Marketing can take many shapes and forms. If you are running a small business and want to promote it, you would need to look for ways of small business marketing that are cost-effective and bring faster results.
Some common ways of marketing are as follows.
- Using brand management strategies
- Running sales promotions
- Setting competitive pricing
- Social media marketing
- Traditional means of advertising
- Blogging, content marketing, and guest posting
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If you want to do small business marketing, you would need to filter out those methods from the ones listed above that don’t cost you a lot, but get you the results that can help you hit your business off the ground.
Marketing for small businesses is often about pushing your brand and products across a small variety of platforms, and hoping that your marketing messages make it through to your target audience. Your customers need to get your message several times before they begin to get influenced and consider buying from your business.
It is good to develop a small business marketing strategy before you start implementing any of the ways mentioned above. A carefully designed strategy will help to stay within your marketing budget and steer your campaigns in a way that brings you returns and more conversions. That’s why a forecast of your sales and your quarterly marketing budget would be two key elements of your marketing strategy. Without these, you could easily get diverted and end up showing your ads to irrelevant audiences or waste money on ads that simply don’t work.
In this post, we will discuss different ways to market small businesses. If you are a creative entrepreneur, you can add to these and test your own marketing tactics. As long as you do your business marketing well, there is nothing stopping you from growing your customers and sales.
8 Ways to Market Small Businesses
Do you want to know how to market a small business? If yes, read on the 8 ways described below.
1. Get Organized
Developing an organized business plan is the first step towards doing marketing for small businesses. Begin with brainstorming. Create an action plan, and derive a suitable marketing plan from it. Use a calendar to build a to-do list. Start small, but plan to get a good return on investment in every step along the way.
Small business marketing heavily relies on an elevator pitch. Your pitch should be part of your business plan. Ask yourself these questions.
- How will you introduce your business to your audience?
- What will be the unique selling proposition of your products?
- What will you do to retain your customers?
As long as you make a good first impression, implementing the rest of your plan will be easier.
2. Build a Website
In today’s digitized world, running a business without a website simply doesn’t cut it. When someone hears your brand name, the first thing they will do is search for it on the internet. That’s why building a website is an essential step in small business marketing.
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Our platform allows you to create a complete website all by yourself. That’s because we have ready-to-use templates for you, which means you just have to select one of them to use as your web design. You won’t have to build your web design from scratch.
Once you select a suitable template, you can start typing your website content and upload any images that you want. Our drag and drop feature will enable you to arrange your content elements in the way you like. You can even edit your content anytime through your website editor.
Strikingly offers most of the features needed to build a basic website in our free plan. Thus, to begin with, you can create your free account with us and start exploring our tools and features.
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3. Leverage Social Media
Once you have a website, it is in your best interest to integrate it with your social media pages. Create pages on all the relevant social media platforms, and make posts on each regularly. Then link all those pages with your website. There are two ways of doing this.
You can place social media icons on your site’s footer. When visitors click these icons, they will be directed to the respective social media page. This will help you drive traffic back and forth between your website and social media presence.
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The other way to integrate social media with your website is to add social media handles at the end of your blog posts or web pages. These handles will enable your site visitors to share your posts and pages on their social media profiles.
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4. Work on Your Site’s SEO
Merely building a website is not enough in this day and age for small business marketing. You need to optimize it for search engines so that when people search for your brand name, they can discover your website.
To do this, you need to know the basics of SEO. Your on-site SEO can be done in the following ways.
- Add a precise site description.
- Add appropriate page titles and meta descriptions.
- Use meta tags and relevant keywords throughout your site’s content.
- Create original content. If you use any copied text, stats, infographics, or images, make sure to link them back to their original source.
- Upload good quality photos.
- Include videos in your web pages.
Strikingly’s features make it easy for you to follow all the above SEO guidelines. For instance, simply go to ‘Settings’ and ‘Basic Info’ to write your site description. Then type in your description text in the box that says ‘Site Description’.
To take care of your off-site SEO, you can do guest posting on other people’s blogs to spread the word about your business and create backlinks that bring people from other websites to your website.
5. Build an Online Community
Another way to do marketing for small businesses is to build an online community. A community will provide a platform for your users and customers to interact with each other and keep themselves well engaged with your brand. This is good for small business marketing.
At Strikingly, we have our Idea Forum, where our users regularly post their opinions about our services and new ideas about website development. They also resolve each other’s queries and give feedback about our services. A community is also suitable for staying updated with the changing consumer tastes and preferences about your products and services.
6. Use Referral Marketing
Referral marketing is a technique of marketing for small businesses that helps them grow their brand awareness by giving an incentive to their existing customers to bring in new customers. It is a low-cost small business marketing strategy.
Many popular brands used referral marketing to grow their business at its initial stages, such as Dropbox and UpViral.
7. Advertise
You can consider running paid ads once your business is et, and you have your first few customers. This step is not encouraged much for small business marketing. But if you can build a stream of income, even if it is small, you can try to invest a little bit in paid advertisements and see if they bring any returns. This can include Google ads, social media ads, and even YouTube ads. All of these will cost you only a bare minimum but give you access to an extensive database of ad analytics, which you can use to modify and optimize your ad campaigns.
8. Continue To Do Networking
If you are a small business owner, you must be an outspoken, outgoing, and confident person anyway. Do not shy away from speaking about your business once it really begins to hit off. People often lose their contacts and network when they are struggling to grow their business. This is not advisable. Keeping in touch with your personal and professional network can help you explore new opportunities for your business growth.
These were the eight ways to market small businesses. It’s actually straightforward. The whole point of small business marketing is to get the word out and let people know about your products or services. Only once they know will they be able to consider trying them out. If your marketing campaigns are reaching your target audience to resonate with your message, they will indeed get inspired to try out your brand. If they don’t you can continue with your small business marketing efforts, and soon you will begin to see the results.
Many of our users at Strikingly are aspiring entrepreneurs who are determined to succeed by first building a website with us and then promoting it effectively. We are here to support each of our users, whichever plan they choose to use, to help them grow their business at their desired pace. If you want to become part of our community, please register your free Strikingly account on our landing page today.
