Marketing

Basic Guide to Small Business Marketing

The constantly evolving digital marketing landscape can seem overwhelming if your team isn’t large enough to delegate tasks. That’s where small business marketing comes into play — it’s the best solution for small business owners to advertise their businesses in a manageable way that accounts for their size and budget. 

Keep reading to learn more about small business marketing. Here’s a brief outline of what we’ll cover in this:

• What is small business marketing?
• What is the small business marketing process? 
• Best small business digital marketing strategies to try out in 2023
• Best Practices for Implementing Small Business Marketing Strategies

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What is small business marketing?

Small business marketing refers to online and offline tactics for increasing exposure to a small brand’s products or services. It includes all efforts to expand your reach, from advertising to market research to competitor analysis. 

What is the small business marketing process? 

A small business marketing process is a procedure that guides how you implement your marketing, analyze your performance, and plan for growth. It gives you and your team a solid understanding of strategizing your marketing plan and maximizing your time and money. 

But how do you build one for your business? Here are nine easy steps for building a small business marketing process:

1. Create a website
2. Determine your audience 
3. Adapt and refine your business’s messaging
4. Draft your budget
5. Find your analytics tool 
6. Use social media for free content marketing 
7. Claim your business on Google My Business 
8. Check reviews
9. Use email marketing

1. Create a website

In this crowded digital world — people now prefer doing their research online. An optimized website helps you provide users with helpful information and establish a credible, first-hand source reputation. 

A website helps you leverage search engine optimization (SEO) strategies to increase your visibility online. With Google ranking websites with more authority and brand recognition, optimizing and improving your small business website is essential. 

2. Determine your audience 

Establish your target audience and ideal buyer persona. Your marketing efforts have a better chance of staying relevant and consistent if you understand who you’re trying to reach. 

When you have a firm grasp of your target market, you can tailor your content to generate leads and build a community that interacts with your business. You can also allocate your budget to channels that work best for your business goals.

3. Adapt and refine your business’s messaging

When you know your audience and what they respond to positively, you can use this information to refresh and re-optimize existing content to create impactful advertising that fits your goals and better caters to your audience’s audience. 

In addition, receiving positive feedback from your audience can indirectly improve your sales and SEO ranking score. 

4. Draft your budget

Drafting a budget helps you track your spending and appropriately allocate funds to the execution plans for hitting your targets. For instance, if your audience doesn’t respond as enthusiastically to pay-per-click (PPC) advertising as they do to social media content, it’s best to give social media marketing a bigger share of your marketing budget.

Once you draft your budget, you can also determine your ideal return on investment (ROI) with each channel’s reach abilities. As you learn what your audience likes, you can adjust your funds.

5. Find your analytics tool 

The only way to determine if your marketing efforts are achieving your goals is by analyzing tracking metrics. For instance, tools like SEO.com will give you a rounded perspective of your website’s performance.  SEO.com uses features like keyword research, site analyzer and traffic analysis to grade your digital marketing performance.

6. Use social media for free content marketing 

While paid advertising can give you the results you’re looking for, it’s always best to take advantage of the free resources. Social media platforms are the best landscape to explore. You get to interact directly with your audience while giving them updates that they can share to reach a bigger audience. 

7. Claim your business on Google My Business 

Claiming your business information on Google My Business gives first-hand information to potential customers. You can update your hours, location, and website so your customers can find you easily.

8. Check reviews

Encouraging and responding to reviews can rapidly boost your reputation. Have you ever heard the adage, “Bad publicity is still publicity?” In the same way, even negative reviews can be indirectly effective — you can still win some customers’ hearts by handling negative reviews. They might give your business a chance if they see that you’re less defensive and more kind and respectful.

9. Use email marketing

Email marketing lets you send your customers personalized messages, inform them about deals or promotions, update them on critical business news and keep them in the loop with newsletters. The best email marketing tools offer automation functions to keep your emails on a consistent schedule.

Best small business digital marketing strategies to try out in 2023

Digital marketing is any form of marketing or advertising through a digital medium, such as search engines, social media, email, video, and more. This field encompasses a vast range of marketing strategies geared toward generating leads, driving conversions, and increasing revenue for small businesses.

Here are a few small business digital marketing strategies to get you started:

• SEO improves your website’s ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs) by improving its visibility with web users. Optimizing your content for SEO can increase your business’s reach and drive more traffic to your website by satisfying Google’s ranking algorithms.
• Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising allows your business to place ads on platforms like social media sites and SERPs to increase its brand exposure. Each time someone clicks on your ad, you pay based on various factors, such as your bid amount. PPC ads appear at the top of the search results, where audiences will see them before organic results, increasing your likelihood of making a sale.
• Social media marketing involves making social profiles to share information with your business followers online. Social media advertising allows small businesses like yours to create advertisements that appear in targeted users’ newsfeeds. Both strategies are ideal for connecting your small business to an audience using personalized content.
• Email marketing allows you to send individualized content like sales promotions, newsletters, and product releases directly to your subscribers to encourage them to convert. You can quickly obtain email addresses for your email list by implementing sign-up bars and pop-up forms on your website or asking customers to sign up in-store.
• Content marketing helps your business share helpful information with its audiences, positioning it as an industry expert. Producing high-quality content is an excellent way to improve your visibility in search engines, increase brand awareness, strengthen your brand identity, earn backlinks, and generate new leads. 

Digital marketing is precious for small businesses, as they often have limited resources and low authority than larger corporations. These small businesses can build their online presence, connect with interested leads, and ultimately expand by using online marketing techniques.

Best Practices for Implementing Small Business Marketing Strategies

Now that you know the best small business marketing strategies, you can start implementing your plans. Consider the following tips when beginning your marketing journey:

1. Set goals: Before implementing your small business marketing strategies, set some business goals that detail exactly what you want to achieve and choose strategies accordingly.
2. Get organized: Use calendars and to-do lists to organize your action items and stay on track with your plan.
3. Create a website: If your small business doesn’t already have a website, it’s time to get one. Make sure you create a mobile-friendly web design that is visually appealing, easy to navigate, and aligns well with your brand image.
4. Determine your target audience: You can identify your target audience based on who already buys your products or services, observing characteristics like age, gender, interests, income, location, occupation, and buying habits.
5. Know your product’s value: Think about how your product or service will improve your customers’ lives or solve their problems. Knowing your product’s value will help you better market it to consumers.
6. Build a social media presence: Create social media accounts on popular platforms and post content often for regular engagement. 
7. Participate in forums: You can use online forums to answer industry-related questions for web users and establish yourself as an authority in your field.
8. Look into third-party sellers: Selling products and offering services through third-party websites like Amazon, Marketplace, and Angie’s List can help your company reach new audiences. 
9. Manage your reviews: Customers trust reviews. That’s why you should take the time to read and respond to your reviews to establish a positive relationship with your audience. 
10. Use marketing automation: You can use marketing automation tools to eliminate the hassle of campaign management.
11. Monitor your campaigns: Be sure to keep an eye on your marketing campaigns, paying attention to metrics like clicks, conversions, impressions, and form submissions to determine their 

Well-executed marketing strategies aid in the advancement of sales targets and company-wide recognition. Marketers employ various strategies in an effort to entice potential customers to become paying clients. When putting together a marketing strategy, you should only include tactics that make sense for your small business.

Get expert digital marketing assistance for your small business

Marketing a small business is a highly hands-on process. While getting started may feel overwhelming, it doesn’t have to be when you partner with a small business digital marketing agency like WebFX. 

With over 25 years of experience creating tech-enabled digital marketing solutions for companies across all industries, we’re confident that we can help you grow your business.

Contact us to learn more about our services today!

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