3 Marketing Tips to Grow Your Small Business

As a small business owner, you wear many hats. You’re not only the owner, but you have to handle all the marketing and are the lead (or only!) sales person. If your budget does not allow for the hiring of a dedicated marketing person, you could be missing out on some great opportunities to promote your business.

Luckily there are some strategies we can share that can help you that don’t need a large marketing budget and a great deal of time to allow you to reach the highest number of appropriate buyers.

To start with, a small business owner’s time is best spent executing targeted marketing campaigns. You need to reach the right customers at the right time.

You can develop a targeted, cost-effective marketing strategy by building a strategic plan using these three steps.

Know your audience

The better you know your audience, the better you will be able to market to them. Is age, income, sex or location a characteristic that is important to you? What do your current customers look like? This is quite likely what your future customers will look like too.

Once you’ve developed a profile for your ideal customer, you can target your marketing to customers that match that profile.

Personalize content

No two customers respond to your marketing content the same way. Depending where they are in the sales cycle, each customer needs to be targeted differently. A new customer will respond differently to a certain email subject line differently than a repeat or loyal customer.

It’s important for you to have different content for each stage of the sales funnel so your customers will respond the way you want them to. The Call-to-Action for each stage tells your customers what they need to do next and it should be different for new and repeat customers.

Use multiple channels

Don’t just find one way of marketing to customers and only use that. A good marketing campaign will implement several different channels to reach your customers in different ways. Use a combination of social media, email marketing, direct mail and display advertising to reach your customers. Based on your ideal customer profile, you will be able to determine which channels work best for your target audience.

Your customers need several touches from you before they will be ready to make a purchase.

The key is to identify your potential customers and choose the right content and channels through which to reach them to have a successful marketing campaign. With these pieces in place, an effective marketing strategy is possible.