The Ultimate Guide to Small Business Marketing

Developing a strategy for your small business is an important first step for beginning the business. Yet many small business owners consider it one of the most difficult or intimidating tasks to deal with.

Truly, having a complete understanding of every aspect of small business marketing is a tedious task because every day new tactics of marketing are emerging. It is also a greatly subjective practice. Based on goals, market niche, customer base, preference, and branding, a tactic of marketing that is suitable for a small business may not be suitable for another.

Again, there are some marketing tactics that can be quite universally effective. If you are a newcomer to the small business marketing world, here you can get everything you require to know for gaining customers and driving sales.

The Way to Develop the Strategy for Small Business Marketing:

Designing a marketing strategy for your small business needs a lot of preliminary research. But this research will pay you off when you begin to get the dividends. Let’s see where to begin.

Identify Marketing Goals:

First, have a clear idea of what you are wishing to achieve with the marketing campaign and the way the marketing efforts are going to assist you to attain your total business goals. Begin by targeting your USP (Unique Selling Proposition). You need to be pinpointing what makes you different from the competitors in each of your marketing efforts.

The more certain you are in identifying the marketing goals, the stronger will be your position. Utilize numbers (such as the number of visitors, prospective customers, clients, or revenue produced you are willing to boost) whenever probable. Highly certain goals permit you to modify your marketing strategy for the small business matching with those goals, which saves your resources, effort, and time from dead-end efforts.

It is also much simpler to track and assess your strategies’ success when you possess hard numbers for comparing your outcomes against.

Definitely, each business will identify their marketing goals differently, but there are some numbers you may be willing to concentrate on boosting in your marketing effort:

Website traffic
Lead generation
Conversions from visitors to sales
Engagement or involvement rates on your profiles of social media and other online content.

From a qualitative point of view, all of these goals are worthy but keep in mind that a continuing marketing campaign also needs to aim for achieving less measurable goals. Effective marketing tools are important for making people know about your brand, and developing an identifiable and cohesive brand. Eventually, your marketing efforts help to establish brand loyalty and a positive reputation among customers, which is exactly how businesses sustain and succeed in the long run.

Understand the Market

After identifying the marketing goals, identify the target audience- since you cannot actually attain those goals when your message is not reverberating with the customers whom your service or product serves to.

The finest way to perform this research is just reaching out to your existent customers- email them, call them, ask them for filling up an online survey, or simply speak with them when they come to your business place- and have an idea on why they prefer your company. You can ask this sort of question like what are their points of pain? How do your services solve those issues? Why do they prefer your company over your competitors? How will they explain your brand?

Crucially, collect data on the demographics of your target audience, such as their gender, average age, habits, professions, spending capabilities, and geographical location. You will get a bonus if you can figure out the platforms they prefer to use mostly for discovering and engaging with brands, whether that is a specific channel of social media, Google search, word of mouth, email, or something else.

Online Small Business Marketing:

Mostly your marketing campaigns should be done focusing on your strategy of online small business marketing because digital presence is a highly effective and low-cost method of attracting customers. Consider your own purchasing habits: you like to perform a Google search about a brand before buying their products or services. There is also the possibility that a certain company draws your attention while scrolling through your social media accounts.

You need to learn a lot about online small business marketing because the sector is just expanding with the continuing growth of the digital space’s power. But when you are only launching the marketing plan, ensure to hit the goalposts mentioned below for having the online platform up and going.

Develop a Business Website and Blog:

Developing a professional site for your small business is essential for gaining the trust of your potential customers. This business website not only performs as the digital hub for the business but also as one of the finest ways for future prospects to find the business easily. Around 93 percent of all kinds of web traffic arrive through search engines. That is quite a huge possibility of leads only waiting to be transformed into buying customers- after they, of course, visit your site. You can develop a mobile-optimized and professional-looking website easily with any number of website developers.

Introducing a blog living on your site is not necessarily as important as the site proper. Blog posts can be an outstanding way of communicating with the customers, announcing developments (such as price changes, sales, and updated inventory), and establishing yourself as an entity in your sector. Blogs are also important tools to boost SEO, which attracts to your website and business.

Develop Appealing Content:

Content marketing serves as one of the most effective and popular strategies of online small business marketing. But to become successful in it you need to develop appealing content that speaks of the particular needs, pain points, and wants of your audience. A business website and blog are perfect places for showcasing your content.

Some of the popular types of content for including on your business website and blog are:

Blog posts regarding practices for your sector, practical tips for the target audience, and important stats roundups.
Visual or video content for engaging your audience, showcasing the products and services, and answering the FAQs of your audience. No worries regarding investment in expensive equipment. Because you can easily shoot footage of high-quality with your iPhone.
Infographics can be strong marketing tools that are another kind of visual content. They are easy for both reading and sharing making them helpful for enhancing referral traffic to the website. Here, the best thing is that you can develop them for free by applying tools like Canva.
Other types of content consist of whitepapers, social media posts, podcasts, eBooks, online courses, industry reports regarding a topic that can be interesting for your audience.

Optimize the Content for SEO:

Apart from creating appealing content, you need to ensure that all your content is SEO optimized for boosting your rank in the search engines. The better your rank, the more easily your prospects can find your business during a Google search.

SEO means “search engine optimization.” It is a collection of strategies that can improve the ranking of a website on search engines. By properly following the SEO strategy, you improve your website’s probability of reaching the desired first page of a Google, Bing, or other search engine search.

There are paid services for boosting your SEO, as well as, many free SEO strategies that you can implement easily:

Select a website developer that emphasizes SEO optimization.
Apply free tools for keyword research for finding the keywords your audience is looking for. When you possess a blog, ensure that the blog topics are focused around these keywords, and optimize the blog posts for SEO on your content management system (CMS).
Attempt to get positions on other sites relevant to your sector for developing a backlinks’ profile.
Ask the customers for writing positive reviews on Trustpilot, Yelp, and other authentic and trusted sites for review.
Concentrate on developing the best content probable.

Though SEO is a complex and frequently-changing landscape, you may consult various resources for necessary tips to begin. You can also hire an SEO expert when you have the required budget.

Always remember that it takes some time to have that desired traffic increase after you have optimized the content for SEO. As long as you don’t give up and stick with it, you will be unable to find any other strategy more effective than it to attract potential customers.

More precisely, content marketing is like playing a long-term game. At first, it takes time to see the desired result. But you should stick with it for your own good because content marketing is able to bring you a steady flow of leads, visitors, and customers for the long-run.

Apply Web Analytics Tool for Measuring Your Results:

Introducing your site and just letting it survive online is not quite enough for capturing customers, even when it is SEO-optimized. To have the most from your website and other materials for online content marketing and to completely optimize the strategy for online marketing - you require applying some sort of web analytics tools.

These tools can track the overall performance of your website. Some of these tools can also measure many of the behaviors of your website visitors- such as the way they navigate the website, which devices they are using for finding your site, how frequently they leave, their demographics and geographical locations, and more. If you think rationally, these metrics can give valuable insight into the way you can change your website and any kind of digital content you develop, for better suiting the browsing habits and preferences of your customers.

The suit of Google of analytical tools, consisting of Google Analytics and Google Search Control, is so far the most vastly applied analytics tool nowadays. Google Search Console tracks the way your site is doing via search, so you are able to understand the way to optimize your content well for attracting more traffic. Google Analytics also tracks the performance of your website, but you will be able to measure your advertising return on investment (ROI) too if you use Google Ads for the paid advertising efforts. For this reason, GA is a single hub to measure your bulk of online marketing initiatives.

Create Profiles on Social Media:

Your business’s presence on social media is important too just like having a website. Not necessarily you should create an account on all of the main social media sites (such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and TikTok). The more you get involved in these social media platforms, the greater you will perform. If you have accounts on all of these platforms and you cannot properly handle any of these, none will offer you a proper ROI.

Rather than select a few social media sites that you believe you can handle, and more specifically, those you know that your client base practically uses. You can take help from social media statistics for guidance and thus, you can match the demographics of your customer with the demographics of the platform, and understand the way to develop your content to match what users involve with on any specific platform. This content includes informational updates, videos, or simply nice product photography.

Social media can also be a built-in means for interacting with the customers through the direct messaging system or comments section. Your customers can also connect and interact with one another through these platforms.

Here are some tips for you to best design and manage the social media strategy:

Post your staff’s pictures: Your customers are curious for knowing you. Social media can be the best place for breaking down this barrier.
Other content for sharing: Your product’s beautiful images, video stories, your staff’s behind-the-scene moments where they are involved in their function, and live chats for talking about the business and perform Q&As.
Use social media for sharing special and exclusive discounts. Thus, you can create interest among your customers for following your profiles and bring them nearer as the audience.
Use a suitable platform for content management such as Hootsuite or others for managing the social media accounts from a single place and scheduling content in prior.
If you are a brand new business, no need to worry about posting every day. Social means your probability for the customers for knowing you and the business you are running, more easily. Therefore, it should be natural.

Use Email Marketing:

Email marketing still has the same importance as a marketing technique in spite of the increased popularity of social media. Statistics say that around 64 percent of businesses consider email marketing as their most effective technique of marketing. A well-operated email campaign can be also unbelievably cost-effective because each $1 invested here makes a return of $38 on average.

But you possibly won’t have that excellent ROI by just sending random, monotonous emails. You need to develop and implement a comprehensive plan for email marketing to get the best result. You can address these mentioned details and start:

How often do you like to send emails? Weekly, fortnightly, or, monthly?
What sort of content would you add in the emails: email drip campaigns, newsletters, product updates, dedicated sends?
Decide on which email service provider you want to use.
Develop your list of email ids.

While writing the emails, ensure to add a subject line interesting enough for the recipient for opening the message. Keep the email copy short, relevant, easily understood, and written in conversational language. Add links to your profiles on social media, and surely add a CTA or call to action to encourage recipients for visiting your site or store (having a relevant link).

Make Your Profile Perfect:

Developing a Google My Business (GMB) profile is a necessary tool to boost local SEO. It is completely free for setting up and permits your business for appearing in local search results. For increasing your rank in the search engines, you should take some steps for optimizing your (GMB) profile. These are as follows:

Use your real business name and select the correct categories
Claim the listing
Ensure that each of your details is correct and up-to-date
Apply images with high resolution
Ask for social check-ins and reviews from your customers
Inspire visitors for uploading photos.

Apply Paid Advertising:

Online paid advertising has many forms. You may purchase ad space on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, and Instagram; partner with a company for sharing your products and services on their platforms; sponsor a podcast, or apply PPC or pay-per-click advertising and the like.

The best way can be the paid advertising space with Google Ads. You can take your business site to the Google search page’s top with Google Ads. Thus, potential leads can find you more easily, you can also give advertisements for your business on YouTube and across other sites when individuals search online for related keywords.

Select a goal you want to achieve with the ad, the kind of campaign you like to launch and fix your budget for the month. With the PPC model, you have to pay only when individuals engage or involve with your ad.

Other Strategies for Small Business Marketing:

1. Become a Collaborator:

You can work with other companies for cross-promoting or marketing cooperatively for growing the client base. When you like to collaborate with other companies, you can try with those who are local and associated with your industry yet not your direct competitors.

2. Networking:

You should not underestimate networking’s power to have your messages to the market. You can join communities of local businesses to get connected with your area’s other entrepreneurs. You can also go for partnership with a business for hosting an event sharing your services or products and selling your products at any relevant fairs.

3. Try Traditional Advertising:

Print media is a form of traditional advertising. It is not that much popular nowadays as once it used to be. Still, print media can work well as an additional strategy. It will be best to develop a mixed marketing effort that combines print advertising with online marketing campaigns if your budget permits.

4. Giving Sales Incentive:

You can offer referral codes, giveaways, discounts for clients who provide positive reviews or testimonials. BOGO deals, flash sales, and free trial periods are some low-lift marketing tricks that may work well for converting visitors into customers.

5. Sending Direct Mail:

Direct mail marketing is not that popular nowadays, but you can use it as an opportunity for standing out from your competitors who solely use online marketing. You should target the materials to the ideal audience and be strategic for effective direct mail marketing.

6. Experiential Marketing:

One-time events facilitating customer interaction with your business or brand can all be included under the term experiential marketing. Some examples of it can be tutorials, workshops, competitions, tours of your facility, pop-up shops, concerts, and giveaways.

Finally, the most sustainable and effective small business marketing strategies can be those that build and retain relationships with the customers. For this, you need to appeal to the emotional connection of your customers with your small business. In the messaging, have a focus on customers, not on the products. Focus on how your services or products can relieve their pain points; provide them unique value, and the reason they can have trust in your brand over your competitors.