10 Essential Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

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As a small business owner, you might feel like you’re wearing many different hats at once – one of them being marketing.

Marketing your business is crucial, but where do you start?

Here’s the good news: successful marketing can actually be easy. You just need a solid plan, the right tools, and the right tactics. Once you have this all laid out, you can grow your business without spending hours doing so.

To pull this off, though, you need to make sure you reach the right people and know how to turn this engagement into sales.

Here are ten of the most important small business marketing tips to help you get this right.

Start With a Great Website
Know Your Target Audience
Choose the Right Marketing Channels
Create Great Marketing Content
Run Ads to Reach More People
Know How to Measure Your Marketing Results
Use Email Marketing
Automate Wherever You Can
Understand the Customer Journey
Use a Fully-Integrated Marketing Platform

1. Start With a Great Website

Having a great website is the first step to any successful marketing strategy.

93% of consumers use the internet to search for local businesses. On top of this, 63% of consumers primarily use a company’s website to find and engage with businesses.

Clearly, having a well-designed website that represents your business is essential for attracting and engaging customers.

Your website represents your business and is often the first impression potential customers have of your brand. A poorly designed website can turn off potential customers and give them a negative perception of your business. On the other hand, a well-designed website can help build trust and credibility with potential customers.

Your business’s website will also be where you drive all of your traffic. All of your marketing efforts will be geared towards sending potential customers to your site.

This means your website should have a clear goal and be focused on conversions – i.e. it should be designed to encourage visitors to take action. This can include signing up for your email list, making a purchase, making a booking, or filling out a contact form. By optimizing your website for conversions, you can turn more visitors into paying customers.

Choosing the right website builder is crucial for small businesses. You want a tool that’s easy to use and offers plenty of functionality. Wishpond’s website builder is designed specifically for small businesses and offers a wide range of inbuilt marketing features, including email marketing, forms, popups, and more. It’s all effortless to put together with a simple drag-and-drop editor.

It only takes three seconds for a user to decide whether they should leave your site. So, make sure your website is doing everything it can to help your business.

2. Know Your Target Audience

One of the most essential marketing tips for small businesses is knowing who your target audience is.

Your target audience is the group of potential customers who you’re aiming your marketing efforts towards. If you aren’t clear about this, then you’re really going to struggle to make your marketing a success.

Every element of your marketing strategy should be based on your target audience. From choosing the right channels to creating marketing messaging that resonates with your audience, putting your target customer first is essential. Knowing who your target audience is will also help your marketing campaigns achieve a greater ROI.

The one way you can look at your target audience is by understanding their demographic information, such as age and location. This can be useful for things like ad targeting. Although it’s not always the best way to approach your target audience.

A better strategy is to understand your audience’s pain points and interests. This way, your marketing campaigns can really speak to your audience, grab their attention, and focus on the things they’re concerned about.

Follow our complete guide on how to find your target audience for more information and tactics.

3. Choose the Right Marketing Channels

Once you know who you’re trying to target, the next step to building out a killer marketing strategy is using the right marketing channels.

You have loads of options available in our digital world. However, you don’t want to try to use all possible social media channels and marketing options. This will result in spreading your business’s marketing efforts too thin and focusing efforts on marketing channels that don’t reach the right people.

Instead, choose marketing channels that:

Help you achieve your specific marketing goals (sell products, generate brand awareness, etc.)
Reach your target audience
Streamline your buyer’s journey

By focusing on a few of the most essential channels, you’ll be able to make an impact where it matters. This is key to marketing success.

4. Create Great Marketing Content

Your marketing efforts will only be as good as the marketing content you create. One of the most important marketing tips for small businesses is to focus on creating plenty of high-impact marketing content that speaks to your target customers.

What is marketing content?

Content refers to anything that you can use to attract, engage, and convert your audience. This could include blog posts, marketing videos, social media content, your website copy, and more.

Great marketing content needs to do two things. It needs to speak to your target audience’s pain points, and it needs to work toward a greater goal.

So, consider these two factors before you create content.

Your marketing content should also focus on being either entertaining, interesting, informative, or educational. Your goal for compelling content is to add value to your audience. The more value you add, the more your target audience will engage with and trust your brand. This will result in more sales.

Follow our complete guide to creating a content marketing plan for more details on how to do this.

5. Run Ads to Reach More People

There are two main ways you can reach new customers as a small business:

Generate organic traffic and referrals
Pay to reach customers with paid advertising

As a small business, you’ve got a lot of competition. This can make gaining organic results very difficult. To combat this, running paid ad campaigns is one of the best solutions.

Paid advertising can be affordable and fast. It’s also a great way to narrow down your exact target audience and reach your ideal customers straight away. There are also loads of different types of paid ads you can run, including search ads and social media ads.

If you want to generate as much buzz as you can around your business, then consider running paid ad campaigns to do it. This will help you reach the right people fast, which is essential for small business growth.

6. Know How to Measure Your Marketing Results

Your marketing efforts will be pretty pointless if you don’t know what kind of results they’re achieving.

So, whenever you set a marketing strategy, make sure you also establish measurable KPIs on how to monitor the marketing performance.

This starts by establishing goals. Know exactly what you want to achieve with each bit of marketing effort you put into your business. Make sure these goals are clear, actionable, and measurable.

Then, establish a set of KPIs to monitor to help you understand how you’re achieving these goals. Finally, be sure to use marketing analytics to keep track of this.

By making use of marketing analytics, you’ll be able to understand the kind of ROI your campaigns are delivering. You’ll also know when marketing campaigns need optimizing and what channels and marketing efforts are delivering the most value to your business.

The more you monitor this, the easier it will be to refine your marketing strategy to deliver better results.

7. Use Email Marketing

No matter who your customers are and what type of small business you run, email marketing is essential. Email is one of the oldest and most reliable digital marketing strategies. It also delivers some of the best ROI, as you can make around $36 for every $1 you spend on email.

There are many different ways that you can use email marketing to grow your business. This includes sending a regular newsletter, sending drip campaigns, and even just using email for transactional messages.

Whatever the case, you’ll need to build a mailing list. Here are some strategies you can follow to do this. As you grow your mailing list, you’ll realize just how valuable of an asset it is for your business.

Check out our guide on the different types of email marketing messages you can send, as well as how to establish an email marketing strategy. This can add a major boost to your business growth.

8. Automate Wherever You Can

As a small business owner, you don’t have a lot of time to spend on marketing. This is why using marketing automation is such a great idea.

Marketing automation allows you to send the right marketing messages to the right people at the right time. All of this with minimal (zero) effort. This means marketing automation can help make your marketing tactics more effective while making it easier to scale your business.

Marketing automation is generally applied to email marketing. Although you can also use it for other channels, like SMS. You can also schedule and automate various processes in your marketing strategy, like scheduling social media posts or automating tasks.

This saves you time and effort, allowing you to market smarter.

9. Understand the Customer Journey

Another one of the most essential marketing tips for small businesses is understanding and tapping into the buyer’s journey.

Instead of just publishing marketing content wherever you can, stop and focus this marketing content on the buyer journey.

This journey can be broken down into three main stages, as represented by the image below:

Source

Your job is to use the right channels, messaging, and marketing tactics to deliver relevant messages to the right people at each stage of this journey.

People won’t just find out about your brand and make a purchase. Instead, you have to build trust, nurture leads, and eventually generate a sale at the bottom of the marketing funnel.

So, understand when you need to generate awareness and when you need to generate conversions, and make sure your marketing content, CTAs, and channels align with this.

Make the customer journey smooth, and you’ll generate a lot more sales from your prospects.

10. Use a Fully Integrated Marketing Platform

These days, successful digital marketing is all about using the right tools. You simply can’t create online marketing campaigns without this.

The best solution for small businesses is to use an all-in-one marketing solution. This is when you use a single platform where all of your marketing tools exist and work together.

Doing this is a lot easier to use. It’s also cheaper, as you don’t have to subscribe to each tool individually.

For example, Wishpond offers all the tools you need to cover the entire customer lifecycle. From building your website to running email campaigns, referral campaigns, managing leads, and more, it’s one place that lets you build out your entire marketing strategy.

And with Propel IQ, you get a fully connected suite of tools to cover every single stage of the customer journey. You only need one platform and one subscription, and your small business can run marketing strategies like major corporations.

The results? Your life as a small business owner will become a lot easier, and your marketing strategy will be a lot more effective.

Summary

When it comes to marketing your business, don’t focus on trying to do too much. Instead, try to do the right things and work smart. The marketing tips above will help any small business pull this off.

Ultimately, marketing is all about reaching the right people with the right content and not spending too much money or effort to do this. As long as you establish a smart marketing plan that makes use of the right channels and reaches the right people, this can be easy to pull off successfully.