13 Tips For Small Business Marketing In 2021

Marketing is expensive, but it’s necessary for all businesses out there, especially the small ones. If you want your business to grow, you definitely need to invest in your marketing efforts. Although word of mouth is great, it won’t be enough to reach your audience effectively.

Unfortunately, it poses a challenge for all small businesses with a tight budget. The good news is that there are many tips for small business marketing that you can consider, regardless of your budget. These include the following:

• Know Your Audience

If you want to take your small business marketing to a whole new level, always think of your audience. Buyer personas are one of the best ways to define your audience when it comes to interests, lifestyle, and demographics. When done well, a buyer persona will provide you a direction and target. Moreover, such personas can be used for segmenting your list and personalizing your marketing and sales messages.

Moreover, never forget to consider a funnel position when you’re creating buyer personas. For instance, customers that need nurturing require various messages than somebody ready to purchase. With this in mind, using text blast software for your messaging needs may come in handy. Just keep the right timing in mind to get great results.

• Establish A Brand

If you want your potential customers to recognize your business and stand out in the competition, you’ll need a clear brand identity. Once you’ve decided on your brand identity, match it with a suitable logo, name, imagery, and colors that convey your brand to your potential and existing customers.

Depending on your preferences, you can ask for assistance from experts when establishing your brand. Although this process is a bit pricey, it’ll be all worth it in the end.

• Prioritize Your Customer Service

When running a small business, whether online or offline, it can be easy to forget customer service. However, you should take note that customer service is a critical part of marketing and can be a factor in retaining or attracting customers.

So, if you want your existing and potential customers to reach you quickly, you might like to consider having a contact form on your website or use Drop Cowboy Voicemail Drops instead for effortless marketing.  You can also invest in a chatbot platform which can be a helpful tool.

• Keep Your Content On Target

If you know your target audience, it’ll be much easier for you to craft pieces of content that’s relevant and valuable to them. The use of sales pitches and clickbait isn’t the best way to gain trust from your network. Rather, make it your priority to reach your audience on a more personal level. Then, show them that you understand or care about them as well as their needs. You can do that by avoiding being too promotional.

Instead of promoting your products, focus on providing information, insights, and even entertainment relevant to your offerings. This approach can be effective to convince or persuade your customers to purchase your products and services.

• Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly

There’s no doubt that mobile marketing has become more relevant with countless consumers making purchases and browsing using their tablets or smartphones. Even if investing in mobile-specific marketing may need a particular investment, you may take the first step through ensuring that your website is mobile-friendly.

You can hire professionals to help optimize your website for mobile devices. But, a low-cost option is using a website builder or a renowned eCommerce platform.

• Leverage Your Email Marketing

One of the effective small business marketing strategies is email. No matter what kind of audience you want to focus on, most people check their emails. So, never hesitate to take advantage of emails.

To make the most of your email marketing, you need to start building a reliable email list. There are many lead generation strategies you can use to build your email list. Such strategies can help collect information about potential and existing customers.

Once you have an email list, you may use it to your advantage by sending out regular emails with news, special offers, and discounts.

• Get Google My Business (GMB) Page

Google makes searching easy for everybody around the world. That’s why it only makes sense for small business owners to claim their Google My Business profiles. This works by enabling you to make your own identity and input your business detailed information, such as photos, location, URL, and contact details. It also helps you get more customers to review and provide you assistance when it comes to business marketing tools.

• Consider Local Marketing

Another marketing tip for small businesses is embracing local marketing. This is especially true if you’re running a business in the local market, you would want to take advantage of the online marketing strategies that relate and appeal to your audience.

Other than creating a GMB listing, you may also edit and claim your business listing on some local search directories. You may also consider some local marketing strategies, including the following:

• Participating or hosting a community event
• Implementing direct mail campaigns in your local area
• Creating social media or Google ads targeting a certain area

Even if such strategies fall outside the realm of online marketing, you can quickly incorporate them by including your social media and website on any materials or helpful information you provide around your local community.

• Choose A Social Media Platform 

Social media marketing can make a difference to your small business. One of the reasons for this is that most consumers rely on different social media platforms to make purchasing decisions.

However, it’s essential to keep in mind that social media is a little complicated. It always changes and may require more effort than you could think. Thus, rather than trying to excel on every social media platform, you could try a low-cost tip which is to choose the social media platform that works best for your business. For instance, if you have an online boutique, it’s best to use Instagram as your social media platform to be successful in your marketing strategies. But, it doesn’t mean that you should take other social media channels for granted. You can also focus on them, but put all your efforts and energy on the platform that appeals the most to your target audience.

• Create A Referral Network

If you provide services in a certain niche, look for some related providers that you can partner with for referrals. For example, wedding planners might have several photographers they know to recommend to clients. Photographers may also do the same when their clients look for wedding planners.

A good way to create a referral network is to build relationships first. In most cases, emailing or cold calling somebody to strike up referral partnerships won’t work because they don’t have a clue about your work and can’t vouch for you. With that in mind, look at some vendors for your clients to see if there are some opportunities to reach out to other small businesses.

• Build A Useful Email Newsletter

A lot of email marketing providers offer free accounts. You can benefit from this and make useful email newsletters for your potential and current customers. Add existing and new customers to your email lists and provide a subscribe box on your site to add some new subscribers.

Every week or month, you can send out helpful email newsletters with interesting external articles, company news, product sales, and other things that your customers may find interesting and useful.

• Focus On Content Marketing And Start A Blog

Content marketing, if done right, can have a huge impact on your ability to drive sales and attract customers. With that said, one of the ways to get involved in content marketing is to start a blog on your website.

In your blog section, you can produce blogs about topics that are related and relevant to your business, providing helpful information and showing your expertise, which can drive more audience to your website and boost your search rankings.

The best thing about content marketing and starting a blog is that you don’t have to spend a huge amount of money to promote your content. If you always provide good quality content, it’ll rank in the search engines, and you’ll always have an option to share it organically on social media sites for wider reach.

• Incorporate Video Marketing

One of the ways to dominate the world of small businesses is to use eye-catching videos when marketing. The reason behind this is that most people spend more time watching videos, so it’s never a waste of time to invest in video marketing.

To get the best possible results with this smart marketing move, focus on creating appealing and engaging videos. Depending on your budget and preferences, you can use professional video editing tools or hire professionals instead.

Bottom Line

The above small business marketing tips must give you a place to start in terms of growing and promoting your business. Just remember that not all tactics will work for all small businesses, so never be afraid of thinking outside the box to test out something that you think will be successful for your business.