Small Business Marketing: The Ultimate Guide
This guide will help you build your marketing strategy and fine-tune your campaigns.
This guide will help you build your marketing strategy and fine-tune your campaigns.
As a small business owner, you have a lot on your plate. One of your biggest tasks is finding new customers, also known as marketing. Some aspects of marketing — including educating customers, explaining the value of what you offer, or asking for referrals — may come easily for you. However, when you’re ready to grow your small business, you have to expand upon what you already do well in order to reach new leads and guide them through your sales funnel.
With the right tools and processes, not only will you expand your lead and customer bases, you’ll also be able to determine your marketing return on investment, or ROI, and see where your marketing budget is most effectively spent.
Marketing can include a lot of trial and error, especially in the beginning stages of running your company. All your efforts will help you learn how to best reach potential customers and promote your products and services.
This guide will help you review your marketing strategy and fine-tune your campaigns. Let’s get started.
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You’ve built your small business operation. Now you need to attract more targeted, paying customers. Where do you start?
Welcome to the world of marketing.
Small business marketing entails getting in front of potential users or consumers. It’s important to reach out to these consumers — your target market — so you can focus on their specific wants and needs. That’s because 66% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations.
To learn more about identifying your customer base, check out the “Identify Your Customer” lesson on Salesforce Trailhead.
There are a variety of paid and organic marketing methods you can use to reach people who want and need your service or product. Whether you have a brick-and-mortar location, own a digital-only storefront, or manage a hybrid of the two, you need to ensure people can find you.
Here’s what you need to do to get your marketing up to speed and working for your small business.
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Depending on the size and scope of your small business, some of the following tools will be essential, versus just a nice-to-have accessory to your marketing program. Regardless, these tools and technology are highly recommended and will help get you started.
A customer relationship management (CRM) system allows you to organize prospective and current consumer data in one place. This information — plus good record-keeping — is vital for your organization, especially your sales, marketing, and customer success teams.
With a CRM platform, you can discover actionable insights about your users, track interactions with them, and manage the entire customer journey, which helps you better tailor your marketing campaigns. In the U.S., half of small and midsize companies have a CRM system, and 15% of those CRM systems were implemented within the last year.
Generally, this type of software provides your team some combination of features: organization, automation, and tracking various marketing activities. Often, these platforms can integrate with other tools, such as your CRM platform.
There are many types of specialty platforms within digital marketing, including the following:
Market research is crucial for your small business, and it doesn’t have to cost you a lot of money. Before you put serious money toward a single marketing effort, you need to investigate everything, from your ideal customer to the competitive landscape. Decide on a budget, determine the data you want to collect, and look into how you want to gather it.
Google Analytics tracks all kinds of website-visitor data and generates regular reports that help marketers make data-based decisions about the efficacy of their websites. With it, you can view the breakdown in your visitors’ demographics, location, and age — even the device they use to visit your site. You can also see which content and pages on your website drive the most (or least) page views, the amount of time visitors spend on a page, conversions, and more. Simply put, Google Analytics hosts a ton of data, and SEO specialists can turn that data into actionable insights.
Best of all? It’s free! To get started:
Once your account is set up and tracking properly, it should take 24 to 48 hours to see data in your Google Analytics account. You’ll have access to a solid overview of information about your website visitors and how your content and pages are performing. From there, you can dive deeper into tracking specific data points and configuring reports.
This tutorial provides an in-depth walk-through on how to get started. You can also link Google Analytics to your Salesforce Sales Cloud account to access more prospect and client information.
Google Analytics is a necessary tool, as 99% of marketers will be using their company website as a channel to market to prospects and customers within the next 12 months.
A content calendar is a centralized place where you list your company’s scheduled content. You can include blog posts, YouTube videos, social media posts — any type of marketing collateral and content that your company is producing and plans to publish during a particular time period.
You can use a shared online calendar or a spreadsheet with tabs for each month in tandem with project management software to keep track of each piece of content. In spreadsheets, you can list each task for each assignment all the way from preproduction to promotion, tag the person who owns that part of the project, and manage each deadline.
If you’re planning a blog post for Father’s Day, for example, a sample workflow might look like this on your content calendar.
Communicate regularly with team members to make sure the content and its due date stays on track. Don’t be afraid to adjust the process; if you’re running a lean content operation in the beginning, an online calendar with publication dates might be sufficient to get you started.
Depending on your industry, there may be some variability in how far out you can schedule content. Aim between one and six months ahead, leaving wiggle room for when content is delayed or postponed. If your industry needs a certain amount of time to plan for a big event, take that into account as well. For example, if you’re an ecommerce store that wants to plan a big Black Friday promotion, you should plan out content months ahead of November.
Before you pound the pavement marketing your business, outline these important items.
To effectively market your product, you need to know who it is you’re marketing to and what you want to say to them.
Your messaging needs to be sticky to help people remember you and entice them to make repeat purchases from your company. While you can dive really deep here, these four frameworks are a good place to start when creating brand messaging for your business that resonates with your users.
Thankfully, you have options when it comes to your website. Some business owners spare no expense when launching their website, but you don’t have to break the bank to get your website off the ground.
Even if you don’t build an ecommerce store, it’s valuable to own a piece of real estate on the web so customers can search for and find you. At a minimum, you can promote your company story, contact information, and store hours.
A logo is a symbol, graphic, or the stylized text of your business name. You can create this in-house or hire a professional or firm to help you create one for your company. Once you have a logo, use it on your website, across social media, and on your various business and marketing assets, including e-books and invoices.
Developing a content and SEO strategy will help your potential customers learn about you, your company offerings, and your industry. Incorporating strong SEO practices — such as choosing relevant, high-volume keywords, and getting backlinks from quality websites — will also help your content rank well on the search engine result pages (SERPs).
Your content and SEO strategy, when executed well, will help you rank higher on SERPs. A study from SISTRIX shows that ranking first on the first page of search results earns approximately 29% of users’ clicks. The second result gets 16%, the third earns 11%, and the percentages drop rapidly from there. Long story short, when your website ranks higher in SERPs, more people click on your website.
Every small business owner needs to understand that opportunities exist, even if you don’t immediately start using them. From content channels to business organizations, here’s a high-level breakdown of major marketing tools.
These are just some of the ways you can reach your audience. There are other opportunities for networking and promoting goodwill, such as through charities and sponsorships. Small businesses have a host of different channels and ways to market their products and services to consumers. Use data, try different methods, and work to find your company’s unique marketing mix.
When it comes to your marketing, ask yourself three questions:
1. What are my goals?
2. What is my budget?
3. What are my pain points or areas outside my zone of genius?
Depending on your answers, it may make sense to keep your marketing in-house, meaning you have a marketing strategist or manager as an employee. If your company is experiencing fast growth or needs outside experience to propel your business growth, it may be wise to go with a specialist or agency.
If you don’t have a marketing budget, now is the time to create one. Review it against your marketing strategy, and you’ll have a better idea of what you’re working with and who you can hire. For reference, in both B2C and B2B companies, advertising is the top marketing budget line item, while technology is a close second.
Your small business can have a limited marketing budget or a more expansive one; either way, you can still reach your leads and customers effectively.
Have questions? We tackled five of the most common ones.
Social media, email marketing, blogging — there are plenty of ways for businesses to promote themselves online. It’s important to focus on the best type of marketing to reach your target user.Do some market research and get clear on your audience. And while you can — and should — experiment with different marketing platforms, be careful about going all in on channels where your customers don’t spend time. If your Gen Z small business customer spends their free time on TikTok, don’t pour your limited resources into local newspaper ads.Ultimately, your best marketing strategy is what speaks directly to your users, serves them, and inspires them to make a purchase.
You can host virtual or in-person events or social media contests in which you ask users to tag others, follow your business account, and share it for extra entries. These are just a couple of ways to expand your reach and connect with your community.Thankfully, there’s no shortage of ideas when it comes to promoting your small business.
There are a variety of paid and unpaid ways you can advertise your small business. For some hyperlocal ideas and depending on your target market, try advertising in community newspapers and Facebook groups. If it will help you reach your audience, you can sponsor local sporting events or tournaments, and place fliers and business cards in places like coffee shops that have a community bulletin board.
SEO is a good free or low-cost pathway. You own your website, after all, as opposed to hosting all your content on a third-party site, such as Instagram or YouTube, that could shut down tomorrow.From a top-level view, through a combination of keyword research and best SEO practices, you can create content that both appeals to your customers and search engine bots. Good SEO and content can take time to deliver results, but it’s worth the investment.Social media marketing is another popular option. You can record and upload business content directly from your smartphone. Use multiple channels that work together, such as a specific landing page for a specific Instagram post that has a specific call to action.
Personalized, one-on-one (or 1-to1) marketing is a good go-to. Whether you own a brick-and-mortar shop or operate solely online, using customer data to influence customer experiences and make them as personalized as possible is an effective tactic. This can be as simple as including someone’s name in an email communication, or more involved, such as suggesting product recommendations based on their past purchases.A survey of 1,000 adults revealed that 80% want retailers to personalize their shopping experience. Alternatively, consumers will consider going to a competitor if a business gets it wrong. When it comes to small business marketing trends, digital marketing continues to lead the way.
Marketing isn’t “set it and forget it.” It needs to evolve just as your customers and your company do, and should inspire creativity based on real, data-based results.
If you get excited about your marketing, you can boost your ability to grow. You can spend your marketing dollars wisely and drive conversions if you pay attention.
If you want to grow, reach more customers, increase revenue, have funds to hire more employees, and achieve other goals, then be sure to prioritize your marketing efforts. You’ll be glad you did.
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