How to Market Your Small Business
As a small business owner, you may have marketing somewhere on your long to-do list. You recognize that marketing is essential to attract and retain customers. But, you may struggle to prioritize marketing due to limited time and resources, or maybe the marketing initiatives you’ve launched aren’t working.
A recent report from Constant Contact found that 52% of small business owners surveyed regularly delay or postpone marketing because it’s too time-consuming or not a high priority compared to their operational responsibilities. And 73% of SMBs lack confidence in their marketing strategies.
To stand out and be competitive, you need to rethink your approach to marketing, and it can’t be the last priority. Marketing your small business effectively requires a strategic approach that aligns with your time and goals.
In this article, we’ll give you a list of marketing resources and tactics that you can use to effectively promote your business without sacrificing a ton of energy and budget.
Define or Refine Your Target Audience
Before you get started, ensure that you’re targeting the right audience. There’s an old adage in marketing that says, “If you’re talking to everyone, you’re talking to no one.” Understanding your ideal customer persona is the key to developing a marketing strategy that will attract and resonate with your ideal customer persona.
When evaluating your ideal customers, focus on:
Demographics: Age, gender, income level, education, occupation, and location
Psychographics: Interests, values, lifestyle, and personality traits
Buying Habits: How, when, and why they make purchasing decisions
You can use these tools to get this information:
Once you have compiled the data, build customer personas for your business. Personas help you build a customer profile that informs your marketing strategy – inclusive of optimal marketing channels. This will help you connect with your potential customers to drive brand awareness and sales.
Chances are you already had a good idea of your customer persona when you built your business plan. So, continuing to flesh out your target audience will provide a true north for your marketing strategy.
Clock Your Competition
Competitive benchmarking gives you insight into your competitors' strengths and weaknesses and the trends in your industry.
Keeping an eye on your competition can also help you understand the following:
Pricing Strategies: Understand the pricing models in your industry and where your products or services fit in
Market Trends: Stay informed about current and future trends that can impact your business
Growth Opportunities: Look for niches or underserved markets that you can tap into
Make a list of your top five competitors and subscribe to their newsletters or social media accounts to see how they approach marketing.
Here’s a short list of free competitive benchmarking tools:
Develop Your Marketing Plan and Keep it Simple
When you’re first starting out, don’t try to be everywhere all at once. Promoting your business on every channel will lead you to spread yourself and your budget too thin.
If you have a small budget, determine one or two offline or digital channels where your ideal customer persona spends their time. Build a roadmap of marketing activities and define clear, measurable goals for what you want to achieve. As you grow, then expand to more channels.
For example, if you want to drive more traffic and form completions on your website, content marketing or social media can help you achieve your goal. Quantify the traffic and form completions you want per week or per month. Then, create a content calendar with topics relevant to your ideal customer persona and deadlines for posting the content.
If you’re crushing your goals, consider expanding your marketing to email, paid ads, or search engine marketing.
The following tools will help you create your content calendar and/or monitor your traffic:
Squarespace – for content generation and monitoring traffic
Trello – for building a content calendar
WordPress – for building blog content and monitoring traffic
Optimize Your Website
Your website is often the first impression potential customers have of your business. You have to spend time and attention on your site to make sure it is on-brand, functional, and clearly articulates your value proposition.
Good user experience, design, and content convey that you take your business and brand seriously. Several free online tools can help you optimize your website to attract your target audience.
Or, if this is not your area of expertise, you can outsource this effort at a reasonable cost to ensure a solid web presence.
Keep this in mind when optimizing your website:
Mobile-Friendly Design: Ensure your website is responsive and looks good on all devices
Ease of Navigation: Create a user-friendly interface with clear menus and easy access to information
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Optimize your site with relevant keywords to improve visibility in search engines
Here are a few tools you can use:
Monitor and Measure Your Results
It’s critical to track your marketing initiatives to understand what’s working and what’s not. If you regularly assess the effectiveness of your marketing channels, you can quickly adjust your budget and strategy to ensure your time and dollars are not wasted.
The tools mentioned above can give you insight into how your marketing is performing and produce automated reports that you can receive via email at a cadence of your choice — weekly, monthly, or quarterly.
When building your report, track the following:
Organic and paid sessions
Social media engagement – followers, likes, click-throughs to your site
Email campaign performance – open rates, click-through rates, click-to-open rates
Move Marketing Up the List
Armed with this overview, you can move marketing up your to-do list or adjust your current strategy.
Additionally, you don’t have to do this alone. Agencies like Origin Story can help your small business build and execute a sound marketing strategy that will attract and retain customers. Origin Story exists to help solopreneurs and SMBs unlock their brand's potential to grow.
We’re here to support you, and together, we can create a robust marketing strategy that helps your small business scale and thrive in a competitive market.