Marketing for Small Business: 5 Ways to Market a Business

Small business marketing involves using a variety of tools and strategies to get a product or service in front of your target audience while staying on budget. Finding success in this area requires having a good marketing strategy or marketing plan, as well as low-cost and clever marketing tactics.

Small business owners have many marketing tools and marketing channels at their disposal when planning their marketing strategy. Entrepreneurs and small business owners can use any of these methods with any marketing budget to help them reach their target market or create more brand awareness for a business.

1. 1. Affiliate marketing: With this marketing strategy, business team up with third parties to advertise their products. A company will pay affiliate partners for each lead, visitor, referral, or sale they bring to the business—depending on their agreement.
2. 2. Content marketing: With this method, you can provide various types of content—text, video, and audio content—to engage potential customers. Examples of content marketing include advertising memes, entertaining videos, podcasts, and blog entries.
3. 3. Digital marketing: With digital marketing, an internet marketing strategy, you can engages new customers through omnichannel online advertising. This includes search engine marketing (SEM), which displays a service or product through purchased ad space when an internet user searches for something similar, as well as search engine optimization (SEO) which boosts a business’s presence on search engine results pages.
4. 4. Email marketing: Often companies prompt website visitors to sign up for their newsletters. This method, known as email marketing, allows businesses to spread awareness of their brand to their subscribers. You can use emails to promote upcoming events, offer subscriber-only discounts and sales, and build community around your brand. Create an effective marketing strategy to drive customer engagement. Many email service providers (ESPs)—companies that allow you to build email lists, craft emails with templates, and use automation to send them—offer services to make starting an email marketing campaign accessible and affordable.
5. 5. Social media marketing: Even if you have little to no budget, social media marketing is an accessible tool. You can create social media posts to target audiences in real-time. Mounting marketing campaigns across different social media profiles can result in drawing in new users and building engagement with followers in a personalized way.

Small business marketing can be difficult when you’re on a tight budget or are just getting started. Consider the following marketing tips to help your new business or local business grow.

1. 1. Conduct market research. Pinpointing your potential customers will allow you to determine how to best reach them. While you can conduct market research on your own, you can also hire a professional market research company to help you through this process.
2. 2. Gift products. Especially as you start up a brand, gifting products to bloggers or other influential people can help get your name out there if they decide to review your items. This is not the most cost-effective method but can build momentum as you start out.
3. 3. Identify competitors. To help you stand out, you must have a keen understanding of your competitors. Not only will it allow you to see how your products and services compare to others in the same space, it also gives you an opportunity to learn what methods work for them. For example, by studying your competition, you can learn if they do use online marketing or traditional advertising, how much they charge, how their landing pages appear, and more. All of this can inform your own business strategies.
4. 4. Link up with other professionals. The best inventors and business visionaries aren't necessarily the best product marketers. So rather than task yourself with something that you're not naturally skilled at, enlist the services of a product marketing manager. At the very least, use online tools that can help you reach your target customers. Various services can help you establish and maintain an email list. Take advantage of online targeted ad services as well.
5. 5. Stay on brand. Remain consistent in your messaging so that your audience understands who you are and what your company offers. Devote time to thinking about how you want your brand to appear to consumers. Come up with brand guidelines so that your visuals and wording remain the same. For example, if you start off with a friendly, casual tone, your customer base might find it jarring if you switch to something more serious and educational.

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