3 Highly-Effective Small Business Marketing Strategies You Must Use to Succeed in 2020

Driving sales and building brand awareness are the top two priorities for small businesses.

And that’s not surprising.

When you’re a small business, your main problems are 1) getting enough sales to sustain yourself and 2) becoming known in your marketplace, so that prospective customers trust you.

Luckily, these two goals can be achieved simultaneously using small business digital marketing.

If you know how to approach digital marketing from a small business standpoint, you can use the fact that you are smaller and more agile to your advantage and carve out a place in the marketplace against competition that is much larger and richer.

But how to make digital marketing work in your favor?

After all, in an ever-changing online landscape, strategies and best practices are changing quickly, so you need to have a pulse on what’s working right now to achieve the best results.

Therefore, in this article, we’ll explore some of the most effective small business marketing strategies that, if implemented, are all but guaranteed to drive sales and brand awareness for your business.

Ready to get started? Then read on below.

Email Marketing

When you’re a small business, you need to get the most out of every single marketing dollar that you have.

You can’t allow your budget to be wasted on experiments or pricey PPC campaigns because you may find that the leads that you do attract end up costing you more than they bring in.

That’s why email marketing should be at the top of your marketing strategies list.

Email marketing has been proven to generate a whopping $38 for every dollar invested, which is an amazing 38:1 return that no other marketing approach can even come close to.

Sure, you need to get people on your list, which costs money, but then, you can potentially interact with them for years to come, nurturing your relationship and having access to a group of your very best buyers whenever you need an influx of new sales.

However, in order to get the best results with email marketing, you must know how to put together effective campaigns that match the expectations of your audience and continually provide value.

From the moment that a visitor comes to your landing page, you must provide value and set expectations, so that you can entice them to subscribe and that they know what to expect from you with every communication that is to follow.

Try to help your audience overcome the obstacles that prevent them from buying your products, as the farther you can move them in their buyer journey, the easier it will be to sell to them again and again.

Also, remember to explore the best email marketing services for small business, as you want a platform that is user-friendly, flexible, secure, and affordable.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization has been around for a long time, but it’s still just as effective today as it was a decade ago.

Google receives about 5.8 billion search queries every single day, and a significant percentage are looking for local business solutions just like yours.

So, if you can get your business in front of those eager prospects, you’ll never have a shortage of new customers coming in basically on autopilot.

While SEO does take time to set up and ranking for some keywords can be a challenge, the reward is that you get a steady stream of highly-targeted traffic to your site month after month, without having to pay a dime.

For a small business operating on a limited marketing budget, having a free source of traffic is something that cannot be ignored, so even though the initial efforts will likely require an investment, the cost-per-lead, in the long run, makes it well worth it.

But how to develop an effective SEO strategy? 

Well, there are a few main aspects that Google looks at when determining where to rank a site, and the good news is that you can improve all of them, either yourself or with the help of an SEO agency.

First off, if you want your site to get ranked, you will need to make it relevant and useful to prospective visitors. That means that your content has to be of the highest quality and provide engaging, fresh, and insightful information that people will find useful.

Then, you need to make sure that your website is convenient to browse on any device. It has to be mobile-friendly, lightning-fast, and easy to navigate, as well as being rich in various media and useful links.

Finally, you need to show Google that your site is trustworthy by having plenty of SEO signals such as backlinks from relevant websites, social media engagement, and a sound site structure with a sound internal linking strategy.

As a small local business, you should also make sure to register your company on Google My Business, as that can help you appear at the top of the rankings for some services-driven search queries. 

Influencer Marketing

Many companies make the mistake of focusing all of their attention on product development, using product management tools to micro-manage every detail of the product creation and growth.

Don’t get me wrong, that is obviously very important, but it’s also crucial to have a proven strategy for getting those products introduced into the marketplace. Otherwise, you may end up writing off a product as a failure even though the real problem was too little exposure and poor use of marketing resources.

Now, the fact remains, smaller businesses have less to work with, so it’s understandable that you can’t run an elaborate TV ad campaign or plaster billboards all over the city.

However, no matter what type of product or service you offer, you can use influencer marketing to get your product in front of your very best customers in an instance.

What’s more, with influencer marketing, you are also immediately positioning yourself as a trustworthy and even authoritative company in the eyes of your audience, which can help you lure away buyers from the competition even they didn’t know you even existed before.

But what is an influencer marketing, anyway?

Well, basically, it’s the process of partnering up with an influential figure on social media that has a following in your niche and getting them to promote your products or services.

You’ve probably seen influencer marketing in action if you’ve ever stumbled upon the Instagram feeds of some of the more prominent social media celebrities.

However, even though you may not be able to afford the A-list public figures on social media, you don’t have to – for every influencer with many millions of followers, there are hundreds of smaller micro-influencers who have a laser-targeted following ranging anywhere from five thousand to around a hundred thousand people.

In fact, smaller influencers are often even better because they have a following that is more focused and more engaged, meaning that once they promote your product, the campaign likely to get a much better response.

But how can you get an influencer to promote your products?

Well, this part requires a bit of effort, but considering the results that it can bring, it’s still one of the most cost-effective ways to promote your business.

First off, you will need to conduct thorough research and identify the best candidates on the social media platforms that you think are popular with your target audience.

Once you have a shortlist of the best-suited influencers for your situation, you’ll need to craft a compelling pitch and offer them to partner up.

After you reach an agreement, you’ll work with the influencer to craft a message that both present your product in the best way and is also in-line with the voice and personality of the influencer.

Finally, you launch the campaign, track results, and watch as you get an instant influx of new customers in a matter of days, or even hours!