Looking for marketing ideas for small business that you can deploy to make your business enterprise stand out?
It is a known fact that small businesses frequently struggle to make a mark against their competitors due to tight budgets and limited time.
However, with creative thinking and some form of innovation, some folks have come up with some attractive and inspiring ways to gain visibility and market their businesses.
In this post, we have 25 of the top marketing ideas for small business that will help you stand your business out and make it one to remember.
Table of Contents
1. Optimize Your Website’s Online Presence for More Traffic
The first among the tried and tested marketing ideas for small business is to create a website that showcases your product or service. Then optimize it for prospects, your customers should not see your competitors’ websites first before yours when they search on Google for your market keyword.
If you don’t have expertise in website optimization, then try Valuecoast Solutions, a digital marketing agency, to optimize your website’s organic Google ranking and increase site traffic.
Valuecoast Solutions will first do a free analysis to let you know if they can work with your specific business. They will send you a report to informing you about your rating and that of your competitors with respect to relevant Google keywords.
Then you will know which keywords will work best for your small business. They will develop a targeted PPC campaign, and report progress back to you on a monthly basis.
2. Hire an Expert to Market Your Business on Social Media
After optimizing your website for more traffic, here you are simply using the services of an expert to advertise and market your products and/or services. This will ensure that you focus on the very essence of your business while a pro does the marketing and bring in the needed sales.
You can get a select few offering this service around you that also specialize in supporting small businesses or you get this done using Fiverr or Upwork. Valuecoast Solutions offers social campaign creation, management, and monitoring, and will even run your social advertising campaigns.
As a full-service digital solutions provider, we also offer website design, search engine marketing, and optimization, display advertising, digital listings management and other services that will boost your online presence. Click here to get in touch with us today.
3. Give Out Free Samples of Your Products
As a business owner, giving out a sample or free trial of your products and services to customers should never be underestimated. However, while it’s not advisable for a company into furniture making to give away a free sofa to examine if a customer will like it, giving free fabric samples is a great way for the potential buyer to gauge if the physical fabric looks the same in person and if it would fit with their décor.
This might just be the difference between them putting in a high-value order or not shopping with you at all. Likewise, if you are a service provider, offer a free trial to clients to give them a taste of how valuable your services can be to their lives or business.
4. Your Business Should Maximize Video Marketing
Video marketing is one tip you can’t do without. Nowadays, with the advent of sophisticated mobile phones, it’s low cost to do. As a leader in your marketplace, industry or location, you can leverage your expertise to develop a lasting relationship with your prospect. This can influence them to action and cut down the buyer cycle much faster.
If your sale is more complex and expensive, you will need more time to school your prospect. If your services are less complex or expensive, the faster you can convert to a sale.
Like I said earlier, you don’t need professional equipment to produce professional-looking videos. All you need is your mobile phone if it has a very good camera quality. Just placed it on a stand or tripod and begin to flex your muscles while practicing your video skills.
Although it takes time to produce, then you can really educate and engage your prospects more effectively than just writing on a page. If you are not camera-friendly, software like Camtasia will help you with a voice over and PowerPoint presentation. or better still, use a whiteboard or animated explainer videos.
5. Repurpose Your Content
This is simply recycling and repurposing your content to increase return on investment. To recycle your content simply mean you updating a popular post. For example, take one of your most popular posts from 2017, update it with new, relevant information and republish it.
Also, you repurpose content by producing the same content in different formats and posting. For instance, take an article and create a video or podcast using the same information. Recycling and repurposing content stretches return on investment.
6. Email Marketing Should be a Part of your Business
Email marketing which involves growing and nurturing an email list is very vital to small businesses. This is not only for short-term sales — which is tremendous — but also for the long-term growth of your business enterprise.
You must come up with different ways to encourage opt-ins to your list — from your website with lead magnets in the form of either eBook, cheat sheet or templates offers for subscribing to your blog. This will enable you to build a lasting relationship with them using tools like MailChimp or Aweber.
7. Ensure Your Website Never Has Down-Time
Having a website today for your business is one of the critical success factors and should be a no brainer. When building your website, here are the things you should consider; your website load time and response to your site visitors.
Business owners who use Siteground for their web hosting services have no limitations on the size of files on their site and enjoy unmetered bandwidth and 99.9% up-time. With Siteground you’ll be able to create and use unlimited business email addresses as the need arises and have access to constant technical support — starting at less than $3/month. Click here to get started.
8. Have Product Demos for your Marketing
Product demos or Demonstrations are possibly the best way to give a potential shopper a true sense of the value your product or service will provide for them.
This ensures your offering is real and tangible and can regularly add a human element in an otherwise cold selling environment like the Internet. Clients love doing business with real humans!
Demos come in various forms or formats. Examples include walkthroughs, screenshots, free time-limit trials, live videoconferences, recorded videos, free membership levels with upselling and free samples. Simply use your imagination!
Once your demo is created, decide on usage and place it on your website. Or send as a follow-up to those that made the request via your website. This should be a part of your customer journey to experience the perceived value of your product.
9. Gather, Store and Utilize Customer Data
Data never lies. Meaningful marketing data at your disposal can help you make inform decisions. Strategically collect data by tracking your activities via blog articles, landing pages, emails, and social media campaigns with the help of tools like Google Analytics. Analyze the data to figure out trends and interesting facts such as;
- who are your visitors,
- where they are located,
- their demographics,
- what are your drop-offs and,
- what is being liked by your users
You can get feedback from your most loyal customers by asking them what they like the most about your product and/or service. From their feedback, highlight those points on your landing pages and campaigns. This will help you to build a winning small business marketing strategy.
10. Set Up a Messenger Chatbot on Facebook
Messenger Chatbots offers a great opportunity for small businesses to excel due to the low barrier to entry and affordable setup. This messenger chatbot utilizes the Facebook platform to allow you to automate and engage prospects in a unique way.
Chatbots allow you to offer instant replies to your customers’ queries and questions. The most interesting aspect is that you can build blocks of triggers to answer anything that can be automated. You can use chatbots to educate your prospects, sell your products, take bookings, and much more.
ManyChat and Chatfuel are the two most popular tools for building chatbots on Facebook, and both offer a freemium business model with free access to the majority of services with upgrades for pro features.
Once prospects opt in to your list, you can then nurture them with updates and your business educational including other announcements to increase customer retention and the open rates.
Facebook message open rate is greatly higher than those of email marketing campaigns. Having a chatbot that solves a specific pain point for your consumers can be a great way to boost your business potentials.
11. Write Guest Posts for Publications
Writing articles to a various online and offline site is a great way of raising business awareness for your services as well as establishing yourself as a thought leader in your industry.
In today’s digital world, where content is king even the large media outlets like Entrepreneurs.com, Huffington Post, Forbes, and others are hungry for content these days and often very eager to accept contributed content regularly.
So, as a business owner, you should strive to offer to write articles for both local media outlets as well as national trade and business publications.
12. Start Live Streaming Workplace Activities
Having your business do live streaming of her workplace activities to connect with prospects and Audiences is what is expected as the most audience likes to interact with brands online as real as possible.
Live streaming through media like Facebook Live or YouTube Live or even through Instagram Stories give small businesses an easy way to network with current and prospective clients on the cheap.
The most effective live streams from small businesses involve how-to or “how it’s made”-style videos about your products, behind-the-scenes sneak peeks with new products or covering a local event live. This builds a bond with your audience by giving value with your content that, in turn, promotes your business.
13. Get Your Business Involved in Charity
Your business should be involved in corporate social responsibility and/or charity or just cause your business enterprise feels passionate about.
A potential client may choose to do business with you over going to somewhere else specifically because to them, they are helping or contributing to the cause. Plus, your business enterprise will become known for giving back to society.
Charity services are the best way to get free publicity in your community. The act of Kindness is effective and also free.
14. Advertise on Bing for Less Than Google
One of the best ways to market your small business venture is through paid adverts. This is simply paying to get your business website to appear at the search engine results top page for unique keywords relevant to your business.
Perhaps, you want to reach a new and large audience, considering search engine advertising on Bing with Microsoft Advertising is the way to go. Businesses naturally use Google for this type of advertising due to the fact that it’s the most popular search engine.
This tells you that there is far more competition for clicks. But you can advertise the same keyword or search term on Bing for a far lesser price and capture quality traffic that does not only searches on Bing, but other websites like Yahoo, NBC, and AOL powered by Bing.
You will get an ad credit of $100 When you sign up and spend your first $25 on Microsoft Ads. Click here to get started.
15. Create Content That Solves Your Customers’ Problem
Valuable content has been one of the ways we get clients and generate revenue for our business. The biggest mistake your business will make is to create content that is salesy. You should focus and write content that actually solves your readers’ pain point or adds value to them.
Don’t concern yourself with giving away any guarded secrets you think you have — just concentrate on providing value and helping your audience. Each time you create a post before you hit the publish button. Just sit back and ask yourself this question – “Does this post solves a problem?”
Another mistake most small business owner makes when creating content is that they set unrealistic goals which will lead to them giving up too early. Note, Inbound marketing is a long-term commitment that comes with huge payoff afterward.
16. Partner with Influencers
Another key idea among the marketing ideas for small business is marketing through Influencers. This is very effective and may lead to great exposure and rock-hard conversions. These are celebrities, thought leaders, industry experts, etc.,
who have hundreds of thousands if not millions of followers on social media. Most of these influencers have a very loyal following and a much higher engagement rate.
To partner with an influencer will approximately cost between $100 and $1000 depending on the nature of your promotion.
So, depending on the type of promotion you want to go for like a product review, article or product demo and your preferred medium such as an influencer’s blog only, across selected social media channels and so on, the costing will vary.
Therefore, your focus is to make sure that the Influencer has a high engagement rate, which implies that many people always like, comment, and shares the influencer’s posts.
17. Host a Meetup Event
This works better with physical outlet. The idea is to host a gathering irrespective of the nature of business. It always makes sense if the focus of the hangout or meet up relates to the focus of your business.
You can invite an industry expert to chair such meeting, answer questions and ensure the conversation momentum is flowing. If done strategically, there is bound be truly engaged prospects walking through your doors, which indeed are the best type of potential customers.
18. Never Underestimate the Power of Localized Marketing
Localized marketing aids to spread the word of your small business in the local and surrounding environment. Like ripples in a pond, your business reputation for quality services or products will begin to spread to wider communities
Therefore, encourage your clientele to put their money where their house is and buy things locally.
Whether this is taking out an advertisement in the local or regional newspaper or running campaigns that are specifically conceptualized to gain local attention.
19. Design Effective Conversion Funnels
One way to design Effective Conversion Funnels is to ensure your funnels are built around the awareness, education, evaluation, and retention framework.
The topmost part of the conversion funnel should concentrate on your market’s biggest problems and drive your business prospect to educational resources thereby positioning you as an industry expert.
This will give your business an advantage when your prospect gets to the next stage of the decision-making process, which they will evaluate the right solution to buy.
Retaining them successfully involves a mixture of enabling them with the right training material and providing top-notch customer service. missing any of these elements might cause leaks in your funnel.
To learn how to build effective Conversion Funnels, Click here to get started
20. Boost Awareness Using LinkedIn
Your goal should be to Connect with at least 30 new LinkedIn contacts per day. With a possible 50 percent follow-back on average.
This ensures you have access to 15 new professional email contacts on a daily basis.
Thereafter you proceed to follow up your new connections with cold email outreach introducing yourself… from there you can scale up using scraping platforms.
21. Brand Your Vehicle
If your business offers outdoor or door-to-door services or products, then don’t waste this opportunity.
Potential customers are everywhere and the more you drive around with your branded vehicle; the more people will see you.
This way you will have new clients because some of the people seeing you move around might just need what you’re offering.
22. Become an Expert in Your Community
Become your industry expert in your neighbourhood. The idea is to reach out to schools, vocational centers, and even the local chamber of commerce and freely volunteer to be their guest speaker on what you are good at.
You will have a confined audience to educate about being an entrepreneur and potentially discuss your products and services. The goal of being seen and known as a community expert will propel your business visibility and your personal brand.
23. Be A Networker
As an entrepreneur, the act of networking should be part of your everyday life. Remember you give to receive. With every interaction you are involved in — online and offline — you should be on the lookout for opportunities to help others out.
This could be as simple as introductions to valuable connections to business advice. People are wired to reciprocate good deeds. I’m always generous with ideas and time because I love doing it, so it comes naturally to me.
As a result, I often get referrals and good traction with my posts on social channels. This can be seen as karma economics.
24. Build True Partnerships
Find businesses that are like-minded, noncompeting in your environment who have a similar target market and find out creative ways you can both works together. The key goal here is to make it unique and easy to execute on both sides.
Just Think about your business and company you are partnering with — what stands your various businesses out? How can you synergize those things and leverage the customer base of both businesses in a trustworthy way?
The best business partnerships always keep the brands organized flawlessly in the eyes of the customers.
25. Register for an App to Connect With Your Customers
Small businesses can greatly benefit from getting their businesses registered on an app. This will make the connection with their current and potential clients seamless. Once their business page is set up on the app, their consumer can easily connect with them.
Any time the business promotes its next new product, the consumer will know about it in about eight seconds. The app will serve as the hotline between your business enterprise and the consumer. This will keep you fresh in their mind whenever they look to buy what you sell.
Bonus – Utilize Pay-per-Click Advertising on Google
One of the most effective online marketing strategies for our clients in recent times apart from Facebook advertising has been pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. A highly targeted PPC marketing campaign on a Google search will enable you with the ability to get customers that are aggressively searching for the products or services you offer on your website.
Unlike an SEO campaign, tangible results may come within a few days, if not hours, of launching your campaign through Google AdWords. most businesses can set up and manage their PPC campaign on their own. Though, for most, they utilize a digital marketing agency to help them with the setup and also manage the campaign.
Want to learn how to utilize Google Advertising, Click here
Over to You
These are some tried and tested great marketing ideas for small business; don’t you think so? Do you have any of your own marketing ideas for small business to add?
Let’s get to hear them using the comment section. May these exceptional and inexpensive promotion strategies spark ideas for you and your small business!
Love is sharing, sharing is caring!
