Marketing can be a challenge for small businesses. With limited budgets and resources, it’s often hard to compete with larger companies. Yet, smart and creative strategies can level the playing field, helping small businesses reach their target audience and achieve their goals without breaking the bank.
The key lies in making every marketing effort count, focusing on cost-effective and impactful approaches. Building an online presence is always at the top of the list, but there are other ways to promote your business while staying within budget.
The Pew Research Center reports that 86% of Americans believe small businesses positively impact the country as a whole, so they have consumer support. This article highlights eight small business marketing tips that can help your company connect with customers moving forward.
Quick Takeaways
- Understanding your ideal customer’s demographics, psychographics, and buyer behavior helps craft effective, personalized marketing campaigns.
- Creating valuable content, optimizing keywords, and managing a Google My Business profile can increase your visibility on Google and attract local customers.
- Targeting specific keywords with cost-effective ad campaigns drives traffic to your website and converts leads into customers.
- You can build and nurture customer relationships through personalized, automated email campaigns with compelling subject lines and engaging content.
- Connecting with your audience on the right platforms using tailored content and a consistent posting schedule enhances brand awareness and loyalty.
Why is it Important to Build a Small Business Marketing Strategy?
Every business wants to get its name out there. Still, when you’re a small business with a modest budget, it’s hard to come up with traditional and online marketing ideas while balancing marketing expenses against the expenses of actually doing business. And with advertising costing as much as it does, it’s no wonder many small businesses struggle to get noticed.
Here’s the plot twist: advertising isn’t the best way to generate leads anymore. The average person today sees around 5,000 ads a day, a number that’s over twice as high as it was in the ’80s. As a result, close to one billion people use ad blockers globally. So, if ads aren’t the way to build a customer base, what is?
Well-researched and planned digital marketing, diligently and consistently executed, will keep the branding and sales wheel churning for the smallest of businesses. The need for a plan is one of the top small business marketing tips you’ll encounter.
Your Marketing Plan
The Marketing Center reports that 54% of small and medium-sized businesses don’t have a business plan, and 67% of those companies lack a marketing action plan. Small companies often deal with a limited marketing budget. As a result, earning visibility in a local community can be challenging.
A marketing strategy helps you increase brand awareness and develop a pipeline of qualified leads that will turn into sales. With the right digital tactics, you can scale your small business marketing efforts to earn more customers in your local area.
Before diving into your channel strategies, you need to build a foundation. Consider the following elements when getting started:
- Understand your target audience’s problems and priorities so you can present your business as the solution
- Build a strong value proposition that differentiates you from your competitors
- Set performance goals so you can focus your budget and resources on meeting objectives
- Identify how you can leverage current customers to become your brand advocates
- Use free promotional tools and automation where applicable
Can Small Businesses Compete Against Enterprise Behemoths?
Small businesses are the lifeblood of the economy. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 99.9% of American businesses are small businesses, and they’re responsible for 43.5% of the country’s GDP.
Why am I telling you this? Because for some strange reason, when we think of the “economy,” we think of the Amazons, Googles, and Apples of the world. Not one thought is spared for the businesses that actually employ almost the whole country. Remember, every President and wannabe President has cried out, “Small businesses are the backbone of the American economy.”
However, even though small businesses play a vital role as employment generators, they lag far behind the large companies in terms of business value created. The behemoths of the world are doing something right that’s leaving the minnows eating dust.
Does this mean there’s no way for a small business to compete against the Goliaths? Absolutely not! It depends to what extent you can replicate their marketing strategies and follow some small business marketing tips.
Components of a Small Business Marketing Strategy
There’s no secret sauce to developing a small business marketing strategy. However, some strategies can help small businesses earn high ROI and even get some valuable time back.
While the combination might be trial and error, dedicating time and budget to your marketing and implementing some small business marketing tips will pay off in sales and brand reputation.
1. Define Your Target Audience
Knowing your target audience is perhaps the most important part of any marketing strategy and one of the most valuable small business marketing tips. When you fail to understand who your ideal customer is, your efforts may miss the mark, wasting time and resources. A well-defined audience helps you create personalized messages, choose the right marketing channels, and offer products or services that speak to your customers.
You’ll want to start by identifying demographics. Key characteristics like age, gender, location, income, and education are worth focusing on.
From there, you can look into psychographics, which explores values, interests, and lifestyle preferences. Understanding buyer behavior—how customers make purchasing decisions—can also guide your marketing approach.
You can use tools like Google Analytics to analyze website traffic or run customer surveys to collect feedback. Social media platforms also provide insights into your audience’s preferences and behaviors.
This data creates a clear picture of your ideal customer so you can make smarter and more effective marketing decisions.
2. Search Engine Optimization
Beyond developing an impressive website, search engine optimization (SEO) is perhaps the most impactful marketing strategy for small businesses. SEO optimizes your website and content so search engines or end users can find your company.
Often, the higher you rank on Google, the more likely you’ll be able to drive traffic and consumers to your website. Statista reports that 32% of consumers use Google to search for local businesses multiple times per week. With an SEO strategy, customers searching for your services will be more likely to find your business in search engine results.
You can implement SEO by:
- Creating a Google My Business account
- Requesting reviews from your customers
- Optimizing your website with local keywords
- Creating blog posts or videos that relate to the local community
- Using location pages
- Focusing on getting high-quality backlinks
At Marketing Insider Group, we’re constantly optimizing our strategy for ourselves and our clients and following our own small business marketing tips.
The best advice we can give to any small business is to publish blog articles multiple times per week. Even if you don’t have the bandwidth to do it all right now, start small!
Don’t expect to write a few words on an industry trend or two and have your website crash from too many visitors! Research SEO blog posting strategies and others that could help to build your credibility in search.
3. Pay-Per-Click Advertising
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising allows small businesses to display ads when consumers search for certain keywords in a search engine. While it can lead to an expensive bidding war, local markets are often less competitive, and the PPC model helps you keep a regulated budget.
Sounds good, right? But how does this work?
You bid on keywords like “local printing company” or “office supplies near me” and create ads around those phrases. Advertising platforms will then use an algorithm to display your ads in the search engine result pages (SERP) based on factors such as keyword relevance and landing page quality. You pay every time someone clicks on your ad.
For some, it works wonders. But this must be a thoughtful approach! Definitely don’t just “throw money at the problem.” Make sure your business roots are strong, like your strategy, website, and brand messaging. Then, assess if this small business marketing tip could truly make a difference for you.
4. Email Marketing
With a projected 4.37 billion email users by the end of 2023, email marketing is an excellent way to reach your target audience.
In fact, 53% of small and medium-sized businesses report that email is one of their most frequently used marketing tools.
Email marketing is the only digital marketing tool that allows you to build a personalized relationship with customers and continue to nurture them well after their first purchase. You can send customers drip campaigns based on an action—like signing up for a consultation or completing a purchase—or send regular newsletters filled with company and product updates.
To use email marketing successfully, consider the following tactics:
- Segment your customers based on demographics or activity
- Use a CRM or EPS to automate sending emails at the right time
- Develop compelling subject lines to make sure your email gets clicked
5. Social Media Marketing
If you’re looking to reach a larger audience and engage with customers regularly, social media is a small business must-have. While it may not be the biggest driver of sales growth, it can help you reach awareness and branding goals.
The average user spends 143 minutes a day on social media. While it may seem intimidating at first, it’s essential not to spread yourself too thin and join every platform.
Instead, focus on your target audience. Where is your target audience spending the most time? What type of content do they enjoy? How can you make the biggest impact?
Depending on your customer needs, consider the following platforms:
- Facebook: Post entertaining pictures, status updates, and customer success stories
- Twitter: Share news and answer customer inquiries in real-time
- Pinterest: Spread visual content like blogs, infographics, and e-books quickly
- YouTube: Dominate with user-generated and branded video content
- Instagram: Display high-resolution imagery that showcases your services
But remember this important small business marketing tip: showing up on social media platforms when you feel like it is not enough!
Your small business’s social media accounts could use their own smart strategy. Build a realistic content plan and publishing schedule once you’ve figured out where your audience is lurking. Stay consistent for a few weeks, and don’t be afraid to make small adjustments along the way.
6. Content Marketing
What should be at the center of your small business marketing strategy? Content marketing.
Content marketing is the act of developing and publishing high-quality content that is valuable to your target audience. It should speak to your customers’ challenges and needs while positioning your business as the solution through creative storytelling.
It’s important to note that content marketing is a long-term strategy. It will take significant time to build rapport with your customers and search engines. However, when done correctly, content marketing can position your business as an industry leader and develop long-lasting relationships with your audience.
Types of Content Marketing
Your content should include a wide range of formats to highlight your industry expertise and learn what your audience prefers to consume. When getting started, consider the following content types:
- Blogs
- Whitepapers or e-books
- Infographics
- Videos
- Podcasts
The quality of the content you create is invaluable. Each business has a field of expertise, and you can capitalize on your valuable expertise by sharing your knowledge online. Customers then find your content when searching for information on the topic.
So rather than trying to find your customers to shove an ad in their faces, they come looking for you. And the better the content, the more loyalty you’ll build with your audience. Just be sure you combine content efforts with search engine optimization so your content appears in Google searches.
Content isn’t just text. You can boost written content with some snappy visuals. Whether you’re including a well-crafted infographic, some applicable photos or visual references, or even a video, giving your audience something to look at will increase engagement.
You can even go a step further and get in on what all those trendsetters have been talking about: live streaming on social media. Hold a Q&A on Twitter Spaces, give visitors an on-site tour of your facilities on Facebook, or show them how you get the job done with LinkedIn Stories. The more transparent you are with your audience, the more they will trust you.
7. Ratings and Reviews
Beyond the content you create, the product or service you provide significantly impacts your online presence. You need to be aware that people leave reviews of your company and your products on places like Google, Amazon, Yelp, and more. If you’re providing something remarkable and offering excellent customer service, then this is a good thing.
If not, then it can have some serious consequences. You must be proactive about encouraging positive reviews and remedying negative ones. You don’t want to manipulate reviews to suit the image of your company, but you should make it convenient for your customer to leave an organic review and act quickly to resolve the problems in negative reviews. Here are some tips:
- Encourage reviews: Make reviews easy to post and have a link where people can read reviews.
- Respond to negative reviews: Try to resolve issues and improve the customer’s disposition.
- Consider using online review software: Get the most from customer feedback and online reviews.
- Make sure your reviews are organic: Don’t sabotage your reputation with paid reviews.
8. Online Reputation Management
Remember how we mentioned SEO? Well, just like you need to watch out for negative reviews, you need to watch out for negative or defaming search results. Negative search results can crowd out positive ones and make it hard for customers to find your business, let alone trust it.
Reputation management is a huge topic to cover. To simplify, you should check regularly for what comes up when you search your company’s name.
Make sure you’re honest and customer-friendly in your dealings, producing excellent content, and making the most of social media sites and business directory listings. The more positive stuff about you that you can put out there, the better chance you’ll have at crowding out the negative noise.
5 Questions Answered on Small Business Marketing Strategy
Figuring out a marketing strategy when you’re a small business owner can seem daunting. Once you have a foundation, we can dig a little deeper. Here are five important questions on marketing for small businesses, answered:
1. What marketing tricks can SMBs learn from Fortune 500 companies?
First, large companies believe they can be known for something, but their egos get in the way when they only talk about themselves. Small companies are often better able to maintain an important focus on customers and become known as true thought leaders in their space. Our small business marketing tips help SMBs craft customer-focused mission statements to guide their strategy.
Second, small companies have less technical infrastructure. We’ve seen them outmaneuver their larger peers with better customer experiences on their website, more authentic and engaging content, and more interaction on social media.
Third, smaller companies also tend to have more passionate employees willing to create engaging content, interact on social media, and even drive referrals for customers and new recruits. SMBs should identify this strength early on and focus on employee and customer engagement as part of their marketing strategy.
Fourth, retention is the secret to a high ROI Marketing strategy and one of the most important small business marketing tips. In larger companies, working closely with existing customers can become secondary to driving growth. SMBs face similar pressure for different reasons.
However, the math behind the growth engine is different for SMBs. They need growth with lower investment. Customer retention programs are the best way to achieve high ROI with little investment.
2. Where should marketers be focusing today when designing marketing campaigns?
We hate the word ‘campaign.’ It’s everything that’s wrong with marketing today.
Today’s customers and buyers are always searching online for information, education, and solutions to their problems. Smart marketers are creating always-on programs to answer this need. That includes educational and non-promotional thought leadership, activating employees in content creation and social engagement, and then developing and testing the right paths to conversions.
3. What is the key to wildly successful digital marketing programs?
Wildly successful marketing programs are always running. They are constantly testing the right content or message and always tweaking the audience filters and targeting parameters. They are continually optimizing the visual elements of the program. And they are consistently testing conversion paths. Being always on is the key.
4. How should SMBs approach campaign development today, and where do they typically go wrong?
SMBs can sometimes be so desperate to deliver on the sales or lead goals that they focus too much on the last stage of the buying process. Marketing programs should match the buying process as much as possible.
You’ll need to create a lot of content in the early stages.
On average, for every customer, there are 100 people in the early stages of the buying journey. These people know they have a problem but are unsure of the solution. Explain it to them and why it’s important (no product yet)!
For every buyer, there are 10 people in the middle stages. These folks are looking for deeper how-to education. Spend time helping them (not too much product yet).
Now, you’ve earned a right to talk about who you are, what you sell, and why you are better.
5. What are some great tips for designing customer journeys?
We live in a digital world where it’s relatively easy to see what your customers need at each stage of their journey. We can use Google auto-fill or related searches to tell us what content to create.
Suppose I’m selling content marketing strategy services. In that case, I know that people want content marketing strategy tools, templates, and examples because Google auto-fill or related searches tell me that’s what most people are searching for.
Once you’ve created a list of topics, you can group them into categories and use Google Trends to tell you which categories of content and issues are more important for your customer journey relative to each other.
We can use other tools to tell us what questions we should answer with our content at each stage of the buyer journey and which channels are most important to our customers.
For B2B businesses, LinkedIn might be the place to be. But if you’re in fashion, for example, you have to be on Instagram. Don’t leave these decisions up to your gut. We can quantify the impact of each of these approaches.
Finally, we need to measure our efforts. Are you showing up on the first page for the search terms your customers are using at each stage of the buyer journey? Identify the top 15-20 search terms your customers use across their journey and track your visibility or position relative to your competition. And remember that online, your competition might be an online publication or a mommy blogger.
Implementing an Effective Small Business Marketing Strategy
Limited resources and a small budget don’t mean you can’t leverage a marketing strategy to grow your business. Developing a small business marketing strategy and following some small business marketing tips lets you learn about your ideal customers to serve their needs better and earn their loyalty.
1. Bring Your Brand Personality to Life
One of the most significant benefits of a small business is that it has the freedom to be itself. With passionate owners driving small businesses, it’s a great idea for business owners to infuse some of their own personality into their brand.
Sevenly is an excellent example of a small business founded by a pair of socially conscious millennials to give back to society.
In keeping with its image as a do-gooder brand, every marketing message from Sevenly reinforces its cause-oriented social commitment. The company has donated over $5 million to various charities since its inception.
2. Help Customers Help Themselves
Big businesses with deep pockets have the luxury of splurging on things that small businesses could never dream of. A 40% discount on your bestselling products? No problem! A 24×7 toll-free helpline number with 10 dedicated reps answering questions? All yours! 30-day returns with no questions asked? Why not!
However, tight resources are no excuse for cheaping out on customer service. There are a million ways to keep those disgruntled customers happy, even on a shoestring budget.
So why not be proactive and offer your customers answers to frequently asked questions upfront? Create a dedicated FAQs section on your website that users can browse (and search!) to give them answers before they pick up that phone to call you (or worse, walk in to have an argument).
Product demo videos that explain step-by-step how to use your product are also great customer care tools.
Does your product have a steep learning curve? Set up a quick online learning option where users can understand various use cases, watch how-to videos on-demand, and get more comfortable with your product or service in a virtual environment at their own pace.
For B2B or SaaS businesses, helping customers learn by themselves is far easier than hiring and training staff to help them. As a simple example, you can record a video where you explain stuff in person and show a step-by-step tutorial via an app right from your iPhone screen (and I’ve rarely seen a startup founder who doesn’t carry one of those!) This small business marketing tip is something that any business can implement to keep up with far larger companies.
3. Stay Connected
When the typical entrepreneur starts a new venture, they naturally gravitate towards social media to promote their business and generate word of mouth around it. While reaching out to your friends and relatives about your business is great, it’s even more important to connect with your target audience and customers one-on-one.
When local businesses connect with customers, they listen and engage better. One of the most valuable small business marketing tips is to reach out to your customers in your own authentic voice, not as a soulless corporate brand.
Social media is not the only way to build a personal bond with your audience; email is equally effective, too. It allows you to reach out to users regularly (after all, out of sight is out of mind) and offers a wide variety of ways to offer true value to the user.
A Mighty Girl is a small business that empowers young girls through unique toys, clothes, and knickknacks, all focused on changing societal attitudes about women.
Even though their bread and butter comes from the items users buy on their website, their emails do not hard sell any item. Instead, they focus on content about influential women in history, inspirational news items, and content pieces that teach values to young girls – things their typical user deeply cares about.
Without a single “buy” button on their email, A Mighty Girl encourages its users to shop with them purely on the strength of the bond they’ve forged.
4. Use Familiarity to Your Advantage
My morning ritual consists of dashing out the door for work and stopping at a neighborhood coffee shop for my morning cuppa. I prefer this small shop over a Starbucks for a very simple reason: I like to start my day with a smile, with people who know me and know what I like to drink without me even having to tell them.
This level of familiarity and comfort is a privilege that many small businesses enjoy. But are they making the most of it?
Make sure you offer a personal touch to all of your regular customers. A smile, a little chit-chat, helping them find a product, put your customers at ease and encourage them to come in again for a similar warm experience.
When you know who your regular customers are and what they like, go the extra mile to offer them a product or service that is custom-made for them. Personal gestures like placing a special order for an item for a customer or offering to install a product in a customer’s home at no extra charge are all small business marketing tips for knocking down walls and winning a customer for life!
If you’re an online-only business, though, you don’t have the luxury of a face-to-face tête-à-tête with your customers. But don’t despair. Simple and inexpensive chatbots are within the reach of every small business willing to invest a little time and effort into online customer service.
5. Invest in Chatbots & Voice Tech
Businesses have been using AI to engage with customers and simplify or otherwise improve processes (and, in doing so, drive sales) for a number of years now, and AI-powered chatbots that utilize pre-programmed scripts are definitely among the most effective tools. These nifty bots help answer your web visitors’ queries, qualify sales leads, and improve the basket journey for customers who crave convenience and ease of use.
Chatbots are no longer just fancy FAQ machines equipped to answer basic queries. They can interact with different touchpoints along the customer journey and initiate and complete transactions with scalable, omnichannel functions.
The easy availability of big data and simplification of AI programs has allowed bots to personalize the experience for each shopper. The future belongs to mom-and-pop-and-bot stores!
Voice Tech
Voice tech, of course, is even more sophisticated. Did you know, for instance, that you can tailor your special ‘virtual agent’ to speak in such a way as to align with your company’s brand?
And if you suspect this is just fancy technology for fancy technology’s sake, you would be quite mistaken. AI-powered customer service meets burgeoning demand: SEMrush notes that 50% of consumers use voice search daily in the United States, so it’s an incredibly popular technology.
All indications are that voice search, far from being a flash in the pan, is here to stay. So, optimizing your site content for voice search is something you should already have done and one of the most important small business marketing tips moving forward.
If you’ve never given much thought to chatbots and voice technology, perhaps it’s time you mulled them over. These developing techs could help you improve customer service and yield impressive ROI next year.
Both chatbots and voice AI have developed expeditiously in recent years, helping to resolve countless consumer queries without burdening or bogging down we fallible humans. Adding one or both to your arsenal will help reduce delays and give customers the peace of mind and convenience they crave.
6. Prioritize Video Content
Video marketing is becoming more important every day. Consider these stats:
- About 50% of the time users spend on Facebook and Instagram involves watching videos
- The average American user spends over 26 hours on the YouTube app and over 45 hours browsing TikTok every month.
Our expectations of what makes a satisfying browsing experience are changing. As a savvy business owner, you would do well to respond to the flux of consumer expectations and deliver slick, professional video content that reinforces your brand and strikes a chord with your audience.
Not only will this keep you relevant in a fast-changing landscape, but it will get your message across more effectively. It’s one of the most useful small business marketing tips you’ll encounter.
So yes, there might just be some utility in embedding a nicely shot video to your product or category page, building up your YouTube channel, and sharing relevant videos on social media. This strategy includes live videos – which are growing in popularity – for breaking news or behind-the-scenes content.
You could spend all day reading surprising video marketing statistics, but you’d be better off addressing your aversion to stepping in front of the camera and making video a pillar of your strategy next year. Who knows, you might just be a natural!
7. Collaborate with Other Small Businesses
Partnering with other small businesses can expand your reach and allow you to share resources. When you work together with other companies, you can tap into each other’s customer bases, build stronger community ties, and create joint marketing efforts that are more impactful than going it alone.
For example, you might co-host an event, such as a local workshop or a holiday market, which attracts customers for both businesses. Another idea is cross-promotion, where you advertise each other’s products or services through flyers, social media, or newsletters.
You could also create bundled offers, such as discounts when customers buy from both businesses. It’s a win-win for everyone and allows others to take advantage of the small business marketing tips you learn.
Finding potential partners is the tricky part, but it helps to look for businesses that complement yours without directly competing. You’ll want to reach out with a clear proposal outlining mutual benefits and collaborative ideas.
It’s a good idea to start small and build trust over time, laying the groundwork for a successful partnership that benefits both parties.
Take the Next Step as a Small Business
Small businesses can achieve remarkable success with the right marketing approach. From defining your target audience to collaborating with other local businesses, these eight small business marketing tips can deliver significant results on a small budget.
Marketing Insider Group can push you in the right direction with our CRM and Marketing Management Services. We’ll handle every aspect of your marketing strategy, including content creation, social media management, and reputation monitoring, helping you compete with far larger organizations. Reach out for more information on these services, or book a free consultation with our team.
