Master the Art of Small Business Marketing with These Top Tips

If you run your own small business, it’s highly likely that marketing is just one of the hats you have to wear daily. When you’ve got administration and accounting tasks to perform, employees to supervise, products to make or services to provide it can be a challenge to find the time for marketing. Finding the money to invest in your marketing strategy can also be an issue. If you’d like to know how to give your business a competitive edge here are some small business marketing ideas you might want to try.

Know Your Audience

When it comes to marketing your small business, it’s important to think about your audience. You need to know who they are, what they do and how your business is going to help them do it better. Knowing the answer to these questions allows you to define your audience in terms of demographics, interests, and responsibilities. It’s then possible to tailor your marketing strategies accordingly. Another aspect that’s going to influence the type of marketing strategy you use is where in the sales funnel your customer happens to be. For example, you’ll need to take a different approach for a customer who needs coaxing into purchasing one who’s ready to buy one of your products.

Get Your Branding Right

When you first start in business, it’s essential to have your own brand identity. The business world is very competitive, and you need to be able to stand out. Get your brand right from the very beginning, and you’ll be benefiting from it for many years to come. Get it wrong, on the other hand, and it could be a costly mistake. There are certain aspects you need to identify if you want to establish your business identity.

• What does your company stand for?
• Who are the customers you’re targeting?
• Do you have any competitors and how different are you from them?
• Have you found a niche in the market?
• Define your company values.
• Consider the type of personality you want your company to have.

Clarify the answers to these questions and your brand identity will be clear. The next step is to choose the right name, a logo, and colors that will represent your business. Research color psychology and you’ll be able to find the right colors to attract your audience and include them in your branding material and logo.

Have an Awesome Website

The internet has a significant role to play in any marketing strategy, and one of the key factors of success is to have a website that stands out from all the others. You’ll first need to find the right web hosting agents, but once that’s done, you can get on with your website design. There are two options when it comes to building your website. Thanks to the many easy-to-use, free tools available online it’s possible to build a beautiful website all by yourself. If you feel you don’t have the time or the technical know-how, you can choose to hire a website designer. This does, however, come at a price.

Once your website has been created, it acts as a very cost-effective way to share information about your business with any potential customers who might be looking. Once you’ve paid the initial cost of building one, it’s free for you to use when you want to boast about your company achievements and developments and is a great way to generate leads.

Even if your business is offline having a website is an essential part of promoting your business. More and more people turn to the internet when they want a product or service and if your business isn’t there how are they going to find you?

Create Some Social Media Pages

With your website up and running it’s time to move on to the next stage of marketing your business. Creating pages on one or more of the social media platforms is important for the future success of your business. However, you don’t need to rush into creating pages on every single platform you can find. There’s little to be gained from working on all social media pages at the same time. Instead, prioritize the most important ones for your particular marketing strategy. Your target audience is going to help you pick the right ones. Facebook and Instagram are great places to start as they allow you to share content and information about your business and share photos so potential customers can see what you’ve got to offer.

To make the most of social media you have to keep your pages up to date, include keywords in your profile and join groups and conversations where you can talk about your products and services. Be careful, however, not to appear too spammy as this is going to create a negative image for your business.

Produce Quality Content

You’ve already identified your target audience so your goal with the content for your website and social media pages should be to reach your customers on a personal level, showing them you understand and care about their wants and needs. Rather than pushing your product or service focus on providing useful information and entertaining them. Try it, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how effective it is. You might think that creating lots of content is going to be very time consuming, but it is worth the effort. As well as providing value to your audience it helps with your search engine ranking. Google and other search engines like to see fresh, relevant and valuable content. Visitors to your website and social media pages will be able to share your content, thereby increasing your audience.  

With these five small business marketing ideas, you’ve got a good foundation on which to build. They are by no means the only way to market your business, but they are a good place to start. As your business grows and your customer base expands and evolves, you’ll be able to look at marketing your business in a variety of other ways. Focus on the tips above to start with and evaluate your results before exploring the different options available.