corporate management Suitable investment structured. Venture capital can be the best way of financing startups. However, it comes at a cost because new investments always have high risks. If you do not want to lose part of your independence or shares in the business, then do not consider this option. Venture capitalists always aim at harvesting long-term financial gains. They may opt to harvest after a period of 5-10 years after making the original investment. Small business startup loans can make things complicated for your business. Family and friends: If other options are not applicable, you can always turn to family members and friends. Your parents brought you up and seeing you successful will make them happy. If your business is worth their trust, they can willingly invest in it. The good thing here is that parents will not push you the same way bank will if you delay payments. However, to maintain a healthy family relationship, respect your obligation and try to repay the loan on time. Do not put your family and friends into too many risks. Let them know all the risks the business faces before they decide to invest in it. The major problem with this option is that parents and friends will always feel they have to be consulted when it comes to spending because they loaned you. Crowdfunding: This is one of the best and common way of financing new ventures. It involves sourcing funds from friends, clients, family, and personal investors through an online platform. You give your idea to a large number of people, and you will probably find someone willing to finance your venture. It is often referred to as online fundraising and has helped many startups successfully. Small business Startup loans can make things easier for your business. Grants: Although it is hard to qualify for these types of funding, they are very beneficial because one will not have to repay them. They are usually provided by the government, though recently some small business associations provide individual grants. Conclusion: These six alternatives for small business startup loans discussed in this blog. Consider first the options that you will not be required to repay such as grants. If you need a substantial initial capital, you can go for venture capital and business angels. Whichever option you take, you will be better off than someone using bank loan options. Read Also: Benefits Of NBFC Business Loans 6 Top CRM For Small Businesses In 2019 6 Loan Mistakes Every Business Owner Must Avoid What Entrepreneurs With Bad Credit Need To Know Before Applying For A Loan? What Is The Future Of Digital Marketing In Regards To Shaping Up Small And Large Businesses?

How to Market a Small Business in a Big City?

1. Research