Top 5 Marketing Tips for Small Businesses [2021]

Introduction

Introduction to Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

Marketing for small businesses is so much more than simply owning a nice storefront and flying posters. With the rise of digital marketing, small businesses are increasingly expected to create an inspiring brand, have an active social media presence, and design the perfect customer experience. These demands of the digital area can be overwhelming, which is why we've compiled these five tips on how to market your small business.

Tip 1: Designing Your Brand

The moment you create an idea for a small business, you have an amazing opportunity to build a brand from the ground up. Though creating an entirely new brand requires a lot of foresight and responsibility, it also allows you to create one synonymous brand where everything fits in its place. Because your brand is the most essential component of your marketing strategy, it's important to get it right.

The most important things to consider when creating your brand are simplicity and consistency. Your mission statement, your vision, and your values should all relate to and build off of each other. If you have too many competing ideas, you will confuse your customers and you won't have a strong brand. When you decide what you want your brand to be, make sure to answer these three questions:

1. Who are we

2. What is our purpose

3. What do we value

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Tip 2: Know Your Audience

Now that you know what your brand is, you need to know who you're marketing yourself to. Knowing your target audience helps you create ads that appeal to your ideal customers, making them more likely to engage with your content and increase potential sales.

You can segment your audience based on their demographics (i.e. they're age, gender, income, etc.), their interests, their purchasing habits, their attitudes, or a combination of all of the above. Many platforms like Google, Facebook, and Instagram can easily target users based on these characteristics so that your content appears to the people who are most likely to engage with it. This information allows you to create multiple social media marketing campaigns, thus making your digital marketing strategies more effective.

Tip 3: Create a Professional Online Presence

Since 97% of people learn about small businesses online more than anywhere else, having a professional online presence is crucial to increasing website traffic and sales. Having a trendy and easy-to-navigate website is essential. If your website is difficult to browse or is visually unappealing, people will believe that your business is less credible and won't want to take the time to navigate your complicated website layout. You want to make visiting your website both enjoyable and easy.

Beyond your website itself, all other forms of social media including your Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn should be kept up-to-date and should represent your brand. It's important to create business accounts for all of your social media profiles because this makes your business appear more legitimate and allows you to track user engagement. Post relevant content, customer testimonials, and promotions regularly to keep your audience engaged.

We at Stiddle understand that navigating social media marketing can be difficult, which is why our mission is to simplify digital marketing while making it accessible and affordable for all businesses. Using our machine learning algorithm, we can create the perfect Facebook and Instagram ads for you and your social media marketing campaign. If you don't see results within the initial 7-day trial period, we will extend your free trial, no questions asked.

Tip 4: Market Smarter

Good digital marketing isn't cheap. What good digital marketing is about is spending your budget wisely. Services like Google Ads charge you based on how many clicks your ads receive. If those clicks don't convert into sales, then you will be wasting your marketing budget. You have to make sure that you are strategic about who you display your ads to and how you can convert engagement into sales.

Beyond targeting the right audience, you also want to ensure that you display your ads to people in the right location at the right time. If you're a local restaurant, it would be illogical for your ads to appear to someone who lives across the country. You can even make your approach hyper-local, advertising your brand to people within your business's immediate proximity.

Additionally, you don't want to advertise your content at hours when your business is closed. Going back to the restaurant example, if your business is open from noon till midnight, then showing advertisements in the early morning when customers can't purchase from you isn't strategic. Some platforms like Google Ads allow you to choose when and where you display your ads so you can spend your marketing budget wisely.

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Tip 5: Encourage Organic Marketing

Our last tip about marketing is to encourage your customers to market your business. You want to turn your loyal customers into brand advocates. The best way to encourage organic marketing is to create a strong customer success strategy. Simply put, you have to create a positive customer experience.

Some simple steps to creating a good customer success strategy are to have a good customer support team who can easily respond to customer queries so that the customer experience is easy and enjoyable (you can read more about our tips on customer success management here). Additionally, to encourage your customers to post positive reviews of your business, you can create promotions or a loyalty program for answering survey questions and posting reviews. By putting the customer at the heart of every decision your business makes, you will be able to create a loyal customer base.

Conclusion

Starting a new business leaves you with limitless opportunities on how to market your brand. You can build everything from your brand to your marketing strategy from the ground up, granting you the freedom to make your business exactly as how you envision it. By following these simple steps we've outlined for you, you will be on the right track to building your dream brand.

Stiddle - aims to bring you inspiration from leading respected marketing experts.