10 Small Business Marketing Musts

As a small business owner, you know the importance of marketing. Reaching your target customers and letting them know what you have to offer is crucial. But knowing where to start is challenging, especially when building your brand takes time to achieve.
Here are some of our tips to help savvy small business owners get their message out effectively and cost-efficiently. 

Small Business Marketing Tips

While most business owners understand that marketing is a must and not a nice-to-have, many don’t know about the different options available to them. Marketing exists across multiple mediums and techniques, which they mix and match to fit any budget. Quality ads don’t need to cost a fortune. Ads are effective if they reach and resonate with the people likely to buy from you.

By following some simple steps, you can start to take charge of your messaging and attract your target customers. 

1. Set Clear, Attainable Goals

Would you set out on a trip without having any idea of your destination? How would you know that you’ve arrived? That is exactly what starting a marketing campaign is like without setting goals. You could be wasting money on efforts that don’t serve you.

The first step towards creating any marketing plan is knowing what you want to achieve. From there, you determine which steps help you get there. That way, you’ll know what to do and when to achieve your goals.

Make sure you keep your goals realistic. Setting a goal that’s out of your capabilities can be incredibly demoralizing. While being ambitious is good, you want to be able to meet, or come close to meeting, what you set out to do.

2. Understand Your Target Customer

Another critical factor in optimizing your marketing spend is knowing who you want to reach. Take the time to get to know and write out the characteristics of the people likely to buy from you. You want to know the following:

• How old are they?

• What are their interests?

• Where do they spend their time?

Take the time to get some insight into what drives their behaviors. That lets you build relationships and gives you the information you need to craft a message that resonates with them. 

3. Make Use of Social Media

Social media is a highly effective platform for reaching your target customers and a cost-effective place to start marketing as a small business. Your research into your customer personas should have revealed your demographic’s favored social media platform, whether that is Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, or something else.
Once you know where they are, you can establish a presence and post content encouraging engagement. Spend time acknowledging or replying to comments to show interest in your customers. In addition to developing a relationship with them, you’ll learn more about who they are to create more effective future ads. Sharing blog content and updates or sending out surveys on social media are wonderful ways to provide value or entertainment while learning about your customers.

4. Conduct Campaigns by the Season

Don’t forget to pay attention to how seasonality affects your business and the power of leveraging it in your advertising. Do you have a travel company? Pay attention to school calendars, holidays, and other opportunities to give your customers ideas for how to spend that time off. Craft your message according to what will most influence your target personas. 
Every business has a peak season or items you can plan your marketing campaigns around. Begin advertising deals or stock several weeks before the season begins to earn customers’ attention and let them know what you’re selling.

5. Nurture Relationships with Email Marketing

Email is still an essential part of relationship building and customer engagement. It is also one of the lowest cost options for keeping your brand top of mind for customers. For the most impact, grab their attention with compelling subject lines, then get to the point in the first few lines of the body. Use your research to identify their pain points and highlight your value proposition. 
It also provides a platform to communicate with customers, helping you share deals and updates with your most-dedicated customers. You can let customers know when items are back in stock or give them early access to seasonal items before launching them generally in your store or website.

6. Combine Your Marketing Strategies

Did you know you could combine strategies for even greater results without breaking the bank? Different marketing mediums reach customers at different times of interest or focus. Take audio and digital, for example, as a winning combination.
Audio messages, either on the radio or streaming channels, have high levels of focus and retention. In comparison, digital display ads reach a large volume of customers online. Audio ads get reinforced when your target customer sees your brand on social media or search results pages. Customers will more likely notice your online ads if they’ve heard your audio ads because it increases the ad’s credibility.

7. Become a Community Presence

The fastest way to spread brand awareness in your local area is to be active in your community by sponsoring events, hiring local talent, or taking part with other small businesses in your area in campaigns to encourage consumers to buy locally. Most community residents want to support their local businesses. When your community sees your business as a neighbor, it creates a kinship that inspires loyalty. 

8. Run Consistent Brand Awareness Campaigns

Make sure you consistently remind your audience who you are and what you represent throughout the year. Brand awareness is a crucial indicator of future success. Whether your target is a specific industry or the general public, they need to know what value you offer and why to choose you over your competition. 
While you should run specific campaigns promoting sales, having separate campaigns that specifically promote brand awareness will help you reinforce customer awareness, establishing who you are, what you sell, and your company values.

9. Measure Your Results

Knowing your campaign’s purpose only goes so far if you don’t know how to measure your progress. Are you trying to increase brand awareness or recognition? Do you want to get more traffic to your store or expand your customer base in a new area?
After crafting your marketing strategy, you can set key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure your progress toward them. Set these to reflect how your customers behave. If you’re launching digital ads primarily, you can use clickthrough rate or impressions. For audio ads, you can encourage people to visit a specific landing page and base its success on that.

10. Adapt to Improve Your Strategy

Remember that nothing is static. Technology, consumer behavior, and preferences change over time. Stay aware of current trends and monitor your KPIs consistently. Don’t hesitate to make changes that could improve your strategy and result in a greater return on ad spend (ROAS). 
You can also test out different marketing techniques to determine the most effective. Digital advertising makes it simple to send out multiple versions of the same ad to see which performs better. You can then adjust your messaging or copy accordingly or even adjust what times you set your ads to run or emails to send out based on when your customers will likely be online.

Small Business Marketing Made Easy

Marketing is crucial for all businesses, but especially for new or small businesses. Not having a large budget should not be an inhibitor, as there are many ways to achieve your marketing goals without spending a fortune. Following these tips will help you get started on your campaign, but you will be able to quickly get your marketing up to speed with an experienced media partner. They have the expertise to help your business get further ahead without taking the time to experiment to find what works best.