You can chuck a whole load of money at marketing efforts, but they won’t necessarily produce the results you want. As a small business owner, you probably don’t have a whole load of money to chuck around on a whim. That’s why it’s important to think carefully and to form a marketing strategy and action plan first and foremost. After all, there’s no point promoting your business to people who don’t need or want your products or services.
But with so many ways to market your business, it can be tricky to know where to start. Should you invest in online marketing, advertising, brochures and leaflets, or social media marketing? Before you throw money at it, stop and think about the best marketing channels to ensure a return on investment and to reach your target market. What works for one business may not work for yours. Your small business’s best marketing strategy depends on your specific target audience and your business model.
In this blog, I’ll share what I’ve learned as a small business owner and the tips I give my clients about marketing their small business effectively.
Why is It Important To Build a Small Business Marketing Strategy?
Ultimately, you want sales for your small business and to build a solid customer base. Marketing can help you to generate those. Effective marketing efforts will raise brand awareness amongst your potential customers and build a pipeline of qualified leads that can become sales conversions. In addition, by sharing your message and relevant content, you can build trust and position yourself as an expert in your field.
That’s the theory, but it can be challenging to put into practice. Small businesses tend to lack resources – important ones like budget and time.
Whether you’re a start up or well-established, the right marketing strategies can help you to determine your small business marketing efforts. Even if you have a limited budget, a small team, or are confused about your direction, developing a considered marketing plan appropriate for your business will give you a roadmap to business growth and development.
Your 5 Steps To Creating a Small Business Marketing Strategy
The thought of developing a marketing strategy may fill you with fear if it’s out of your comfort zone of expertise. Start simply by thinking about where you are now and where you want to be. This will become your long term plan to reach more target customers and become a viable, sustainable business.
1. Your Current Business Position
Think about which phase your business is in. Are you a new business start up, a growing company or well established? List your business strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps you have a decent customer base and email list or an engaged social media community. Consider which marketing efforts have worked (or not) for you before.
2. Your Target Customer
What problem does your business solve and who’s most likely to need that solution? That’s your target audience. It may not be your current customer base though, especially if your offering’s evolved. Market research can help you to work out who your target customer is and where to find them. Your marketing needs to be tailored to that target market.
3. Your Budget and Resources
When budgets and resources are limited, it’s important to use them wisely and appropriately. Identify the best ways to spend your marketing budget by using market research and data analytics rather than guesswork.
Spending tens of thousands on a TV ad or billboard marketing campaign is likely to be out of reach for most small businesses. But perhaps you could create short videos for TikTok, informative articles for LinkedIn or beautiful images for Instagram – whichever social media channel is most appropriate for your business.
Note your monthly marketing budget and look at the resources you have available. Perhaps you have an enthusiastic team member with social media marketing experience, a robust email list of existing, former and potential customers or a good online presence. Identifying these opportunities will help you to decipher the marketing tactics and initiatives to focus on and invest in.
4. Your Quick Wins
Which marketing strategy is the easiest and most appropriate to implement? Go for the lowest hanging fruit first. If you’ve identified that you have a local target audience for your service, try word of mouth or partnerships with other relevant local businesses to reach those potential customers. Set up your free Google Business Profile (Google My Business). Or try email marketing, an effective way to communicate with your customer base and drive sales and awareness.
Set SMART goals. Do you want to gain new customers, increase website traffic or boost brand awareness? Goals should be specific, such as, ‘increase ecommerce sales by 15% this year,’ ‘attract 3 new customers by December,’ or ‘improve engagement on social media accounts by 20% in the next 3 months.’
5. Test and Measure
When you set specific strategic goals, you can measure their effectiveness. The return on investment is clear and you have a roadmap of how and when each event will happen.
Keep an eye on how marketing ideas and initiatives are performing. Is your digital marketing expanding your online presence and website traffic? Check Google Analytics regularly to track that. If you’ve set up a discount coupon or promotional code, measure how many people have used it. If a marketing campaign or incentive isn’t delivering the results you want, adjust and tweak it to reach the right demographics.
6 Marketing Strategies To Boost Your Small Business
Once you’ve done the market research and strategic planning, you can start putting all of that work into action. In my experience, these are the best marketing strategies for small businesses to try.
Referral Marketing
Referral marketing is a low-cost strategy that encourages word-of-mouth marketing. And word of mouth is really powerful.
Asking your existing clients to provide testimonials or to endorse your business is a great way to get new customers. Testimonials and recommendations can build trust – you’re more likely to buy from a business that’s got good reviews or has been recommended by someone else. To encourage this, you can incentivise existing customers by offering a discount, gift or other perk in exchange for bringing in new customers.
But you can also ask people you know to recommend you. When I was building my business, I asked former colleagues to recommend me to others in their network. It costs nothing (except for a coffee potentially) and is an effective marketing tool.
In-person Promotion
I’m a big believer in networking and making connections with other relevant and/or local business owners. Industry events and conferences, or local business networking events, are ideal for this. Building relationships with other small business owners can result in referrals or you could form strategic partnerships to support or promote each other.
In-person or digital events like webinars, tutorials or workshops are great ways to share your expertise and connect with potential customers. Share some of your knowledge to hook them in and then entice them to sign up or pay for further services or more info.
Email Marketing
Building an email list of existing and potential customers is an extremely valuable asset. These are people who are interested enough in your business that they’ll willing share some personal data.
Email marketing remains one of the most effective, and cost-effective, small business marketing strategies. You can send targeted messages to specific customer groups. Tools like Mailchimp or Hubspot can help to automate this process which saves time and money. If you’re not doing this regularly, it’s worth a go.
Content Marketing
Create high quality content that provides relevant, educational and entertaining information for your target audience. It’s a great way to engage with people and connect them with your brand. You can use different content to attract people at various stages along the buyer journey to keep your brand in their mind. That could be a blog, video, article or image-based content.
It doesn’t have to cost a fortune either. There are plenty of templates online to help you build websites, design social media images and graphics, or compile attractive emails.
Once you know where your target audience is likely to be, you can create valuable content that will be a magnet for them. Don’t forget to include a compelling call to action to encourage people to do something (contact you, buy something, sign up etc). Choose the social media platforms that make sense for your business, that you can update and manage ongoing and, crucially, that are used by your target audience.
Pay Per Click (PPC)
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can help drive customers to your business website. Create targeted ads that promote your business to people on search engines. Make sure that your website’s working well, easy to navigate and is engaging. Otherwise, the people that you draw to it through PPC will simply click away and go elsewhere and that’s a waste of your money.
Again, it’s important to research where your potential customers search. If they search online for websites, then use Google ads or Microsoft advertising. If they look up stuff on social media channels, use Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, YouTube or whichever platform they prefer.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
This is a longer term digital marketing strategy that helps you to connect with the right demographics and drive traffic to your website. You won’t see results overnight, but done well, it’ll improve your ranking on search engines like Google. It’s your key to getting your website to appear higher up the page of search engine results pages (SERPs).
Work out the terms your customers are likely to use when they Google search for the product or service your business provides. Incorporate them into your content, pages and metadata. There’s far more to an SEO strategy than that, but you get the gist.
If you serve a local market in particular, creating and updating your business profile on Google is a no-brainer. It’s free and can really help to get your business found.
Take Steps To Market Your Small Business Successfully
There are loads of ways to market your business, and you can easily spend a lot of money doing so. That’s why it’s crucial to do your homework first. By creating a good marketing strategy for your business, you can make a big difference to its success.
By following the 5 planning steps before you even start, you’ll be in the best place to make informed decisions on your small business marketing strategy. My advice is to pick a couple to test out and measure their performance. Use that valuable information to refine your marketing efforts.
If you need help to get your head around marketing strategy and business planning, please give me a call.
