7 Essential Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

Running a small business allows you to monetize your talents, take ownership of your work, and enjoy a flexible schedule. For each of these benefits, though, there are challenges that small business owners must contend with, too. One of the greatest challenges facing small businesses is the struggle to compete with established, big-brand competitors. With fewer resources and a smaller budget, how can you hold your own against major companies?

The 7 Best Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

The best small businesses use marketing strategies that deliver ROI without breaking the budget. For instance, did you know that affordable, SEO blog writing can be the secret weapon to revolutionize your small business marketing? Learn how you can leverage SEO blogging and six other key strategies to unleash the full potential of marketing for your small business.

1. Build Your Brand With SEO Blogs

Experts agree — branding is the foundation of any successful small business marketing strategy, big or small. You need to highlight the elements that make your business unique and translate those elements into signature imagery and ideas. It can be difficult, though, to establish the key ideas that you want customers to associate with your small business. Effective branding demands a delicate balance between subtlety and specificity.

Blogs are a fantastic way to strike this balance, establish brand authority, and offer useful content. A blog that answers common questions or offers insightful advice will incentivize organic shares. This, in turn, can generate leads. Customers want to engage with brands that they trust, and blogs allow you to show customers exactly why they should trust your business.

In addition to increased branding, blog writing done with SEO in mind can help your website rank for keywords that your target market is searching for. Establishing an organic presence through marketing strategies such as this can help lead directly to traffic, leads and sales. Essentially, clients search for keywords related to your products and services and your SEO-optimized, keyword-rich blog posts come up on the first Google results. There are are few small business marketing strategies as effective and affordable as SEO blog writing, when done correctly.

To see the full potential blogs can offer to marketing for small businesses, you need to ensure that your content is clear, creative, authoritative and SEO-optimized. Achieving brand authority and organic rankings is imperative for small businesses, and content that’s full of filler can easily backfire. High-quality blogs are one of the best investments a small business can make in establishing their brand and boosting their web traffic by ranking for relevant keywords.

2. Know Who You’re Marketing To

Identifying your audience is one of the most important marketing tips for small business owners. While your big brand competitors may have the luxury of casting a wide net in their marketing plan, you need to be more precise in pinpointing who comprises your customer base — and who you want to incorporate into it, too.

Drafting a specific customer profile can help you develop strategies that make marketing for small businesses a breeze. You can start by conceptualizing who you think your brand should appeal to most. Perhaps that would be busy moms or maybe collegebound recent grads. Identifying the basic traits of your ideal customers will help you market to them more effectively.

In addition to profiling your ideal client, you should profile the characteristics that define your existing customers. For most small businesses, there will be some overlap — and some disparities, too. The overlapping elements can reveal the strengths of your current marketing campaign, and the disparities can help you see the direction in which you need to take your future marketing campaigns. Consider the best marketing strategies for small businesses you can employ to attract customers who are more closely aligned with your ideal client.

3. Leverage Data To Personalize Marketing for Small Businesses

Knowing your customers is important, but knowledge, in and of itself, isn’t enough. You need to know how to integrate this information into your marketing for small businesses and cater directly to your target clientele. Strategically gathering and leveraging data is the most efficient way to do this.

As a small business, you probably don’t have the same breadth of data tracking tools available that a major company has at its disposal. You’re also likely dealing with a small sample size, which means you’ll have less raw data to consider. Despite these constraints, you can gather information about your customers with tools like surveys and web traffic analyses.

You must then identify trends that will help you better understand your customers. The data may reveal surprising facts, for example, such as an average client age that’s younger than you previously assumed. These patterns can then inform and personalize your small business marketing by developing campaigns that directly relate to your customers’ needs.

4. Develop a Long-Term Marketing Strategy

Very few marketing ideas for small business owners address an important truth — your customers will inevitably change. Indeed, just as you will change and your business will change, so will your clientele. People evolve, and it’s essential that your marketing plan accounts for this. Effective marketing for small businesses is always ready to adapt to customers’ changing needs.

Rather than simply strategizing your next campaign, then, it’s essential that you develop a long-term strategy for your marketing goals. This requires a plan for achieving customer loyalty and establishing your brand as a worthwhile investment. The easiest way to do this is by offering excellent products and services — but even the best brand will fall short with shortsighted marketing.

The best long-term marketing for small businesses should focus on strategies that facilitate growth. As your business evolves, it should also expand, reaching new clients and demographics. You can facilitate this with your marketing by periodically reassessing and updating your customer profiles. As your understanding of your customers grows, so should the audience that your campaigns target.

5. Focus on Increasing Conversion Rates

Plenty of marketing tips for small business owners will tell you how to increase traffic to your site, but your conversion rate is even more important that your traffic flow. Conversion is the portion of your site’s visitors who follow through with a purchase or appointment. You likely won’t be able to convert every visitor to a customer, but you can still apply some strategies to increase your rates.

The best marketing for small businesses increases conversions organically. When you give your customers a compelling reason to engage, you’re laying the foundation of a relationship that’s built for longevity. Effective marketing doesn’t rely on pressure. It shows how valuable your product or service is.

This demonstration of value is key to garnering more conversions, and it’s particularly important to small businesses. Even when you’ve staked a claim in your market, you need to be proactive about continuously courting customers. You can sustain their loyalty — and continue edging out bigger competitors — with marketing campaigns that demonstrate the long-term benefits of your brand.

6. Make Your Marketing Strategy a Priority

Perhaps one of the biggest mistakes you can make in marketing for small businesses is putting it on the backburner. Unfortunately, though, that’s easy to do. As a small business owner, there’s a lot on your plate, and marketing is a task that can quickly consume more time than you have to spare.

Nonetheless, it’s imperative that you pay attention to marketing ideas for small business owners and ensure that you’re continuously investing in your strategy. No matter how great it may be, your product or service won’t sell itself — and word-of-mouth marketing can’t take off if nobody knows about your brand. In order to generate organic leads and boost your conversions, you need to invest in marketing.

This means making marketing a priority. Start by carving out a portion of your budget that you can devote to campaigns and clearly identify how you will spend it. Will you focus on running keyword-based ads? Launching a social media campaign? There are plenty of ways you can use your marketing budget, but it’s best to look for the option that will offer the best return on investment — and the least amount of effort required from you.

7. Put Marketing for Small Businesses on Autopilot

Autopilot is the name of the game when it comes to marketing for small businesses. You’re a busy entrepreneur, and you need a solution that’s totally hands-off. SEO blogs meet all the criteria for an effective marketing tool — they build your brand, capitalize on data, boost conversion rates, increase website traffic and sustain a long-term strategy.

Best of all, though, blogs can be an automated marketing strategy when you opt for a monthly blog plan with BKA. Choose the package that’s best for your business and connect with an onboarding specialist who will help identify your marketing goals. Content marketing still reigns supreme as one of the most effective tools for generating leads, and with BKA, it’s as simple as signing up.

With customized SEO-optimized blogs delivered directly to you every single month, all you need to do is publish the content on your site. Sometimes it takes a few months for traffic to increase, but you will eventually see a clear uptick in leads once you start posting blogs regularly. With marketing taken care of, you can devote your energy to what you do best — running a small business.

Jumpstart Your Small Business Marketing Plan With Blogs

Carving out your niche can be challenging if you’re a small business competing against major companies. When you have high-quality products and an effective marketing plan, you can succeed — and even edge ahead! BKA’s monthly SEO blog writing subscription services are tailor-made to meet the needs of busy small business owners like you. We write clear, compelling content and make marketing for small businesses simple. Learn how to get started with your monthly blog subscription by contacting us for more information.