As a small business owner, you don’t have the luxury of relying on a big marketing team to create top-tier content. If you’re lucky, you may have one or two people in your entire marketing department. Or your company might be so small that you’re handling marketing, customer service, and all other daily operations yourself.
Whatever your situation may be, don’t let your lack of access to an official marketing team hold you back. Every small business has to start somewhere, but you can progress and grow rapidly with the right mindset. Here are three marketing strategies you can consider to help your small business thrive in 2023.
1. Focus on Growth Marketing
Traditional marketing techniques are important for all businesses. But there are other marketing strategies you should also prioritize as a small business owner. Growth marketing is particularly desirable for helping small businesses thrive. When you focus your time and efforts on this type of marketing, you can start to see impressive results. Growth marketing diverges from traditional marketing in one key area — its focus.
Traditional marketing efforts are primarily company-centric. The main goal is to acquire customers and sell more products or services. Growth marketing, on the other hand, takes a firmly consumer-centric approach. Its primary purpose is to provide the most positive and personalized customer experience possible.
Both traditional and growth marketing strategies have the same end goal of propelling the company to greater levels of success. But they go about achieving this goal in different ways. While traditional marketing primarily targets customers at the top of the sales funnel, growth marketing targets the entire funnel.
You can’t have a deep conversation about growth marketing without discussing Dave McClure’s “AAARRR” approach. This acronym stands for awareness, acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue. Growth marketing focuses on all of these areas to give small businesses a competitive advantage over larger businesses. As part of your growth marketing strategy, create an exceptional value proposition. This should be one or more compelling reasons customers ought to choose your products over your competitors’ offerings.
2. Get Comfortable With Social Media
Like it or hate it, social media has become a force to be reckoned with in the marketing world. If your business doesn’t have a strong social media presence, no one’s going to know it exists. Over 4 billion people around the globe use social media. By learning how to market effectively on these platforms, you can get your business in front of a huge audience.
The nice thing about social media marketing is that you can start getting organic traffic for free. When you own a small business with a meager marketing budget, any opportunity to earn free exposure is worth pursuing. Most adults in the United States still prefer Facebook and YouTube over other channels. But Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Twitter are close runners-up.
To maximize your success, maintain an active presence across the platforms that matter most to your target audience. If research shows that your audience is mostly on Instagram, that’s where you should prioritize your time. Consistently invest your efforts in building your audience and keeping them engaged. You can do this by establishing a regular schedule for posting interesting facts, announcements, and discussions.
It’s also important to be proactive about learning the rules surrounding various social media channels. For example, if you plan to use Twitter, you’ll need to keep your tweets to 280 characters or less. When creating Instagram videos, follow best practices and try to keep them under a minute long. Once you learn the regulations and posting recommendations for various platforms, start posting. Aim to post to each channel at least once per week to remain relevant.
3. Utilize Multiple Marketing Tactics
Too often, small businesses focus all their efforts on a single marketing strategy while neglecting other options. Even if social media marketing is working great for you, it’s still important to branch out. That way you can get even greater brand awareness and establish yourself within your industry.
There are many different marketing channels and methods you should explore, including email marketing, content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and influencer marketing. All of these marketing strategies can help you attract new customers and provide consistent value for existing customers. Many well-rounded marketing campaigns involve most or all of these approaches.
It’s especially worth noting how these strategies complement each other when used simultaneously. For example, influencer marketing can improve social media tactics because it shines a spotlight on your business and its profiles. Additionally, quality materials produced by content marketing efforts can improve SEO strategies as customers and search engines find helpful and relevant information. That’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how each strategy connects and contributes to your marketing efforts.
As a small business owner, it might seem like you have a huge disadvantage compared to more established companies. But thanks to the power of digital and social marketing, you can quickly rise through the ranks. When you use the above marketing strategies, you’ll be amazed at how fast you can become an industry authority. Perfect your marketing approach, and get ready to experience unprecedented growth in 2023 and beyond.
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