Small Business Marketing Tips

Are you struggling to get the impact you want from marketing efforts? Whether you’re just starting out or have been trading for many years, consistent marketing is incredibly important. These simple and effective marketing tips for small businesses will help you to stand out from the crowd without breaking the bank.

1. Know your audience

Reaching customers in your niche is key to succeeding as a small business. You need to understand your customer base - their problems, priorities and crucially, ensure you can provide a solution to their needs. Start by thinking about your existing customers and who you would like to work with. Then, sit down and develop a buyer persona to help you get into your ideal client's head. This will help inform where they go to look for services like yours and enable you to develop a marketing plan that will reach them.

2. Create a strong brand identity

Having a consistent look and feel for your business will help you appear more professional and encourage recall. This means ensuring your van graphics, signage, website, leaflets and social media posts have a consistent look so that potential customers can instantly recognise your business and identify with your offering. Investing in professional support to help you develop your brand identity will pay dividends long-term. Once you have your identity nailed, it then becomes easier for you to promote your business across multiple channels.

3. Highlight your value proposition

A strong brand identity will only get you so far. What will really stand you out against the competition is your proposition. What can you offer your customers that will compel them to work with you? Can you disseminate this into a simple statement that will be universally understood? Use your website and other promotional tools to reinforce your proposition at every opportunity e.g. to demonstrate your experience, specialist skills or superior customer service.

4. Stay focused

It’s so easy to lose focus on your priorities by trying to cover all of your bases. There are so many marketing directions you can go in that it can be difficult to know which is best for your business. As a consequence, you end up trying a myriad of things on a stretched budget and find that none of which you’ve executed have worked. Focus on a single goal and set a target for this one area. You can expand your efforts or pivot to other initiatives once you’ve made some progress. It’s very rare that you’ll get instant success from marketing so you need to be in it for the long haul.

5. Be visible online

It’s more important than ever to be visible online. Every business should have a website as it gives valuable trust signals to prospective clients and can help extend your reach to new audiences. It’s one of the most important assets you will create for your small business, showing who you are and what you offer along with the ways they can get in touch with you.

Want to improve your search engine rankings? You need to ensure your website SEO (search engine optimisation) is following all best practice techniques. You’ll also need to understand the keywords your prospective customers are searching for and ensure this content is reflected in your website. (There is a lot more involved than this simple explanation but I need to keep brief!)

Free tools such as Google My Business and social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn also give you an opportunity to reinforce your brand, proposition and product/service offering.

You may be able to use other online channels to help promote your business too, for example, advertising on a website that your target audience regularly uses.

6. Use free marketing tools

The good news is there are lots of free tools you can use to help you to promote your business and measure your success. One of my favourites is Canva. This online graphic design tool has lots of easy to use templates for social media posts, leaflets, videos and more. You can also take a look at some of the best free tools to help with SEO in my blog.

7. Encourage customers to share experiences

Using your existing customer base to share their experiences will help to build trust and encourage prospective customers to get in touch. You can achieve this in a number of ways.

Encouraging them to leave reviews on Google My Business or other review platforms like Trust Pilot, Trip Advisor, Facebook or Feefo is a visible way to showcase your feedback. Or, you may want to incentivise customer feedback through surveys so that you can continuously improve your offering. On a more personal level, clients could leave recommendations for you on LinkedIn which is ideal for professional service industries.

Case studies that show how you tackled a client’s problem and achieved a positive solution will add weight to your proposition and engage with prospective customers.

8. Use email marketing

Email marketing is a great way to get in front of potential customers and your existing database is a goldmine that’s often under-utilised. Do you have lapsed customers who haven’t bought from you in a while, or enquiries that haven’t converted into an order? It can take more than seven points of contact to convert a customer so it’s important not to give up at the first hurdle.

Sure, there’s a lot of noise when it comes to email marketing so you want to have a good hook, and you need to ensure your audience has opted in to your communications. That said, email marketing is a cost effective means of reaching your customer base that could help generate extra business.

Mailchimp is a great tool for email marketing that’s free for up to 2000 contacts within your database, making it ideal for smaller businesses who may want to send email newsletters and keep in touch with their audience to promote products, events or news.

There’s also the opportunity for email automation if you’re running an e-commerce website. For example, if a customer doesn’t complete the checkout you could send an automated email with an exclusive discount code to encourage them to complete the order. Or, perhaps you could promote accessories or prompt renewal for a service.

9. Collaborate

Collaborating with other businesses can be a great way to pool your resources and share the marketing load. Is there a business that shares a similar ethos, audience demographic or solutions-led approach as you? How can you leverage one another to make the most of any marketing exposure?

Networking, either online or via networking face to face groups, is also an effective way to build relationships that could result in referrals or collaborations.

10. Put together a plan

I’ve saved one of my most important tips until last - put together a plan! So many small businesses are swept up in the running of their business they do not take time out to really think about what they want to achieve and what tools will be best to use. It’s always advised to put together a marketing budget too, so you can plan for your marketing costs throughout the year.

Thinking about your strengths and weaknesses, competitors, customers and business goals will help you to develop a marketing strategy and plan that you can develop your tactics and timelines. Do not forget to build in time to monitor your performance too and measure the return on any marketing investment you make. Take a look at this article for more tips on developing a marketing plan and a handy downloadable template.

Marketing help

If it all feels a bit daunting and you want to make sure you take all of the right steps to give your business the best chance of success, get in touch. We can have an informal chat about where you may need marketing support and how to maximise your marketing budget to drive enquiries.