If you own a small business offering a high quality product or service but not getting the attention you deserve, marketing is most likely a missing component. Tech accelerator Y Combinator recently hosted a thread reviewing some of the top growth strategies for startups and small businesses that received attention.
One top strategy is to leverage strong SEO work (tips on which you can find throughout this blog) with highly-detailed, well-designed, compelling landing pages for relevant content. The combination of high SERP placement with high retention and conversion rates are a recipe for success, especially after optimizing page load times and minimizing overhead.
Another standard but highlighted strategy is to ensure that the content on your site is both compelling and relevant to potential search keywords. A single good article that answers a common concern or otherwise strikes a nerve with users can provide more traffic than the entire rest of your SEO practices combined.
Another important component to sustainable growth is to make sure you have accurate tracking tools for sales, conversions, and which leads end up finally translating into return on investment. While there is a wide variety of analytics and BI tools beyond Google Analytics and Omniture available, make sure you have a marketing consultant who can properly code together tags and analytics to funnel all leads into a single channel for analysis, and then provide actionable steps to ensure that your business capitalizes on channels that are performing well.
Another growth idea is to focus marketing towards high value targets, locales, and business corridors while highlighting important competitive advantages and assets like strong third-party reviews and being locally owned and operated.