Most of the advice to grow your business online or locally and make money is the same: strategize.
Yet many people feel they are already doing this and their small businesses still aren’t growing.
The problem is that there are various levels of “strategy,” and the reality is that having a strategy that fits your business is difficult as it takes a lot of effort to think of great ideas.
So if you feel stuck, this post discusses several advanced strategies to grow your small business in less time.
Let’s do this.
Types of Marketing Strategies
Most of what you’ll find disguised as marketing strategies is a market plan—which is a marketing approach.
The Ansoff’s matrix is a perfect example of marketing strategies, and that’s what we’ll discuss here and then move to approaches to marketing later in this guide.
Ideally, Ansoff’s matrix encourages all small business owners and marketers to consider the four Ps:
- Product: What is being sold
- Place: Where it is being sold
- Price: What the product costs
- Promotion: How the product is marketed to the target audience
The way you’ll define this in your marketing approach depends on the growth strategy that you’re using and the general outlook of your market.
These four strategies are:
(i). Market penetration strategy
This strategy involves selling your existing products to an existing market.
(ii). Product development strategy
This process involves the development of a new product for an already existing market. If you want local business to be successful here, you need to be innovative and conduct further research into the existing market, including the profiles and needs of the target audience.
(iii). Market development strategy
Here is when you introduce an existing product into new markets that are not familiar with the product, that’s to say, although the product is the same, you’re selling it to a new place, therefore, you might want to consider new pricing and promotional marketing efforts too.
(iv). Diversification strategy
Last but not least, you may find your small business developing a new product for a new market.
In this case, you need to be extremely aware of the product, price, place, and promotion because no one has a taste of what you’re offering.
Conducting a pre-assessment of your business while considering the 4 matrixes above becomes helpful in designing your content marketing and strategy—which we’ll talk about in the next section.
How To Create A Marketing Strategy
To grow your small business, you need to have a robust marketing strategy. Here are the key things to consider:
1. Define your business and marketing goals
We’ll echo this once more. If you want to succeed in running your business, you need to have a solid problem that you want to solve that has been giving lots of people or businesses sleepless nights.
It should ease their struggle and make them open to spending on your products or services.
These goals are what will guide your marketing initiatives and the development of your marketing approach:
- Grow customer base
- Increase sales
- Increase brand awareness
Next up.
2. Conduct market research
After defining your business and marketing objectives, the next big thing to do is run a market research.
This will help you identify where you fit in the bigger picture and how to grow in it.
Here are some of the things you need to consider at this stage:
- The value proposition and market share of your competitors.
- The realistic number of customers that would be interested in your products
- Market gaps where you can provide value
- Social-economic realities that could impact the market in the long term
If you’re not sure where to begin, the Legiit GMSD dashboard can help you shape your business and marketing goals.
It tells you what your target audience wants, and then you can pick it up from there to set your marketing goals.
3. Create a buyer persona Avatar
To get your targeting right, you need to know who you’re targeting. Here is what you can ask yourself:
- Based on what you know about the market, who is your target audience? What are their key demographics?
- What is your product’s value proposition to your customer? (Product)
- How much is your target audience willing to pay for your product or service? (Price)
- Where does your target audience shop? (Place)
- What marketing tactics are most persuasive to your target audience? (Promotion)
For example, here is an ideal avatar for Legiit.
Their fears.
Your competitive advantage and the tone of voice you can use to win over them.
Sounds cool, right?
Next.
4. Synthesize and strategize
Most business owners follow the above steps, but they make a mistake here.
Once you have all the information you need above, the next step is to start creating a marketing plan and approaches that will fit into the business goals.
Unfortunately, there are lots of online marketing approaches that make it difficult to choose from to get maximum results.
The truth is, there is no one-size-fits-all approach, so do not rush into trying everything at once. It will be time-consuming and take a significant amount of junk out of your budget.
Our advice could be to try one approach at a time, depending on what the market is all about, your target audience, and the type of content that fits them.
In the next section, we’ll jump into some of those small business marketing tools and approaches that you can use.
Different Small Business Marketing Strategies That Work For Small Businesses
(i). Leverage cold email marketing
A study report by Campaign Monitor for 2021 indicated that 64% of small businesses use email marketing to reach customers.
Why?
Email marketing strategy offers a great way to connect with potential customers who may not be familiar with your business with a low price tag.
Secondly, it is a flexible solution that allows you to customize your message into personalized emails that fit into different categories of customers and information that is designed to appeal to them.
There are several ways to collect email addresses, including website sign-ups through lead magnets, running a contest, or offering incentives and discounts.
At the end of the day, be sure to keep track of your results and adjust your strategy as needed.
(ii). Advertise your business on social media accounts
In the past, most social media apps and platforms were purely based on networking and socializing. Today, literally every aspect of these platforms has turned out to be “pay-to-play.”
If you need to get more eyeballs for your business's social media channels and profiles, you need to pay a little more to get things done.
Today, more people discover new brands, products, and services via social media ads than through word-of-mouth recommendations, brand and product websites, and consumer review sites like Amazon.
Such social media platforms include:
- YouTube
- Tik Tok
In your marketing strategy, you can create ads that target a specific target audience, or you can simply post about your business on your forums and engage with people organically, but the latter works well for established businesses.
(iii). Use influencers to build brand awareness
Influencers are individuals with a large online following who can sway the opinions of their followers.
If you build a relationship with certain influencers in your niche, you can use their power as a marketing strategy to influence their audience and have them promote your products or business.
At Legiit, we have a whole dedicated page for our influencers.
From time to time, these guys pick services that they have used and recommend them to other customers.
(iv). Invest in search engine optimization (SEO)
This is by far one of the best small business marketing strategy to promote your small business for free on the internet today.
Here is what the stats say:
- The top traffic source for all websites is organic search
- A staggering 98% of people read online reviews for local businesses
- SEO drives 1,000%+ more traffic than organic social media.
- 60% of marketers say that inbound (SEO, blog content, etc.) is their highest quality source of leads.
- SEO leads have a 14.6% close rate.
Here, you need to have a website for your business and optimize it to rank for target keywords that your target audience searches for.
The Legiit GMSD dashboard is big at this.
It may also be wise to link your website to your Google Business Profile if your business has a physical location or link it to a Shopify store, Amazon, and other e-commerce options.
Finally, consider blogging about the latest trends, news stories, and events related to your business niche so that customers can learn more about you and what you offer.
This can help you attract new customers and build trust with existing ones.
Other than search engine optimization, the other option that you can leverage here is a search engine marketing strategy. This option allows you to show your ads each time your target customer searches using some keywords.
How effective are Google ads? Statistics in the industry show that 75% of users state that ads in Google search results make their searches easier. Another study indicates that 63% of people have clicked on a Google ad at some point, while 41% of users say that they trust paid ads.
And 50% of users can't distinguish between paid search ads and organic in search engines' results, making it a better targeting option if your customers are apprehensive about clicking on ads.
You only need to be clever about your targeting and use the keywords that have the desired impact.
(v). Traditional Marketing
Traditional marketing is still a very strong small business marketing strategy, especially when you want to create awareness and build brand recognition for your small business owner.
For example, if your business is targeting people in a specific location who might not have access to the Internet, erecting a billboard with signs might be a good way to market your business and retain existing customers.
The only disadvantage here is that the cost of running a TV ad would be twice or even 5 times that of running a digital ad.
Additionally, it is difficult to assess the impact if you’re selling your products digitally and you’re using traditional marketing methods like TV, which might not have any connection to your digital store on Amazon.
Final Thoughts
Small businesses have a great potential to scale their level and make more impact and money in the process.
What we’ve covered in this article is what you need to create a digital marketing strategy for your small business and market it to the world.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what marketing strategies are the most popular. What matters is choosing the right fit for your small business.
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