Marketing For Small Business: More Than Just Buzzwords
In today’s competitive world, small business marketing is the lifeblood that keeps you thriving. Here, effective marketing strategies separate success from obscurity.
This blog aims to demystify marketing by breaking it down into actionable steps. Whether you’re a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting out, this guide will help you craft a marketing plan that aligns with your business goals and resonates with your audience.
noun: marketing
Oxford Dictionary
The activity or business of promoting and selling products or services, including market research and advertising.
“Anyone working in communications and marketing will find the guide invaluable.”
Starting a marketing blog with a clear definition makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? Marketing involves a wide range of activities, and for small businesses, effective marketing can save thousands of pounds by avoiding wasted time and effort on the wrong strategies. Yet, as business owners, it’s often something we overlook. So, where should we begin?
Start with the Customer: Insights & Market Trends
To truly connect with your audience, you must also grasp the market trends that shape their decisions. For instance, if your ideal customer is environmentally conscious, offering products like paraffin wax candles might alienate them. Instead, focusing on eco-friendly alternatives, such as soy wax candles, aligns your offerings with their values. By integrating customer insights with market trends, you can ensure your products are both relevant and appealing, leading to more successful marketing strategies.
Understanding the Market: Product Viability
Once we understand who our client is, their habits, and the trends that influence them, our next task is to identify their pain points. How can our products and services meet their needs, solve their problems, or benefit them? How can we be ‘in service’ to them? Understanding this helps us tailor our offerings to be truly useful and meaningful.
At this stage it’s always worth while to understand what the market demand is for the service/product we want to offer? Is it a new market? Has the market been around for a while? Maybe the market is in decline and a new market is emerging. This information can be easily sourced online and it’s always worth checking product viability through competitor research, market surveys or focus groups i.e. in most cases, asking friends and family!
Pricing Your Product: Competitor Insights
Now that we have our wonderful gift to offer our clients, how much should we charge? Pricing depends on several factors, such as what others are charging, whether our product has unique qualities, and the basic costs of bringing our product to market. This includes covering expenses and ensuring we can pay the bills, eat, and sustain our business. If similar products or services exist in the marketplace, conducting competitor analysis will be invaluable as a way of benchmarking prices, gauging other product offerings and providing information which can inform decision making. This is a relatively easy market research exercise to undertake. It just needs manpower.
Product Launch: Measuring Success
Now we’re ready to bring our product or service to market, and this is where we encounter what I feel can be the somewhat tricky business of sales marketing. In more aggressive circles, there will be sales targets, ROI, and hard sales pitches. However, there are many other ways to attract customers that can grow naturally with your business, provided your business model allows for it.
Your products and services will help determine the best platforms and outlets for your marketing. For instance social media or your website. And let’s not forget that not all marketing efforts will yield a direct return. Some marketing is for visibility (vanity), while other efforts are for long-term sustainability (sanity). Different platforms serve different purposes for your business, depending on your intent. In addition, some of these platforms are easier to monitor for performance analysis than others, even when you are committed to finding out where your clients originated from. If you’re operating digitally, understanding the data will help inform you whether a new product service has been a success.
Branding
Branding is more than just a logo or color scheme—it’s how your business is perceived by your clients. It’s about your values, your story, and the emotions you evoke. A strong brand builds trust and connects you with your audience.
For example, Taskmaster Lee C is committed to empowering clients by providing expertise that enables them to become more efficient. This helps clients focus on what they do best while trusting Lee C’s services. Everybody enjoys some TLC right?
The Customer Journey: Engaging on Social Media
We also need to consider the customer journey: from the clients initial awareness of their need, through consideration and comparison of their options, to decision-making and the final purchase. Knowing where they are in this journey allows us to support them with the right information at each stage, providing them with exactly what they need, when and where they need it. Sounds straightforward, right? Yet, many business owners rush to join the latest social media platform without first considering if their target audience is even there. Social media auditing can help focus marketing efforts to the right platform. No point in offering services on Tick tock if our clients are searching for a resolution on Pinterest.
Content Marketing: Optimising Your Website
The customer journey starts way before a purchase. Clients seek information, compare products, and want to understand the services on offer. This is where content marketing comes in. Take this blog, for instance. You might be a small business or entrepreneur not yet decided on the type of help you need or exactly what help you need. This blog walks you through the marketing journey, helping you understand the support that will work best for you.
But let’s not forget effective SEO. Without it, it’s like printing the most wonderful posters and then throwing them in the bin. If you can’t do it yourself, hiring an all rounder who offers a number of website services will leverage enough expertise to create content good enough to meet most of your needs. And if needed, they will know the right questions to ask of the right people.
Adapt and Evolve: The Importance of After Sales
No one ever gets it 100% right. Times change. Things move on. If we’re not aware of our market and our clients’ changing needs, we might find that what worked yesterday isn’t working today and not understanding why. Remember what happened to Blockbuster?
And even after a sale is made, marketing doesn’t stop there. What you do after a sale is just as important as what you do before it. Think of your previous clients as your greatest asset. Listen to them and tend to them just as you did when you first met. If they’re complaining, there’s room for you to improve. Don’t get all sensitive about it, instead be grateful they didn’t leave you scratching your head wondering what you did wrong. If they’re singing your praises, fabulous, leverage those feathers and add them to your wings. Treat your clients well, and they’ll market your business for free. Your after sales should be seen as the start of your next sale. Start and end with your customer.
Just Like That!
It all sounds so easy, doesn’t it? Yet in reality, after answering emails, resolving urgent issues, and managing a slew of tasks that have suddenly jumped from “important but not urgent” to “urgent and important,” finding time for big picture planning can become an impossible task. For small businesses and entrepreneurs focused on day-to-day operations, strategy can seem like a luxury reserved for big corporations.
But that doesn’t have to be the case.
It’s precisely within these daily tasks that hiring a marketing assistant can help transform your decision-making process, saving your business both time and money. Instead of taking a scattergun approach to marketing—which can cost a fortune with little return—having a plan can help maintain focus and prevent distractions.
If hiring a marketing assistant full or part-time feels way out of your scope, you may want to explore hiring a virtual assistant like Taskmaster Lee C who can provide some if not all the marketing services you require.
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