Many entrepreneurs who go into business for the first time probably aren’t sure exactly how to approach marketing or even branding. A solid product or service, a strong brand and intelligent marketing will play a role in the stability and growth of a new venture.
Today I will talk about small business marketing. Once you have a great product and brand in place, it is time to consider how and where you will marketing your business to the masses. This process and the strategy to do so will be constantly evolving. In the old days people would look up almanacs, encyclopedias, dictionaries, and physical maps to figure things out. Since then, the landscape has changed quite a bit.
Google and Small Business Marketing
Google is and has been a huge component of a successful marketing campaign. From a full spectrum perspective, we look at your total visibility across multiple platforms from social media, Google Ad campaigns, to email marketing, backlinks, blog visibility, and more. The new emerging trend in SEO is creating a audience-based strategy versus just keywords and titles like the old days. We have new platforms to cater to, how is your presence on social media? How much of your market is not on Google? How much is? They are very good questions when it comes time to decide where to put your time, trust and marketing dollars.
You want to make the most out of every marketing dollar you spend. Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest – these new players and more are now competing for the spotlight. However one feels about the conduct of Big Tech, the markets will decide.
Tapping Into Your Immediate Local Market
For some of my clients, I can see that they have a service or product whose market is not outside of their service area which they or another team member can get to. In this situation, we would not market to the whole state, or the whole country – we would focus on the current, untapped market in their own area.
Things like Google Business, local directories, Facebook and others allow you to tap into your immediate local market. Each has a specific approach which should be tailored to your abilities, your resources, your audience and more.
An Audience Based Approach
In regards to approaching different audiences, an example of this years ago and currently, was Facebook Ads. You have the ability to create specific ‘Audiences’ to show ads to. You can do an analysis of who your demographics are, and then test out your conclusions.
You can pick one audience of say work-at-home people, of a certain sex, a certain age and their interests, and even name it. Then save this audience as ‘Work at Home Audience’. Then you can create a female-based audience in a specific area, define an age range, and save that as a new audience name. When you create your ads, they can be shown to specific audiences to gauge which are more open to your service or product.
This new Audience based approach takes a look at data from multiple sources, SEMRush, Moz, Google Search Console, and others to give you a more clear look at how you should be approaching your niche, so that you can apply it across your campaigns. Specifically, creating content that engages your audience via social media to build your brand, authority, and followers.
Final Thoughts
For small business owners, this means that you can more easily make decisions about where to spend your marketing budget, and equally important, where not to. Growing a company from a seed will take those who do so down a unique journey, posed with unique decisions and strategies that must be navigated strategically and confidently. Making these important marketing decisions can affect your financial fitness as a company, your sales and opportunities and much more.
