In a tensely competitive business world, where entrepreneurs are taking every step to outdo one another; identifying key marketing strategies for small businesses and finding ways to implement them in your own business could herald the beginning of the big turning point you’ve been waiting for.
Don’t take my words for it. A lot of entrepreneurs are already using these strategies to get better outcomes for their businesses and startups.
Unfortunately, many new founders do not have an idea on how to evolve the marketing strategies that will work for their own business.
Whether you’re just starting out today or you’ve been in here for a number of years, the marketing strategies I’ll be sharing in the following paragraphs will get you to experience a robust growth in your business, when used judiciously.
Goals & Planning
Table of Contents
The first step you want to take as you create a marketing strategy for a small business is to identify your key goals and then take steps to create a plan based on your goals.
This is the most cardinal aspect of any successful or effective marketing strategy.
So you want to start with setting clear and measurable goals. From there, get on with identifying the things you want to achieve in your their order of priority.
After that, identify the steps you can take to really get to achieve these things. As soon as this is sorted, go ahead and further choose your target audience and the clients that can get you to achieve these things.
Now when you’ve completely figured out the things you want to do and how you’re going to go about them, it’s time to sit down and put this into a plan.
At this stage, you want to map out things like the steps you will take, how long you will have to take these steps, etc.
Doing this will get you to evolve a business plan you can use to implement your marketing strategies.
Content Marketing
Content Marketing is a powerful tool that’s evolved to become a very core part of the marketing strategies for small businesses, especially when it comes to generating new clients.
From engaging to building visibility and brand credibility, content marketing has served as a very useful marketing tactics that’s delivered huge returns for businesses.
Personally, I’ve seen a handful of small businesses that started out off the back of content marketing. Watching businesses like these grow into sustainable entities has consistently reinforced the role of content marketing in driving business growth.
By creating valuable, informational and relevant content that meets the needs of your target audience, answers their questions, informs or entertains them as expected, not only do you get to attract them over your platform, you position your brand as the expert that can create the solutions they need.
When done well, what this does is that it keeps them coming back to your platforms either for your content or your products/services.
Keywords & SEO
While content marketing provides a great opportunity to forge your brand in the minds of your audience, search engine optimization affords you the chance to get a better visibility with your content therefore, attracting a wider audience.
As a critical part of the marketing strategy for small businesses, before creating your content, you have to find out the key words or content ideas that interest your target audience.
After doing this, work on creating your content and going the extra mile to meet up with the expectations of your audience, using examples, anecdotes and a deep research where needed.
Furthermore, you do not want to create a piece of content that gets lost on your website without anyone interacting with it. To optimize visibility and engagement, you want to work on strategically inserting your keywords into your content and optimizing it for wider visibility.
As part of your search engine optimizations, pay attention to using both search engines and human friendly titles that will attract readers to actually interact with your content. Also, use Meta descriptions that are not just descriptive but captivating enough to get a potential user to click and read your content, effortlessly.
Social Media
The social media has provided a platform where billions of people are meeting, interacting and socializing around the world, on a daily basis.
It’s widespread impact and overwhelming audience has turned it into a large virtual market place and a big part of any realistic marketing strategy for small businesses.
As a small startup, there are many things you can do with the social media. From creating content tailored to attract and retain a growing audience, you can use social media to tell powerful stories that engages your audience while building your brand.
Before you get started using the social media, first of all, identify the social media platforms with the largest number of your target audience.
If you’re a B2B brand targeting corporate clients, you want to pay attention to using a social media platform like LinkedIn etc. if you’re targeting a much younger Gen-Z population on the other hand, you can opt for platforms like Tiktok, Instagram etc.
Taking these steps trims off the not-so-important platforms, allowing you to focus on the ones that will get to deliver the most outcomes for you.
While engaging and using the social media as a business, one thing you want to keep in mind is leveraging the platform to create content that appeals to your audience, showing up consistently and telling your own stories in a way that will positively impact your brand.
Email Marketing
Email marketing remains one of the most effective channels for nurturing leads, turning prospects into customers, and building long-term relationships with existing clients.
One reason why email marketing stands out as a key marketing strategy for small businesses is that is that whether directly or indirectly, with your subscribers, it creates a warm audience that is already open to receiving your updates or getting to hear from your brand.
The main implication of this is that you can leverage this audience to create a marketing campaign that will deliver a far better ROI for you and your brand compared to trying to target an audience that is not familiar with your brand.
One reason why email marketing stands out as a key marketing strategy for small business and startups is that as a founder, you can use email marketing to deliver personalized content, exclusive offers, and relevant updates directly to your subscribers’ inboxes.
Outside using email to send messages and updates, you can also utilize it to build a cordial relationship and credibility with your subscribers so that it becomes even easier to promote your product and services to them, whenever you have to.
Paid Advertising
Most small businesses with a shoestring budget will always want to avoid anything that has to do with paid advertising, especially during the early start up weeks and months.
As a matter of fact, paid advertising is actually one of the marketing strategies for small businesses that can get your business of the ground, especially on days when you’re largely unknown.
For most businesses, instead of relying only on organic marketing strategies, you can use both organic and paid advertising to ramp up optimum visibility for your business.
What this does is that while the organic marketing results is building up, the results from paid advertising (which is always faster) can get you started, getting you visibility and some handful of clients until the organic marketing outcomes catches up.
Paid advertising offers you different options depending on your budget.
For example depending on your goal and budget you can opt for social media advertising which is always more cost effective, Search Engine Advertising like Google PPC, Sponsored Ads, Banners etc.
Whatever works for your goals and budget, there’s always the flexibility to choose, when it comes to paid advertising.
Referral Marketing
Referral marketing is a strategy that keys into the power of word-of-mouth recommendations to acquire new customers and drive business growth.
This and social media marketing is one of the strategies that helped us when we first started out as a business, many years ago.
One reason why referral marketing is a powerful marketing strategy for small businesses is that it is easy, straightforward and very effective.
Encouraging satisfied customers to refer their friends, family, and colleagues through incentivized or non-incentivized referral programs can generate valuable leads and build brand advocacy.
Depending on what works for you, you can actually offer clients incentives like discounts, rewards or exclusive benefits in return for referrals or word of mouth reviews to people they know.
Outside giving you a bunch of new clients to work with, referral marketing can also position your brand as authentic and reliable while serving as a great PR for your branding effort.
Final Words
Despite the growing competition in today’s business landscape, the fact that many new businesses are springing up on a daily basis is a clear indication that with the right marketing strategies, it is very possible to start and grow a successful business, regardless of where you are.
But to get to achieve the kind of success you’d want, outside using the strategies you learned in this article, one of the key things you have to keep in mind is to monitor and evaluate your progress at intervals. This will give you clues on what’s working and what’s not.
Study trends, metrics and analytics data. This will guide you on what’s important to your audience and by extension, your business. By using putting these information to use, you’ll find ways to create a customized marketing strategy, models and business solutions that will work for you, consistently.
To learn get help in creating a marketing strategy that is custom made for your business, reach out to us here. And of course, you can also sign up for our content marketing classes here.
Now, it’s over to you. What’s the most difficult of the strategies mentioned in this article that you’ve used? Drop your comments below.
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