There are billions of small businesses operating in the United States. Coming from all different industries and backgrounds, these small businesses vary in many, many ways.

However, there’s one thing that all of these small businesses have in common. They all need marketing. Regardless of what industry a small business is in or how much competition it has, it absolutely needs customers, and unfortunately, customers don’t just appear out of nowhere.

Customers come to your business because they heard about you one way or another. Whether they heard about you from an advertisement, your sign out front or even from a friend or coworker, it’s all marketing.

Marketing can be a big, scary concept, but it’s a lot less complicated than you might think. From providing excellent customer service to asking for testimonials, there are many ways that you might already be marketing your business without even knowing it.

It’s important to realize that marketing doesn’t have to be complicated. Today, I’d like to break down a few of the marketing basics to help you get started.

The basics of small business marketing

Website

Did you know that 36% of small business owners (more than a third!) still don’t have a small business website? Of those small businesses without a website, 41% said they don’t need a website, 35% said their businesses were too small to warrant a website and 29% said they were planning on building a website in 2021 (TDA).

The truth is that no matter how small your business is or what industry you’re in, you need a website. It’s rare for people to use a phonebook or to ask a friend when looking for even a local business these days. And, when they look online, you want your business to have a presence.

While your business can (and should) have a presence in multiple places throughout the web, you need a central hub for your business to call home, and that’s your small business website.

Whether someone finds your business in a Google search or on a local directory, they’re going to want to learn more about your business, and to do that, they’re going to visit your website.

Make sure that your website is modern and professional, and that it has all of the functionality your customers expect, such as online booking, a payment gateway where they can pay invoices or make purchases and easy-to-build website forms for collecting customer information.

Content marketing

Building a small business website is the first step toward building an online presence for your business. But, you’re not done yet. Having a website alone isn’t enough.

Your website can only ever be as effective as it is visible. Think about it. If no one sees your website, it really doesn’t matter what it looks like or what kind of features it has. To be successful, you need to work on ways to make your website visible. One of the best ways is content marketing and SEO (search engine optimization).

68% of online experiences begin with a search engine (BrightEdge). When someone searches for keywords relevant to your business (i.e. “plumber near me” or “women’s shoe store Denver”), you want your business to show up, preferably near the top of page one of the search results.

Creating ongoing content for your website, social media profiles and other marketing channels, as well as optimizing your website for search engines, will help to improve your visibility on search engines and drive organic traffic to your website.

Ads

While SEO and content marketing are both great options for increasing your small business’s visibility online, they have their limitations. For one, building organic success won’t happen overnight, and a page-one ranking today won’t necessarily be a page-one ranking tomorrow.

A faster and more surefire way to drive traffic to your website is advertising.

The digital advertising bucket is vast, and it includes everything from search ads on Google to Facebook ads, YouTube ads, Instagram ads and more. But, no matter what channel you’re advertising on, you can do more by targeting the right audience.

Not every consumer is going to want or need what you have to offer, and it’s a waste of your advertising budget to pursue them. Smart advertising is not only about being visible where your customers are looking, but also about making sure that your message gets in front of the right audience.

With targeted, multi-channel advertising campaigns, small businesses can capture market share and drive high-quality leads for less.

Reputation management

Consumers have a lot of options these days. Why would they want to settle for working with a company that doesn’t value its customers or has provided less-than-ideal service in the past?

They wouldn’t. That’s why most consumers do research before deciding to shop with a brand they’ve never purchased from before or to work with a new local business by reading reviews.

89% of consumers worldwide will make an effort to read reviews before making a purchase, and 3 out of 4 shoppers say they trust online reviews just as much as they trust personal recommendations from friends or family (Oberlo).

Reading reviews gives consumers peace of mind about their purchasing decisions. Having reviews for your business helps to build that much-needed trust that turns consumers into customers.

Consistently requesting reviews will help you build up your reputation, but you should also make it a point to manage and respond to your reviews to show your customers that you’re listening. Reputation management has become essential for successful small businesses.

Social media marketing

The most effective place to market your business is wherever your prospective customers are spending the majority of their time. And, with 3.5 billion daily active users, social media is a powerful place to market your business (Oberlo).

Social media used to be about connecting with old friends and staying in touch, but these days, people use social media for so much more, including finding new local businesses and discovering new brands.

57% of consumers will follow a brand to learn about new products or services, while 47% will follow a brand to stay up to date on company news. After following a brand on social media, 91% of users will visit their website or app, 89% will buy from them and 85% will recommend them to a family or friend (Sprout Social).

Consistency is an important part of building a strong social media presence, but it can be difficult to post consistently when you already have so much on your plate.

Social media scheduling tools, like Marketing 360® Social, allow you to schedule out social posts for the day, week or month ahead of time, helping to free up your time each day and ensuring a consistent posting schedule.

CRM

Too often, small business owners focus all of their marketing efforts on new customers instead of focusing on the customers they have.

The fact of the matter is that, while new customers are great, marketing to them costs a whole lot more and they are willing to spend less than your existing customers. You can maximize your ROI and get more out of your marketing efforts by focusing on building strong customer relationships.

For better, more effective customer relationship management, you need a small business CRM that’s customizable for your needs and scalable for future growth.

The right CRM can help you manage all of your customers, projects and more from one place. It gives you a single place to organize key customer data that all of the necessary people within your organization can access.

Listings management

People search for local businesses in all kinds of different ways. Some will search on Google or Bing, while others will go to a review site, like Top Rated Local®, or a local directory, like Angie’s List.

Wherever consumers in your area are looking for what you have to offer, you want to make sure that your business is listed, and that the business information consumers find there is correct and up to date.

An effective listings management strategy is about making sure that your business is listed anywhere and everywhere potential customers in your area are looking, and that your listings are updated and consistent.

With dozens of potential places where your business could be listed, managing them all one by one is simply untenable. Marketing 360 Listings allows you to control them all from one place, in minutes.

Email and text message marketing

If you want to get the most out of your marketing efforts, you need to work on increasing the maximum lifetime value of your customers. The more value you can get out of your customers, the less you’ll have to spend on marketing to new customers.

Email marketing is a fantastic way to stay connected with your customers. Through email marketing, you can ask for feedback after a purchase or service, recommend additional products or services, send out curated offers and more.

Another awesome way to stay connected with your customers is through text message marketing. Text messages are often read right away, making them ideal for reminding customers about upcoming appointments, sending out time-sensitive offers and updating customers about any applicable changes.

With Marketing 360 Nurture, you can create and send out automated professional email and text message marketing campaigns from one place.

Performance monitoring

From getting new customers in the door to building long-lasting relationships with existing customers, marketing is a must for every small business. However, not every marketing strategy is made equal.

Sometimes, the problem with a marketing strategy is something big, like marketing on the wrong channel or targeting the wrong audience, but sometimes, it’s something small, like using the wrong verbiage or publishing ads at the wrong time.

In order to create an effective marketing strategy for your business, you need to know what’s working for you and what’s not. The last thing you want is to sink your money into a strategy that’s not getting results.

It’s important to monitor your marketing performance on a regular basis, so that you’re always in the know about how well you’re performing. By staying on top of your performance, you’ll be able to make data-driven decisions about where to put your marketing budget and what your strategy should look like.

---

Marketing 360 is a singular platform that has everything you need to master the marketing basics and grow your business. See our plans and pricing.