Marketing for Small Business - How to Start & What You Need to Do

Reality shows that many business people have no clear view of what marketing is and what is to be done for marketing small businesses.

Marketing, if employed the right way, is the guarantee of your success in business, both winning new customers and making them return again and again.

Marketing for small business

Each small business is unique. A marketing plan developed for one niche will differ from that of any other. However, developing the plan, following it, as well as managing time and resources - all these are important issues for any business.

Here come a few tips to help you promote your business:

 

Knowledge means power. It is crucial to get to know every single detail, including not only what is to be done to promote business, yet what is not to be done, just like it may be vital to know potentially fatal mistakes.

 

Make your customers your priority. You have to see who your customers are, what attracts them and what they do want and value. Stay in touch with them even after they buy your product or service.

 

Know your consumer. EVERYONE is not a target audience! Aim your marketing at those only who need your service and who want to get it. This is the way to get YOUR potential customers coming, and they are very much likely to open their wallets for you, so learn more about their interests, family status, age, etc. Even if you sell women’s clothes and believe that your customers are only women, then we have spoke bad news for you: they all have different demands and requests, so you’d better divide them into several categories.

 

Marketing is not advertising. Get to know all the various ways to promote business - they are numerous. Here below we will mention some powerful tools.

 

Set aims in your sales. Marketing is, above all, figures and indicators: what aims you set for costs, revenues, profits, number of requests and, of course, the volume of new sales.

 

Examine the four major aspects of marketing, namely, the product, the pricing, the distribution strategy and the promotion strategy.

Marketing tools required for small businesses.

The plan and the budget: drawing a plan is the most important and visible part that will not let you lose your way. It may be brief yet comprehensive.

A quality product or service: any promotion will fall flat upon people if they don’t need what you are offering. To avoid such failures, study your customers’ needs.

Professional brand: brand means not a logo only but it is what people read, hear and think about your business. As early as at the very start, invest in a brand development to make it stand out. It will both save you money and help avoid many issues later on.

Elevator Pitch - this is the name for a brief yet comprehensive presentation of your business, which is to take no more than a few seconds. You will be anyway asked “What do you do?” around a thousand times. Do not make a mistake by exhausting the one asking this question with lots of useless and incomprehensible data. Make sure you always have at hand some funny, interesting and easy-to-remember presentation. And mind you: the presentation is to be completed no later than the elevator covers several floors.

A brilliant website: your website should grab the visitor’s attention and be useful. Consider it a tool to keep your current customers and stay in touch with them, as well as to attract new ones. The online world may appear really confusing and unclear to many small business owners. However, unless you master it, you may end up out of the running.

A simple database: the basis of any good marketing implies developing a reliable database incorporating the ex-, current and potential customers. This will allow you staying in touch with them and having a regular contact while addressing them through mail-outs, messages or calls.

Life hacks for small business marketing

You do not have to spend tons of money on marketing. Being a little smart and creative to make you slightly different from any other player in the market may proper you to success. Here are just some of hundreds of ideas to promote your project:

Attend events. Networking is still there, and new contacts are part and parcel of more than a few businesses. Just go out, meet people, interact, introduce yourself and earn a base of potential customers.

Sponsor some local event or a charity company. Offering someone from the same league makes you feel really great. Besides, this is profit to everyone - you, your people, customers, people you support and, of course, the community as a whole.

Do not forget about your PR. Making everyone see your name on TV, radio, in newspapers and magazines is easier than it may appear. There is a catch, though: you will have to have something to tell others, and that must be a story that does deserve to be listened to.

Use social media. Posts in the media, your videos on YouTube or blogging - all these are great ways to keep people updated about you and your business. But please, don’t be a bore! Run your social media accounts so that both you and your followers have fun and stay interested. By the way, in 2022 it is important not just to have an account as part of your brand but promote it actively - launch challenges, announce prize draws, collaborate with some media personalities and influencers. Account promotion will take much longer unless you have extra traffic. The good news is that you can delegate this part. The Post Market service, for instance, could help you promote your business through advertising with bloggers. An advertising campaign is nothing difficult to launch, so all you will have to do is accept requests and process them.

Hold seminars and other events, invite your best customers and their friends. This is a great way to meet people, strike rapport and make this interaction productive.

To be noted that you do not have to plunge head first into some cheap (or even free) marketing before you start with the most important things. First of all, have a marketing plan, put down your strategy, decide on the market and create a good product. Only after that you can try and attract your target audience with some tools that are free or do not require a significant budget.

There are ways to promote your business at no much cost. Let’s have a look at 4 of them.

Email-distribution

One of the proven tools helping expand the target audience and promote your product in the least consuming way.

Involve your creativity, approach the task in an unconventional way. Think of an unusual design for the message heading, improvise with the theme and the content. The more creative and intriguing design you develop for your E-mail distribution, the higher are the chances your advertising messages will be opened and read to the end, which may finally turn the readers into your first customers.

However, we do not recommend you take the risks because you can easily make a mistake that will backfire in the future. Besides, any entrepreneur’s success relies on his/her ability to delegate what can be delegated. Here, we would suggest you find a copywriter to create E-mails that do sell.

Marketing in social media

This way is equally simple. Just complete your registration and have a correct and aesthetically impeccable business profile in all popular media.

Presenting the brand in social media will be great to reveal its strongest points, just like it will attract a number of potential customers thus helping you enhance the target audience. Of course, you cannot expect the sales to zoom once you have completed the registration, but the approach in itself will lay a perfect basis for your future success.

Some enterprises, while never having an official website (which might take certain investment), do have an Instagram page helping them sell their products and services.

If you are running, for instance, a bakery, a coffee shop, a cheese plant or a barbershop, then having bright profiles on Tik-Tok or Instagram would do to attract a lion’s share of your target audience and win their trust with your services.

To begin with, examine your target audience: needs, age, social status, gender, interests and preferences. See who your potential customers are, what their interests are, what is good for them, etc., then analyze your rivals’ strong and weak points.

Try to think what you can offer that would make you different from all your competitors. Stress your strong points, find something special, and make them an offer they will never want to refuse.

Next, set your objective. Develop a clear strategy, tactics, and make up a content plan for a month. After that, wrap your offers, special offers, information and fresh ideas into some visually attractive and comprehensive content.

Avoid your presentation being monotonous - have it diverse, throw some intrigue in to have the reader fascinated. Do not stick to one single style and genre. It may be not just conventional texts for blogs or social media yet news releases, podcasts, and so on.

Never forget about all that social media have to offer: targeted advertising, recommendations from bloggers, reels, etc.

Word of mouth or a discount for recommendations

A good old and time-tested method that many companies employed to start.

Offer your customers a good discount for recommendations. It could look like this:

 

bring a friend and get your discount

 

get your discount for your first buy through the referral link

 

tag a friend in your comment under the post and get your bonus/gift/etc.

This method is sure to work, which explains why many love it. Who would ever reject a discount or a gift in exchange for some simple action?

Bartending

This is another acceptable plan mto be employed at the initial stages of your brand promotion. If you have something to offer to your partners, then why not do it? Of course, your interests have to be compatible, while their target audience will have to be a match to yours.

Cooperate with famous and popular bloggers on bartending basis - offer them your product while they can offer you native ad in return. People love imitating the ones they adore, which makes the approach in question not an affordable one yet also an effective one in terms of expanding your outreach.

If you employ the methods above - or at least some of them - this will definitely yield its fruit, while keeping the costs rather low and the payback - high.

Actually, the channels for promotion are numerous, and many more can be expected to appear in the nearest future. The important part here is not to invest in one only. It is time to experiment. Better allocate a few budgets to ensure promotion through different platforms, test them all and rate them based on their effectiveness, after which opt for at least 3 you find best.