Creating a Successful Small Business Marketing Strategy

The biggest challenge many small business owners face with marketing is the lack of a marketing strategy. They tend to try a bunch of things like throwing spaghetti on a wall to see what sticks. However, this approach may get a client or two but you are not going to see the ROI you’d like to see. Your marketing approach should be more holistic. Most importantly, you should have a marketing plan in place that effectively reaches your target audience. A successful marketing strategy will incorporate content that reaches your target customer via multiple channels. However, most small business owners aren’t sure how to write a marketing strategy.

How to Write a Marketing Strategy for Small Business

An effective marketing strategy for your small business will focus on your business goals. It should incorporate both traditional marketing and digital marketing with the bulk of your focus on the digital side. A digital marketing strategy should be holistic and incorporate the channels that both work within your marketing budget but also work with your target audience. Once you have a strategy, then you can focus on building your first inbound marketing campaign tied to sales and revenue goals.

At a minimum, the marketing strategy for your small business should contain the elements outlined here.

Your Target Audience – Buyer Personas

Part of your marketing plan will include identifying your audience. Once you have a good understanding of your ideal customer, you should develop your buyer personas. A buyer persona is basically a fictional character you create based on your ideal customer profile. When creating your buyer personas, you should include customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. The more detailed you are, the better.

Social Media Marketing

Many small owners focus a lot on social media because it’s free. Social Media Marketing should be a big part of your marketing plan. However, infrequent posting, poor content and a confusing brand message can sabotage your social media efforts. Many business owners feel like they need to post on all the social networks. However, it’s more important to post on the channel that your audience is engaging with. For example, if your target is middle-aged men, then posting on Pinterest is not going to help with your revenue goals. You may need to focus your energies on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. If you are B2B focused, LinkedIn may be the best social network to consider. The social media platforms work via an algorithm so your message is not always distributed effectively. Therefore, including Facebook ads will improve your reach.

Website

At the core of every online marketing strategy should be a well designed, search optimized website. Your website should be user-friendly and accessible. It should also be centered around your brand and showcase your product or service. When planning your website design, it’s critical that it be responsive and designed with mobile devices in mind. Most importantly, you should install the code for Google Analytics so that you can measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts as many of your campaigns will push traffic to your website.

Search Engine Marketing

One category that many business owners fail to utilize is search marketing. Now that you have a website, you should incorporate SEO and SEM. SEO is search engine optimization. This is the process of optimizing your web pages so that the search engines will list you in their search results. Another way of getting traffic from search engines is with paid search marketing. Google Adwords is a great way to drive targeted traffic to your site. Google Analytics can help you measure your KPIs such as click-through rate or unique visitors so that you can measure your effectiveness.

Content Marketing

But wait, what do you put on your website? Once you have a website and an SEO plan in place, it’s important to also include content marketing. A good content marketing strategy can be very effective at driving traffic to your website through the numerous channels you’ve included in your marketing plan such as social media. Remember, traffic converts to sales.

Email Marketing

Along with content marketing, it’s important to grow your email list and implement an email marketing strategy. You can utilize the content you’ve created and push that content out to a captive audience through email. The advantage of email over social media is that you own your list and have control over which content and how frequently it is shared with them.

Marketing Budget

Now that you’ve aligned your company goals with your marketing goals, you’ll need to identify your marketing budget. Most companies budget 2-10% of their gross revenue for marketing and advertising. If you are focused on local advertising and/or looking for conservative growth, 2% is a good starting point but if you are driving for rapid growth on a national or international scale, you’ll want to budget closer to the 10%. 

Source: https://www.lsainsider.com/smbs-will-spend-83-billion-on-digital-marketing-services-this-year/archives

At this point, your head may be spinning and you might wonder how you are going to reach all your marketing goals without an expensive CMO to manage it all. This is where Firefly Digital Marketing can help.

Firefly will analyze your current marketing efforts, get to know your audience, and propose the most appropriate, budget-conscious marketing mix to give you that competitive advantage. We will make custom-tailored recommendations, help you implement them, and monitor your progress along the way.

If you’re a startup, small business, or a large organization, Firefly can help you clarify your marketing message, increase your brand awareness and help you reach your potential customers through the appropriate marketing channels with a good marketing strategy that will guide you in creating campaigns that work.

Leave It To The Experts: Should You Outsource Your Marketing? – Forbes

So what are you waiting on? Book a free consultation today to see if we might be a good fit. We’d love to work with you.