Finding marketing strategies that work for your Cleveland business can be harder than you think. Marketing options are limitless, but are the most popular marketing strategies going to be truly effective for your business?
At the highest level, the most effective Cleveland marketing strategy for your company will depend on whether you’re targeting businesses or consumers.
This article breaks down some of the more effective marketing options for each, including:
- B2B Search Engine Optimization
- B2B Pay-per-Click
- LinkedIn Advertising
- Business Partnerships
- Email Marketing
- Trade Show and Event Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Social Media Advertising
- B2C Search Engine Optimization
- B2C Pay-per-Click
- Display Remarketing
- Direct Mail Marketing
6 B2B Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses in Cleveland
To target other businesses, you’ll need to focus on harnessing search engine traffic, LinkedIn users, and some of the tried-and-true traditional marketing methods.
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
According to recent research from BrightEdge, Organic Search is responsible for an average 53.3% of website traffic across industries. In fact, organic search traffic has shown to generate twice as much revenue than any other website traffic channel.
What does this mean for you? As a B2B company, optimizing your website for search can have a major positive impact on your revenue. Whether you’re interested in nationwide or local SEO, you can generate new business with search engine optimization.
Lead generation with SEO can be a monumental task, as it involves hundreds of variables and Google’s algorithm is constantly changing. Contact an SEO agency in Cleveland for help from the professionals!
2. Paid Search Advertising – Pay-per-Click (PPC)
The same study from above shows that paid search generates about 15% of all B2B web traffic, and accounts for around 23% of revenue. This means that PPC and organic search traffic generate nearly 76% of all traffic in the business to business space.
Google Ads and Bing Ads are the best way to generate quality paid search traffic. Paid search is something that you can generally set up on your own. However, if you plan to advertise for more than a year, we recommend investing in a consultant or digital marketing company in Cleveland to help setup and refine your PPC campaigns for the first 2-3 months.
PPC consultants can trim a significant amount of wasted ad spend from your account, and set you up for long term success.
3. LinkedIn Advertising
Members of your professional network have no doubt recommended that you investigate social media marketing in Cleveland. After all, the widespread adoption of social media and smartphones over the past decade have facilitated an opportunity to put your marketing message in the palms of your target audience.
LinkedIn is the best social media marketing platform for business to business advertising strategies. The platform was designed for professionals, and their marketing capabilities have developed a lot over the past couple of years.
Within LinkedIn, you can target dimensions such as:
- Company Industry
- Company Size
- Location (Cleveland, OH)
- Job Seniority
- Job Title
- Job Function
Whether you send traffic to your own website, or collect lead information within LinkedIn itself, it is a wonderful B2B marketing strategy that will help you find the right decision makers.
4. Business Partnerships
Just because SEO, PPC and social media marketing have been the dominant B2B players recently doesn’t mean that traditional approaches for marketing in Cleveland are dead. Finding a business that offers complementary or supplementary products or services can help you generate real revenue.
The structure of these deals is up to you, but you’ll generally get better results if you incentivize your partners to send potential customers your way.
A good example of a Cleveland area business partnership is a gym and nearby smoothie shop. The smoothie shop could work with the gym to promote X% off smoothies to customers at check-in with a discount code. The gym would then get 10% of the purchase price for orders that used the coupon code.
The smoothie shop could reciprocate by promoting X% off the first their customers’ first month of membership. For every customer they refer, they could keep 5% of the monthly dues.
This is only an example of small business development, but incentivized business partnerships can be formed almost anywhere. Once you understand your target psychographic, you can easily identify prospective partners. When used properly, you could use strategies like this to all but replace an internal sales team.
5. Email Marketing
Email marketing is the unsung hero of many B2B marketing strategies in Cleveland, and its success is only amplified by other digital marketing channels. Email has been shown to generate an average of $38 for a single dollar spent. That means email ROI can be a whopping 3,800% when done right.
What goes into this figure?
With the technology advancements over the past 20 years, email has been made so inexpensive that any return from email will result in a high return ratio. Consider that MailChimp’s free plan allows you to add up to 2000 contacts for free. Using this marketing automation tool, you can send up to 2k emails per day, and a monthly max of 10k.
Depending on how you build your lists for email marketing in Cleveland, you could run a highly targeted campaign that results in significant amounts of monthly revenue… for free.
Combine your Cleveland email marketing efforts with the business partnership method from #5. If you’re able to run a cross-promotional campaign with a complementary business, you each stand to generate revenue that may otherwise be inaccessible.
For example, if a smoothie shop could access the gym’s email subscribers for a special promotion, they could generate tens or hundreds of net-new customers. For more context on how to make this happen, we recommend the book “Launch” by Jeff Walker.
6. Trade Show and Event Marketing
Attending the right industry trade show could lead to new leads and paying customers in a very short amount of time. The negative side of trade show marketing as a B2B business in Cleveland is the collateral investment you will need to make.
Branding and trade show booth design and creation costs will add up very quickly. To make Cleveland event marketing work for your company, the cost of your product/service needs to be very large, or it needs to be very scalable. Otherwise, it may not be economically feasible to generate a return on your trade show marketing investment.
A good example of successful trade show execution is a metal printing company attending a CNC and metal manufacturing trade show. The average metal printing job is high enough and scalable enough to generate significant revenue from leads generated at a single event.
Digital Marketing for B2B in Cleveland
The Search Engine Coach team generally focuses on digital B2B marketing in Cleveland. The simple reason is that most business-to-business services and products tend to include higher price points, which accommodate the higher digital marketing budget that is often required for SEO success. Long story short – a Cleveland B2B marketing agency will generally provide digital services like SEO at a positive return on investment, while business-to-consumer firms struggle to do so.
Short List of Cleveland B2B Marketing Agencies
A list of other well-known B2B marketing companies in Cleveland include:
- Kuno Creative
- SyncShow
- 216 Marketing
- Sixth City Marketing
- OuterBox
6 B2C Strategies for Marketing in Cleveland, Ohio
These 6 business to consumer marketing strategies in Cleveland are the most likely to help you generate revenue. We will repeat some of the digital marketing strategies from above, but their tactical execution needs to be very different.
1. Social Media Marketing
Cleveland social media marketing can be effective for B2C companies. Keep in mind, the more local and personal your approach is, the more successful your marketing campaign will be.
Organic social media has a severely limited reach for small businesses unless you have a very dedicated community. After nearly a decade in the game, the major social media platforms flew too close to the sun by catering too much to business advertising. By doing so, they alienated their users and risked becoming obsolete. In an effort to improve the customer experience on their platforms, they reduced the prevalence of ads.
To run a successful social media campaign in Cleveland, OH, you need to be active in local groups. Hyper-local groups on Facebook that are specific to your industry can be a great way to reach your audience on organic social media.
For example, for a bridal boutique, being active in a Greater Cleveland wedding group on Facebook could lead to new opportunities.
We also recommend engaging with local communities within the Nextdoor App. This hyper-local approach can help generate real website users or foot-traffic to your business.
2. Social Media Advertising
Running social media ads will garner better results if your time is limited as a Cleveland small business owner or marketer. Most popular social media platforms have location targeting settings that can hone in as far as zip-codes.
By boosting promotional posts, running relevant ads, or targeting the right locations, you can optimize your return on ad spend (ROAS). By pairing this with hyper-local options like Nextdoor, you can target people in nearby neighborhoods that are already familiar with your business and just needed an extra incentive to stop by.
For example, a yoga studio with several Cleveland locations could run a Nextdoor advertising campaign offering 20% first-month dues for new members. By targeting the neighborhood level, you’re only paying for those users who are most likely to become customers because they have fewer barriers to entry.
3. SEO
In many ways, search engine optimization for business to consumer companies in Cleveland is more competitive than for B2B organizations. A recent industry study shows that the revenue from organic search is lower for retail and ecommerce, media and entertainment, and travel & hospitality businesses than for tech companies or B2B organizations.
The barriers to entry have become so low for organic search that anyone offering a low-cost consumer product can create and optimize their own website. Put simply, Cleveland SEO for B2C businesses is very competitive. We don’t recommend DIY search engine optimization in these situations if you intend to increase sales and leads.
Because quality SEO services can be difficult to identify, learn how to choose an SEO agency before making this investment.
4. PPC
Recent industry data shows that revenue from paid search is relatively high for the media and entertainment, retail and ecommerce, and travel and hospitality sectors. At face value, this means that Pay-per-Click should be a great marketing strategy in Cleveland, Ohio for B2C ventures.
However, despite PPC’s ability to generate significant amounts of revenue, the costs for consumer products and services can be very high. This means that your return on ad spend can turn out to be very poor despite the revenue opportunities for this channel.
Paid search ad platforms like Google Ads and Bing Ads are user-friendly. You can set up your own campaigns within a few hours. However, you can throw hundreds or thousands down the drain if your paid search campaigns in Cleveland aren’t optimized.
While we generally don’t recommend paying someone to manage your PPC campaigns, it could be a good idea to pay for a few sessions from a paid search consultant or contractor. This will help you build a scalable campaign that you can turn off and on as needed.
5. Display Remarketing
If you’re successful in generating website traffic via SEO, PPC, and social media marketing in CLE, then you can use display remarketing to amplify those results. Remarketing ads are served to users that have already visited your website.
For instance, if someone finds your restaurant website while searching for the best places to eat in Cleveland, you can serve them remarketing display ads for a specified time period. That means anytime they visit a site that allows display advertising, your previous website visitors will be reminded of your brand by a visually stunning ad.
This will require some graphic design work for ads in several different dimensions. Depending on your industry, you can use remarketing ads to generate great results at a relatively low price-point. We also recommend researching remarketing within your social media campaigns for extra reach.
6. Direct Mail Marketing
Lastly, direct mail marketing in Cleveland can be an effective B2C marketing strategy. This strategy is admittedly expensive. To be successful, it requires remarkable graphic design, high collateral costs, and access to a mailing list (which can cost a lot).
However, when done effectively, you can generate significant interest in your product or service. This works well for very local businesses that have recurring services. Think landscaping or car maintenance companies.
If a consumer receives a visually stunning piece of direct mail from a nearby landscaping company that offers an attractive discount on a yearly lawn care package, it would be hard for them not to consider. As a Cleveland B2C company, targeting higher-value homes that are likely to pay more for landscaping services can help improve your ROI for direct mail marketing.
Contact Search Engine Coach for More Cleveland Marketing Help
Small business marketing in Cleveland can be difficult, but using some combination of the 12 strategies above should help you get started. For more information on the SEO services available at Search Engine Coach, contact us today!