Are you a small business owner looking to market your enterprise and accelerate growth? Do you want to develop a sustainable small enterprise, such as a lawn care marketing plan that attracts new customers and grows your revenue? Small business owners wear many hats when running an enterprise, and many overlook marketing, a core pillar for any profitable business.
Marketing involves attracting prospects and converting them into buyers for the business to generate revenue. Small business owners can only achieve this by developing and implementing a marketing strategy that outlines how they will reach potential customers.
This article is a small business marketing guide that breaks down X scalable and sustainable marketing strategies to help you grow your customer base and generate more revenue.
What Is Small Business Marketing?
Small business marketing is the use of various offline and online strategies to present your products and services to the eyes of potential customers. The primary end goal of small business marketing is to expand the market share and generate more revenue.
Factors to Consider When Selecting a Small Business Marketing Strategy
Here are three factors a small business owner must consider when choosing a marketing strategy;
Marketing Goals
To build an effective marketing strategy, an enterprise owner must define the enterprise goals. What do you want to achieve? Do you want to acquire new customers, increase the average purchase amount per customer or oversee the enterprise’s reputation?
Defining goals enables you to develop a marketing plan that aligns with your limited resources, time, and budget. It allows you to adopt marketing strategies that achieve your marketing and business objectives.
Customer and Market Insights
Understand the target customers, where they spend time online, and what motivates them to seek your business offerings. It enables you to know the best channels to reach your target market.
Learn about the current market trends and dynamics, your competitors, and marketing strategies to understand how to engage with your customers.
ROI
An effective marketing strategy should justify the marketing spend by evaluating its performance and impact on profit and revenue growth.
Limited resources and budgets bind small business marketing. Focus, test, and evaluate different strategies with the best return on investment.
The 5 Strategies to Market Your Small Business
Here are five scalable and sustainable marketing strategies to help you grow your customer base and generate more revenue.
1. Social Media Marketing
Social media involves using apps and websites such as Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, where users share information and updates. Small businesses leverage social media online marketing through direct communication with potential customers.
Engaging your customers actively on social media increases your brand awareness, leading to sales and revenue. According to a study, customers spend 88% more time on content with videos. So, it’s essential to use videos on social media platforms.
Social Media Marketing Tips
Here are ways a small business can leverage social media marketing to grow the customer base and generate sales;
- Choose the best social media platform
- Set goals and develop a social media plan
- Track the marketing metrics
- Adopt social media scheduling tools
- Use paid advertising
2. Email Marketing and Newsletters
Newsletters and email marketing help small enterprises keep in touch with their customers by sending them sales messages, adverts, updates, and essential information about products and services.
The marketing strategy aims to achieve the following;
- Boost sales
- Educate customers
- Build brand engagement
Email and newsletter marketing is cost-effective, adaptable, and offers instant results when sending personalised messages to your customers.
Email and Newsletters Marketing Tips
Newsletter and email marketing can seem intimidating for a small business owner. However, there are ways to simplify the process;
- Adopt email marketing software: Leverage email marketing software to create custom emails templates for different segments, upload contacts, and send emails
- Employ customer segmentation: Develop custom messages that resonate with your subscribers’ demographics
- Develop content ideas: develop content that stands out and speaks to your subscribers directly
- Track your data: Track the open email rate, click rate, unsubscribe rate, and earnings per subscriber
3. Business Website With SEO
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) involves improving your website to increase its visibility on search engines when customers search for services or products related to your business. Higher-ranking and greater visibility on search engines engages and attracts potential and existing customers than your competition to generate an impact on your bottom line.
SEO marketing attracts zero marketing costs apart from your input and time when developing an SEO strategy.
Business Website Marketing Tips
Small businesses can employ two main types of SEO marketing strategies to optimize their pages, drive traffic and garner more clicks;
On-page Optimisation
It involves optimizing all the components of your website, such as the website code, structure, architecture, content, and site speed.
Here are ways to optimize your on-page content
- Keywords research: Conduct keyword research and find the relevant keywords that drive traffic to your website
- Write unique and optimized content: Create engaging, high quality and in-depth content that explores your business offerings
- Write engaging meta descriptions; Include the keyword in the page title, meta description, and image alt text. Optimize the key meta tags for search engine crawlers
- Use headings and subheadings: Use H1, H2, H3 for headings and subheadings
Off-Page Optimisation
It involves optimizing off-page activities away from your business website to improve website ranking by building backlinks.
For your backlinks to be effective, you need to evaluate three crucial things;
- Authority: The linking site must be trustworthy
- Relevance: The linking page and site should be similar to your content
- Placement: The position the link will take on the page
Here are ways to start building backlinks and establish yourself as more trustworthy;
- Competitor link building: Research and adopt your competitor’s best links
- Resource page link building: Adopt content and link to reputable industry resources
- Guest posting: Write blogs for other websites to get a backlink in return
4. Blogging and Content Marketing
Content marketing strategy involves using blog posts, guides, and videos to attract buyers, build trust, shorten the sales lifecycle, and help clients buy your services and products.
When presenting content to the viewers, listeners, and readers, adopt a unique voice and expertise across all media platforms, such as websites, adverts, podcasts, videos, blog posts, email, and social media.
Blogging and Content Marketing Tips
Here are some tips for launching your blogging and content marketing strategy;
- Use videos and Podcasts: leverage videos to engage, educate, entertain and advertise your products or services
- Create how-to blog posts: How-to blogs educate your readers on how to use a product or service
- Content promotion: Share your content with your target audience through newsletters, social media, and media channels
- Track the metrics: Track your content performance to know what is working using social media tools or Google Analytics to replicate your success.
5. Flyers, Business Cards, and Print Marketing
Print marketing for small businesses involves using business cards, flyers, and merchandise. They include stickers, pens, calendars, billboards, and other forms of signage that are of value to the customer and relate to your business.
Digital advertising gives a visual impression and shows the brand’s seriousness in its products and services.
Print Marketing Tips
Here are tips for running an effective print marketing strategy;
- Source for a reputable and creative print supplier to design, print, or brand your merchandise
- Share your ideas to get custom-tailored services
- Request for samples prints and make any tweaks, if need be, to achieve your enterprise tone and style
Do you want your small business to grow? Do you want to adopt effective marketing strategies to reach a wider audience and generate more sales? Assuming the above methods will increase your customer base and generate more revenue to grow your business