Small Business Marketing Strategy: How to Get Started
Every small business owner deserves access to marketing that’s going to show them results. Marketing is not one size fits all and that’s the foundation I used to build Offset Marketing.
How would you describe your company? Is it a tech startup or a B2B enterprise? Or maybe you run a local restaurant or a boutique clothing store? Whatever type of business you run, chances are you want to attract new customers, increase sales, and improve brand awareness.
When I went looking for top recommendations for small business marketing, I came up with this list:
Create a business website
Leverage social media
Advertise
Network
I think the same people make TikToks claiming “it only takes $8 to start a small business” or “do these three things to create growth.”
These can all be essential elements, but it’s not a holistic look at marketing a small business. These lists or promises don’t take into account all the work you need to do to get to the point of launching a product or making sales. A holistic approach to incredible results includes knowing your ideal customer, building visibility, creating content that your audience will want to have, and prepping that audience to be ready for your promotion.
Are you set up for failure?
The majority of small businesses fail within five years. Most of those businesses are not profitable because they lack a strategic marketing plan. They fail to realize that without a comprehensive marketing strategy, they cannot effectively reach out to customers. Without reaching out to customers, they cannot grow their brand. Without growing their brand, they cannot generate revenue. And without generating revenue, they cannot sustain themselves.
In fact, according to research conducted by Forrester Consulting, nearly half of all small businesses fail within five to seven years. This is why it is important to develop a well-thought-out marketing strategy. You want to make sure that you are doing everything possible to ensure success.
Why Is Marketing Important?
Marketing is essential to any good business. Without it, your business will never make money. You must know what type of customers you want to attract, and then you must find ways to communicate with those people. If you don't do either of those things, your business will fail.
But marketing isn't just about getting your name out there. There are lots of ways to market your business, and each way has its place depending on your budget and goals.
The key is finding the best mix of methods that works for you.
Marketing strategy is what drives results and this is what it looks like:
Create visibility - making sure you have the right eyes on all your different marketing platforms and establishing your business as an authority with your ideal target audience.
Understanding your ideal target audience - knowledge like where they buy, how they buy, and what they’re looking for to solve their problems will allow you to talk directly to your potential customers and connect with them.
Discover what excites your potential customers - once you have an understanding of what excites your target markets and keep them engaged you can create content that will speak directly to them.
Customer journey - knowing exactly how to push your ideal customer through the buying process to help them make a decision effortlessly.
So let's get your time back!
If you're trying to market yourself on your own for your new business, it can all seem too overwhelming. It may take some time for you to get used to using these tools. So let's start by answering some basic marketing questions, and then we can use that to either guide or market our efforts or to develop a more detailed plan. If you follow our simple strategy for creating content, it’ll help you jumpstart your creative juices. First, answer the questions in your marketing strategy the most succinctly so that you can refer back to them when creating any type of marketing content for your company.
We've helped dozens of businesses achieve success by using these methods, from small startups to large companies. So this is a good place to start when investing in yourself by starting out with some free content creation. You can use this template to complete the PDF, answer the question, and save it for future reference. If there's anything else we haven't covered here, feel free to ask us any questions in our Offset Marketing Coaching program.
A good marketing strategy requires a lot of work. Creating one takes a great deal of effort. But it pays off big time. As we mentioned earlier, you want to make sure that your marketing strategy is complete so that you or your marketing team can continue to use it for reference. Otherwise, you won't be able to achieve your goals.