Many small and medium-sized companies lack a defined and planned communication strategy. Whether due to lack of resources, ignorance, lack of conviction, or because they consider that this scope of action is limited to the largest corporations, the truth is that many SMEs are suspicious when considering activating a communication strategy and marketing that supports your business goals. More and more SMEs have already decided to follow this path convinced that if they want to stand out they need to step forward. If you are considering doing like them, in this text we present five practical communication tips for SMEs that can help you.
- Design a strategy
It would have merit if you reached a goal without having set it, right? Well we are sorry to tell you that this is not likely to happen. Put black on white what your company does and what its business model is, define its objectives, determine the audiences you want to target and what means you will use to achieve your goals in the field of communication. That will be the basis of your future communication plan, which you should evaluate over time to see if it is being effective.
If you have a business strategy for your company, how could it not be important to have a strategy to project your business from the point of view of communication!
- If you don’t have a website you don’t exist
It is no longer enough to be in the Yellow Pages. Today everything is in the network, and if you are not in it you do not exist, that simple. If your SME does not have a website, you should build one as soon as possible. And if you have it, it is not enough either. Remember that you are what you tell on your website, so you have to ask yourself if your page responds to the needs of your business. A simple corporate website is not the same as an online store or one dedicated to attracting leads.
In any case, your website should be attractive, clear and easy to use for anyone who accesses it. Do not complicate the life of those who visit you with incomprehensible menus or saturate them with information. And it is essential that your page is adapted to mobile devices, because you navigate from them more and more.
One more recommendation: dedicate a section to success stories or testimonials. It is one of the sections that says the most about companies on their websites. If any of your work has had an especially good result or you have a product that your clients speak highly of, reflect it on your website. Don’t say you’re good, show it. And remember, the web and the entire digital ecosystem you build must be designed and oriented to help you achieve your goals. Everything else is a nice photo album.
- Dare with a blog
Be your own means of communication. You no longer have to rely on third parties to talk about you in a newspaper, you can do it yourself by generating and sharing interesting content on a corporate blog.
This tool can be the basis of a strategy that helps you make a name for yourself, offers you arguments to stand out on social media, brings traffic to your website and, ultimately, helps you set yourself up as an authoritative voice.
But don’t just talk about yourself, always think about your audience: will what you write be useful and attractive to you? Once you are clear about the audience you want to target, choose the large thematic blocks that may interest you the most. Then you can use them to decide the issues you will write about in your posts.
- SEO
If being online is important, so is having visibility. Positioning your website and the different content you are creating in search engines is a vital strategy for them to find you online. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your website so that it attracts more visits from search engines. From Google, to understand us.
To give an example, your potential clients should find you in Google when searching for ‘tuners for bagpipes in Bilbao’ if your company is based in the Biscayan capital and is dedicated to fine-tuning that instrument. For that you will have to use those keywords in certain places on your page (url, title, entry, image title, meta description …).
It is very important that, before generating any content, you decide what words you want to specialize in. It will also help you to gain relevance by including links in your texts, both to other websites and yours, moving your content on social networks, etc.
- Social networks? Yes thanks
Don’t be afraid of them, they don’t bite. But don’t be careless or manage your company accounts as if they were personal. You have to establish a professional and planned work dynamic in them. This will help you develop a good social media plan.
You must find out what possibilities each social network offers and decide if they allow you to achieve your goals. For example, if you have a colorful product you could open accounts on Instagram or Pinterest, if you offer services for other companies perhaps you should look for the most interesting groups on Linkedin and, if you want to create a large and participative community, you probably have to be on Facebook.
In addition, on social networks it is possible to get enough visibility in a segmented audience with a modest advertising investment, and there are also very interesting tools for business, such as contests.
