fbpx

How to Market a Small Business and Unlock Local Marketing Success

Table of Contents

Do you want more traffic?

Use our free tool to get your score calculated in under 60 minutes.

Want to enhance the local company marketing outcomes for yourself or your clients? 

Though a tonne of marketing advice is available online, much of it is targeted at global websites. In many ways, local marketing is a very other animal.

By developing a small business marketing strategy, you may connect with, grow, and preserve connections with your clients. A small firm can expand its reach by utilising online marketing tools like email campaigns, social media profiles, and a company website. 

Expanding your consumer base can be facilitated using conventional marketing strategies like print advertisements, billboards, flyers, and “experiential” seminars and pop-up events that let people interact with your inventory and brand.

92% of business owners believe having a website is the best digital marketing tactic.

Your target audience, financial constraints, market niche, and individual tastes will all influence your marketing plan. Here’s how to get going.

Take Your Small Business Marketing To The Next Level For Tailored Social Media Marketing Services

List Your Marketing Aims

Prioritise your aims and consider how your marketing plan will help you achieve your business objectives. Determine your USP or unique selling proposition.

It sets your company apart from the competition, and your marketing materials should emphasise it.

When outlining your marketing objectives, use metrics (such as website traffic, leads created, customers acquired, or revenue increased) to make it easier to track and measure your progress and, eventually, determine success.

Although every company may have different marketing goals, the following are some metrics you might want to track:

  • Developing leads.
  • Traffic on websites.
  • Rates of social media content engagement.
  • Rates of conversion from browsers to customers.

Enhance Your Small Business Marketing And Boost Your Local Company’s Success

  • Digital Marketing: Take advantage of digital marketing to reach a specific audience in an affordable and quantifiable manner. BH will help you do so by delivering extraordinary digital marketing services. 
  • Traditional Marketing:  Reach a broad and varied audience and make an impactful and long-lasting statement using traditional marketing methods.
  • Experiential Marketing:  Employ us to build brand awareness, generate leads, draw customers in, raise sales, and strengthen customer loyalty.

Recognise Your Market

Once your marketing objectives have been established, identify your target market or the customer base most likely to purchase your company’s goods or services. Making contact with your current clientele is one method to find this group. 

Calls, emails, online questionnaires, and face-to-face communications can all be used for this.

Small business owners manage their marketing initiatives in 47% of cases.

Find out what customers appreciate and what needs improvement about your company, its goods, and services. It is also your chance to collect demographic information about the age, gender, location, degree of education, size of household, and income of your target audience. Ensure your company is on customers’ channels to shop and find new businesses by asking about them.

Tips To Market Small Business:

  • Install the Google My Business app

The first step in making it easier for potential clients to find your business is to create a free Google My Business page. Adding your company’s contact details, opening hours, images, and a list of services only takes a few minutes.

In Google Ads Keyword Planner, 91.45% of search volumes are overestimated.

Another benefit is creating a Google business profile without a storefront. Additionally, analytics are included on your profile to assist you in better understanding how customers interact with your company.

  • Take a look at Google & Bing PPC advertisements

Employing pay-per-click (PPC) advertising platforms such as Microsoft Advertising or Google Adwords can also attract clients to your company. If you’re putting much effort into your SEO strategy but still need a little push, consider PPC advertising. About 45.22% of the time, Google Ads Keyword Planner is correct, and 54.28% of the time, it overestimates search volumes.

You can use Google AdWords or Microsoft Ads to use this search engine marketing strategy to appear as a promoted listing in search results.

Ensure your landing page is as optimised as possible before implementing PPC. You will lose advertising money if you pay for each click and the people who click on the page don’t convert.

  • Create Social Media Accounts

Pick social media channels that are appropriate to your company, easy to maintain, and used by the people who make up your target market. While 44% of businesses rely on social media for brand recognition, 41% of small businesses also use it to generate income. Despite this, social media is frequently solely appreciated for its ability to increase brand awareness. 74% of consumers base their shopping decisions on social media.

Additionally, you should set up company accounts on Yelp, Google, and other comparable websites.

These pointers can help you effectively manage your social media strategy:

  • Post top-notch pictures of your goods, staff behind-the-scenes photos, video narratives, and live conversations about your company.
  • Provide updates about forthcoming events along with unique and special deals.
  • Make time to answer DMs and comments.
  • For you to repost a customer’s review, ask them to tag your business account in their post regarding their interaction with you.
  • Use a content management platform such as Hootsuite, Sprout Social, or SocialPilot to handle all your social media accounts from one business.
  • Start campaigns for email marketing

Email marketing is an essential part of any comprehensive marketing plan despite the growth of social media. Effective email marketing can be inexpensive, with returns estimated to be about $36 for every $1 spent.

Make a strategy that takes into account the following information to make the most of this marketing channel:

  • Frequency: Weekly, bimonthly, monthly, or at a different interval. Additionally, allow recipients to select which emails from your company to receive and how often. 
  • Campaign type: The most appropriate email campaign type will depend on the information you wish to offer. Newsletters, drip marketing, product updates, reminders for abandoned carts, and discount notifications are a few examples. 
  • Email service provider: Well-known marketing software providers include MailChimp, HubSpot, ActiveCampaign, and Drip. 
  • Creating an email list: Use your current clientele, leads generated by your website or social media pages, and in-store sign-up forms.
  • Think about paid advertising

Online paid advertising comes in a variety of forms. Data shows that over half of businesses spend less than $10,000 on digital marketing annually. Furthermore, just 25% of companies invested between $10,001 and $100,000 in digital marketing annually, while 26% of organisations spent $100,000 or more. 

Standard techniques consist of:

  • Purchasing advertising space on social media sites, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
  • Investing in a podcast.
  • Collaborating with an influencer to advertise your goods or assistance on their channels.
  • Using pay-per-click advertising, you, up to a preset budget, are charged a fee each time a user clicks on your web advertisement.
  • Get Reviews from Satisfied Customers

Customer reviews are the last but most important category. While many review platforms forbid you from offering direct incentives for favourable evaluations, you can still invite satisfied clients to post reviews. If requested, 70% of clients will write a review. The ROI on obtaining reviews is evident when you consider that 74% of customers claim that reading favourable reviews increases their trust in local businesses.

Your email signature is a beautiful spot to get recommendations from clients if you communicate with them frequently. Since physical establishments sometimes have this luxury, printing a review request at the bottom of each receipt could be a similar tactic.

Types of Marketing For Your Small Business

A comprehensive small business marketing plan uses more than just internet marketing initiatives.

Traditional Marketing:

Conventional marketing techniques can attract customers from your neighbourhood, mainly if you operate a brick-and-mortar business and foot traffic is a significant source of monthly revenue. Some instances are:

  • Using letters, brochures, or postcards in direct mail operations.
  • Fairs, farmers markets, trade exhibits, and other occasions.
  • Print advertising includes billboards, periodicals, newspapers, and coupon books.
  • Use radio, television, and podcasts to spread advertisements.
  • Host a free open house at your store with complimentary snacks and merchandise.
  • Promotional products include tote bags, pens, and keychains.
  • Cards for the company and flyers.
  • Connecting with other business owners by becoming a member of local business associations.
  • Incentives for consumers who submit evaluations or testimonials, like flash sales, free trials, gifts, and discounts.

Experiential Marketing

Experiential marketing aims to build brand recognition and brand loyalty rather than just selling products. 47% of small business owners handle all aspects of their marketing. The intention is to give customers a pleasant brand experience that will motivate them to recommend you to their friends, family, coworkers, and social media followers.

Final Thought

Marketing is essential for small business owners who want to monitor return on investment and brand exposure.

Even though developing your internet presence will take time, every progress you make will significantly affect your company. These pointers offered some excellent starting points for promoting your local or client’s business. You can use a variety of additional marketing techniques to increase regional trade.

FAQ's

When is marketing necessary for my small business?

"Every time" is the response to that question. It is not possible to switch marketing on or off. Additionally, marketing must be seen as an investment rather than a cost. Engaging in marketing during slow business periods can trap you in a vicious loop.

Why is the process of marketing ongoing?

Effects of marketing take time to manifest. Getting something back up after it has been shut down can be challenging. Furthermore, you need more data from stopping and restarting marketing to determine whether anything is practical.

Does the success of my marketing efforts depend on having a marketing system?

If you want it to be effective, you must approach marketing as a process, a sequence of steps to accomplish your specific marketing objective. However, with a marketing system, your marketing campaign may be effective and balanced, yielding lower-than-expected outcomes.

Share this article

I hope you enjoy reading this blog post.

If you want my team at BrainsHub to help you get more Sales, just book a call.
Swipe up to get more traffic

I hope you enjoy reading this blog post.

If you want my team at BrainsHub to help you get more Sales, just book a call.