If you're on a Galaxy Fold, consider unfolding your phone or viewing it in full screen to best optimize your experience.
Let’s get one thing straight before we start: Marketing is an investment. There is no investment without risk, no guaranteed results, no magical solution, that will make your business grow and generate profits without effort.
There are, however, increasingly efficient marketing channels that can be addressed without a large in-house team, and without adding costly intermediaries into the equation.
What you need is a clear strategy, the right tools to automate your operations, and the capability to measure the outcome of your investment.
Small business marketing has a shorter horizon for generating results; business owners must be more selective in their adoption of marketing channels.
Whereas large corporations are addressing all the stages of the user journey, the SMB segment of businesses targets the consideration and conversion stages of the marketing funnel. Those provide faster returns. This also means SMBs sometimes neglect building brand awareness, as it is a longer-term investment.
Local marketing is a great SMB market approach if your business is a shop or has an important local audience. It starts offline with signage, flyers, and billboards, and it continues online with local SEO and continuous publication on Google My Business, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
It can even expand into the performance marketing strategy -- which we explore below -- by adding geo-targeted, paid media campaigns to the mix.
A local marketing strategy can be very effective and works both on brand awareness in your local area and on sales.
Inbound marketing is one of the most effective strategies if your company has SMB customers itself. B2B companies use content marketing to be visible to their target group and use automated interactions to qualify leads.
The inbound marketing strategy is mainly sales-oriented, but it also generates a spillover brand effect due to the large quantities of valuable content that are distributed.
Influencer marketing has become quite popular in recent years due to the strong impact of social media on people’s lives. It is by no means a new concept, though.
Influencers have long been used in B2B marketing under the name “key opinion leaders” (KOLs) and in B2C as “celebrity marketing.” It uses an endorsement mechanism where influencers have the capability to carry a brand to their captive audiences and vouch for it.
Influencer campaigns can strongly influence SMB social media and help build more following, and more engagement. But an influencer strategy remains focused on brand awareness and may not drive many sales in the short run.
Most SMB advertising falls under the category of performance marketing. The notion of performance means all actions are measurable and optimized toward generating results.
For performance marketing to be successful, it is important to have a clear understanding of the target market, and to be able to measure sales reliably and in real-time.
Performance marketing is primarily a sales-oriented SMB digital marketing strategy but it can have an impact on brand awareness, as it typically generates a lot of impressions.
The digital revolution has made a vast array of digital marketing strategies available to small businesses. The four strategies we have outlined above are among the most clear-cut strategies you can adopt, but there are other techniques worth mentioning here. Let’s look at a few:
In the process of building your own unique marketing strategy, you might also want to take advantage of some proven marketing tips for small businesses we have collected.
Small businesses have never been faced with so many opportunities and so many challenges at the same time. Building a solid strategy is essential for succeeding in today’s world.
Spend time getting it right. In terms of execution, aim to automate as many steps as possible, and always measure and evaluate the outcome of your actions. Marketing is an investment. Measure and optimize the return on that investment.
We're firm believers in the Golden Rule, which is why editorial opinions are ours alone and have not been previously reviewed, approved, or endorsed by included advertisers. The Ascent, a Motley Fool service, does not cover all offers on the market. The Ascent has a dedicated team of editors and analysts focused on personal finance, and they follow the same set of publishing standards and editorial integrity while maintaining professional separation from the analysts and editors on other Motley Fool brands.