Quick Essential Tips for Marketing Your Small Business

If you’ve recently forayed out into small business ownership, congrats! It’s scary but can be incredibly fulfilling when successful. To help you on your way, we’ve gathered some quick and handy Tips for Marketing Your Small Business

• Budgets and plans for less stress
• Things you can do for free
• Next steps

Don’t get lost in the niche, read on and see how you can start marketing yourself and your small business…

Marketing is an essential task for early-stage businesses. It’s all about brand awareness and getting your company and brand name known, make a splash in the local area and get those sales rolling in. It’s not an easy task, but the end result of you being your own boss and financially independent is super satisfying.

The problem is, most small businesses don’t have a large budget to play with, and it can be hard to find the best value options, so read on for some advice.

Budgets and plans for less stress

Managing your own business is a stressful thing, so why add to it by only getting involved in reactive marketing? Keeping track of your spending can reduce your stress as well.

Reactive tactics are where you market on an ad hoc basis. There’s no plan, you simply decide to post an ad or do some social media marketing based on your current sales and stats or what a competitor is doing. It’s not ideal.

Research shows that those with a budget of around 5-7% of their turnover invested in marketing their business perform better than those who don’t. Considering that could be a relatively small amount of cash, you need to plan how best to use it to get a good return on investment (ROI). First, you need to understand what marketing is. It’s not just there to build awareness, it’s there to offer and create value for your customers and brand. Don’t focus on saving a few pence here and there, you should instead be strategic with your marketing and invest in the best channels for your business.

The best thing to do is to invest your defined budget in targeted, customer-appropriate marketing channels across the whole year. Plan every month and prepare to reduce your stress. Doing this will allow you to track the key performance indicators (KPIs) and see how your budget is translating into sales and awareness. Then, and only then, you can change your marketing strategy if things aren’t performing as you expected.

Things you can do for free

Marketing doesn’t have to have a high cost or any cost at all apart from your time. No one knows your business as you do, and you’re likely an expert in your products and services, so you should be capitalizing on that. Here are some Tips for Marketing Your Small Business which include in your marketing and content strategy that cost nothing but time:

1. Content Marketing

As long as you have the skills to write and create to a satisfactory standard, why shouldn’t you be creating content to use in B2B and B2C marketing?

Blogs –

write and post relevant blogs on your website which use your products and services as examples to show your audiences how you can help. Back this up by sharing them across social media and in your newsletters to spread the word and get the best ROI.

Videos –

more time-consuming, but both younger and older audiences adore videos. They could be trending TikTok videos or how-to videos – share them across your communications to get the most views.

Infographics and imagery –

these are pieces of shareable content that are ideal for use on social media. These infographics and images can be reposted by others and shared across the internet. It could be a good idea to include your logo and website somewhere like a footnote as a reference for new viewers.

Outreach articles –

This involves writing an industry-focused piece as if from an objective perspective, then hiding a link to your site or product within. You can then pitch this to other websites to ask if they’d post it for free. This one is more about SEO and building your Domain Authority with Google, but it costs nothing but time and effort.

2. Social Media

If you’re not on social, you’re missing out on valuable opportunities to speak and connect with your audience. It’s considered an essential customer service platform for many, and there are options for everyone, so get signed up and start posting relevant content using hashtags, trends, and shareable content. Don’t forget to include evergreen content in your social media plan as well – this is content that has no time limit and can be posted and shared forever – it’s relevant forever and works to sustain your traffic long-term.

What’s more, once signed up, you’ll be able to keep an eye on active and upcoming trends through social listening. This is the practice of looking through industry-related hashtags and conversations to find new themes and recognise any interest in products or services. It’s kind of like the social media version of keyword research.

3. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

This one is only applicable if you look after your website personally. Whether you’ve gone through a website redesign or not, there are ways to boost your Search Engine Results Page (SERP) position by making Google happy. There are four things to consider with SEO:

Technical –

this is ensuring your site is technically correct with no error messages. You should make sure all your H1 header tags are identified, all your metadata includes all your relevant keywords and are the right length, having a site map of all your content certainly help as well.

Linking –

making sure all your content links in-site are accurate and up to date helps Google search your site more efficiently. You should also monitor other sites that are linking to yours to check for any toxic or low authority links which can reduce your rankings. Moz has a handy guide all about this.

Content –

this should be taken care of with your content marketing, but it’s about showing you’re active and keeping things updated or keyword optimised.

Social and reviews –

any linked social media accounts will be monitored by Google as well, so keep these updated and engage your audience. Similarly, Google likes to see reviews associated with your business, so encourage people to leave you one.

Next steps

The above is all online marketing, but you shouldn’t forget your offline presence. Even if you don’t have a storefront and are an online shop, you still have offline opportunities to consider.

For example, when someone makes a purchase, your small business packaging and labelling is part of your marketing too. They say a lot about your business, so why not make it tactile and personalised with branded stickers or stamps? You could even consider using eco-friendly packaging to reflect your customer’s values and make it a pleasure to unwrap.

The main takeaway here is that planning and budgeting are essential to reduce stress and put you in control of your marketing. Without them, it could be reactive, uncoordinated and ineffective, so do your research, spend time on the low-cost things you can, and make valuable connections with your audience.

Author Bio:-

Jack Teare is the Head of Content at Affinity Agency

Featured Image Courtesy: Pixabay