11 Effective Marketing Strategies and Tips for Black-Owned Businesses
Welcome to Breaking the Blueprint — a new blog series that dives into the unique business challenges and opportunities of Black business owners and entrepreneurs. Learn how they’ve grown or scaled their businesses, explored entrepreneurial ventures within their companies, or created side hustles, and how their stories can inspire and inform your own success.
The support for Black-owned businesses has increased drastically over the past year due to the disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and the influence of the Black Lives Matter protests that took place last summer to combat racial injustices in the nation.
Consumers have been actively seeking to buy from Black-owned businesses to help them stay open and increase the economic advancement of Black Americans.
As a result, the search for Black-owned businesses increased by 7,043% on Yelp, and the search term for “Black owned” on Google reached a value of 100 last summer.
Since then, Black-owned businesses have been proactive in increasing their visibility and accessibility through marketing strategies to optimize their outreach.
I spoke with Dana James Mwangi, the founder of Cheers Creative LLC and a Grow with Google Digital Coach, to learn about effective marketing strategies, tools, and approaches Black business owners can use to promote their businesses.
Marketing Strategies for Black-Owned Businesses
1. Use social media platforms to connect directly with your consumers.
Social media is one of the top tools businesses use to promote their services or products. Platforms like Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook have unique features. Black business owners can use these networks to connect directly to their customers, and to the broader community.
Although some businesses want to have a strong presence everywhere, Mwangi suggests entrepreneurs focus on one platform where they receive the most visibility, instead of trying to be present on all of them at once.
“You want to use social media to get people to your website,” Mwangi said. “You can also use it to get people to sign up for your email list, or both.”
For instance, check out how Rihanna promotes her Fenty Beauty, Fenty Skin and Savage X Fenty brands on Instagram with catchy captions and visually appealing posts. Her content is not only relatable, but inclusive to people of all backgrounds.
This tactic can help you secure a potential sale and maintain continuous, effective engagement with your audience. It also enables you to expand your brand reach.
2. Create targeted ads for high-converting audiences.
Social media platforms and search engines like Google offer entrepreneurs the opportunity to create ads that show up on their targeted audience’s timelines or feeds. Mwangi says ads are a great way to market yourself to receive a faster return.
One benefit of using ads is it allows you to choose what audience you want to target. Facebook and Instagram, in particular, offer the option to market to people who follow your brand, or you can customize your targeting …read more
Source:: HubSpot Blog
