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The 16 Best Marketing Strategies For Small Businesses

May 31, 2021
Bill Kimball

online marketing strategies for small business

Some of these are strategies are effective for online businesses and others for online businesses. Social media marketing is naturally the next marketing strategy for your business. You managed to have in your hands great content so now it’s time to spread the word out and the best way to do that is through a well-designed social media marketing strategy.

Aim at producing content that brings out an emotional reaction from your audience, because many times people share content for emotional reasons. On one hand, bad and low-quality content that is not relevant can hurt your brand. And on the other hand, high-quality content can help you build a strong relationship with your target audience, improve your brand image and boost your business revenue. Small businesses that are not using digital marketing need to understand the importance of it. Because small business digital marketing helps your business thrive in today’s competitive landscape and lets you make your mark. Once you have a list of email subscribers, you can start designing targeted campaigns that allow you to build authority and nurture relationships with leads and customers. For best results, segment your email lists so that you can send more targeted content and offers to your subscribers.

Post visually appealing imagery and user-generated content to engage with your loyal customers. Right now, the world needs more good news and generosity – not tone deaf or overly sales-y messages. Aligning with your company’s values, be inspiring in a helpful, authentic way that connects with your audience and applies to the current situation. Showcase an upbeat, useful take on your products or offer extra services that are practical and necessary during this time. While continuing to make it relevant to the situation and your brand, virtually educate or entertain your followers and give your business a human voice. Show why people should continue to support you, your employees and your business.

See what kind of splash your business can make in your community by implementing these local marketing strategies today. Digital marketing is all well and good, but building a real-world bridge between your audience and your brand is invaluable. Consider sponsoring or hosting a local event whenever possible to increase brand visibility in your local community. This is also a great way to land local press coverage, which improves your odds of being found online by a local audience. Social media marketingis critically important when it comes to local online marketing. Much like your website, your social media pages should be optimized and localized. This means providing up-to-date information, such as your business’s location, contact information, and store hours.

  • Marketing is meant to raise brand awareness and build a pipeline of qualified leads that turn into sales.
  • Using social media channels to reach and engage your target audience is no longer an option – it’s a must!
  • You want to interact with your customers and provide them with value before they even spend money.
  • That’s why defining a strong brand with an authentic and marketable mission and relatable core principles should be the foundation for your business marketing plan and marketing strategy.
  • Post community updates on your website and social media channels, and focus a renewed effort on quality customer service.

Partnering with another business means twice as much notice and exposure to a whole new audience related to your niche. One great way to make content a regular part of your marketing efforts is to start a blog. Most industries have business awards you can win, providing you with an online badge you can place on your website. Badges like these can boost credibility, and as a result, increase sales.

Partner With Other Local Businesses

The more places users can find your business the better off your local marketing success will be. “More than half of traffic coming to websites is from mobile devices,” she said. “If you have a website that’s nice and streamlined, with large text to read on a small screen and large buttons to easily click, you’ll have an easier time attracting local business.” Website optimization is key to driving traffic, but is your website optimized for local users? Local marketing starts with some easy-to-implement steps that you can get started on today. Here are a few quick and simple ideas to improve your business’s local marketing.

Another good example of a business that needs local store marketing is a retail store. While even small retail operations often have e-commerce stores these days, local marketing can increase the store’s foot traffic and local brand awareness. This is especially important for small, boutique retail stores competing with large chains. Now that you have a handful of small business digital marketing tactics up your sleeve you can get to work implementing them across your marketing channels. Helping small businesses grow and build their dreams through digital marketing is what keeps us going every day.

Look into what your competition is creating in terms of content that is getting shares and produce something on the same lines. Helps your audience with the needed answers and encourages them to share them.

With over 35% of all traffic coming from local sources, customers searching for your services will be more likely to find your business in search engine results. There’s no secret sauce to developing a small business marketing strategy. However, the below strategies can help small businesses earn high ROI. Did you know that 50% of small businesses don’t have a dedicated marketing strategy? As a result, it can be a challenge to earn visibility in a local community. With the right strategies and channels in place, you can get on the fast track to growing brand awareness and earning ROI. In this post, let’s discover what should be at the center of your small business marketing strategy.

online marketing strategies for small business

Think about hosting an exclusive discount sale like a “friends and family” promotion every now and then. Learn how to use Facebook for your business—create an event, invite employees, and ask your employees to share it with their personal and professional contacts. Encourage them to share the status and tag people to increase the reach of your event. Video is a highly popular medium for consumers, and while it can cost you a lot to get a professional video produced and uploaded to YouTube, you don’t have to hire a professional. DIY video marketing is easy with today’s personal devices and social media apps like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok.

Whether your strategy right now is focused on short-term survival or long-term planning, digital marketing can be a much-needed boost for your bottom line. The disruption of normalcy and increased uncertainty are unnerving, especially for small businesses. While maintaining critical safety measures, you can thoughtfully and innovatively adjust your strategy and emphasize what your business offers at the moment. As a business driven by the community, ensure your content strategy accounts for local intent, and offer products or services targeted to your market. Increasingly, your community wants to support local businesses – whether through take-out or delivery from neighborhood restaurants, online shopping from local stores, or using services virtually.

Plan an event or class to host, then print out flyers and post them on community bulletin boards . While most community bulletin boards won’t let you post business advertisements, they’re often more than happy to post a flyer promoting an educational event or class.

Advertise On Social Media

But the reality is that social media marketing is a must for small businesses today. Different platforms engage with different audiences in different ways, so research is again crucial here. It is not aimed at selling a product, it aims at becoming a voice of authority in the field.

These three areas can help you learn how your target market is searching online, and position your business to get discovered by the right people. Having a consistent brand identity to promote your business will make you look more professional and help you attract new customers.

Google Partner

It’s also important to have flawless customer service during the period after running your deal, with the expectation that your coupon-driven customers will be even harder to please than normal customers. As an added bonus, many new potential customers will browse your website even if they don’t decide to purchase the deal. It includes videos, podcasts, online courses, and a host of other mediums in which people consume information. Unlike many of the channels we will discuss today, Adwords is a remarkably symbiotic channel that can be paired with many other strategies to maximize output. As a paid marketing channel, it also allows you to obtain immediate results and can scale as far as your budget allows. No other advertising method has the potential to get your business before that many pairs of eyes. If you run a business that has a strong visual component, it might be worth trying out Instagram Adsinstead.

These strategies don’t require a big advertising budget, but you will likely need to put some resources into them—such as by subscribing to a platform or purchasing tickets to events. For more help with quality content creation, check out these 32 Free (& Almost Free) Content Marketing Tools. Check out the training resources in Growth Academy if you’re ready to learn the basics. Get new website visitors to sign up for your newsletter by offering a bonus content piece or coupon/discount for subscribing.

“Reading the room” and knowing the audience you’re trying to reach can help get you started in understanding what your social media marketing approach should be. Content marketing describes the process of creating and publishing online business content that is geared toward a target audience. Your target audience is specific to your business type, your brand, and your long and short-term business goals. Some of what determines your audience is your business’ mission and values, which should be reflected in your brand approach.

This increases the likelihood that your content will be viewed when your audience searches for relevant or related topics. Navigating the timing of email marketing has become more of an issue while many of us are working fully remote, as too much exposure to marketing materials can quickly become overwhelming to your audience. Some of this can be mitigated by using targeted campaigns that nurture the customer relationship and create trust and brand authority. The most straightforward online marketing strategy is to advertise your business online. So, consider all of these options and—using your knowledge of your unique business and customer needs—tailor your online marketing for small business strategy to what best works for your business. Kristen is the Senior Managing Editor at WordStream, where she helps businesses to make sense of their online marketing and advertising. She specializes in local SEO, copywriting, and conversion optimization, and she finds life to be exponentially more delightful on a bicycle.

The higher you rank on Google, the more opportunities you will have to drive new traffic to your web pages. You bid on certain keywords—like “local printing company” or “office supplies near me”—and create ads around those phrases. Advertising platforms will then use an algorithm to display your ads in the search engine result pages based on factors such as keyword relevance and landing page quality. Keyword research is important here, as language trends and relevance related to your industry can change overnight, and because advertisers have to bid on keyword usage for their PPC campaigns. SEO is also important for PPC advertising because advertising platforms and search engines prioritize what they post based on relevance and validity. The keywords you’re using might need to be re-evaluated over time as the industry itself or the language used to describe it change.

Optimize Your Website (and Localize It)

Which means any marketing or design related decision you take should keep conversion in the forefront. Without the right level of testing, running a successful digital marketing campaign is not easy. But still, we find that testing is often put on the back burner, especially by people new to the digital marketing scene. If you truly want to leverage social media marketing and get the most out of it, then you need to actively use the popular social media channels where your audience is likely to be. You cannot use social media as a mere promotional tool to find success with it.

online marketing strategies for small business

PPC ads cost money every time someone clicks on them, which means that if you don’t know the ins and outs of PPC advertising, you may be wasting your budget on strategies and tactics that just don’t work. An effective PPC keyword list should be relevant and exhaustive, including both popular, frequently searched terms and other less competitive long tail keywords. Since the majority of consumers are using the Google search engine to search for information about products and services, Google is a great place to start with your PPC advertising.

According to a 2020 study, nearly 9 out of 10 people are brand loyalwith nearly 25% of them climbing to be more brand loyal in 2020 compared to 2019. Once you have an email marketing tool in place , experiment with emailing out newsletters , and other promotions to your database. We know small business owners don’t have tons of free time to devote to digital marketing, so consider using marketing automationto make this process even easier for yourself. In fact, consumers learn about local businesses online more than anywhere else.

To get started planning your email marketing strategy, check out this guide and template from HubSpot. In fact, 73 percent of millennialsprefer communications from businesses to come via email. Marketing is meant to raise brand awareness and build a pipeline of qualified leads that turn into sales. With a small business, getting the word out can be challenging due to less visibility and lack of resources . However, there are key strategies that can help you scale your small business’s marketing efforts. In this post, we’ll help you build and optimize your marketing strategy using inbound marketing,setting you up to attract new clients and ultimately grow your business. Pursuit provides links from this website to other websites for your information only.