Now that you have started up your business, the next thing you’ll have to remember are ways to get people to know your product or service and how to keep these people coming. Your target market will fuel your business, and consistently attracting them will keep you moving forward.

This is where effective marketing strategies come into play. Marketing is a crucial stage in business; you must be well-prepared in terms of time and money, and your marketing ideas must be well-thought to avoid wasting your energy and efforts.

In this article, you will learn ten practical ways to market your small business and some valuable tips on maintaining your customers’ or clients’ trust in you.

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1. Make a Plan and be Consistent About it
2. Understand Your Target Market
3. Make Use of Social Media
4. Create a Website and Optimize it
5. Join a Community of Small Business Owners
6. Promote Your Small Business Locally
7. Team Up with Other Businesses
8. Offer Free Products and Services
9. Believe in the Power of Word of Mouth
10. Provide Great Service

1. Make a Plan and be Consistent About it

Planning will save you so much time and energy. Before sitting in front of your computer and randomly posting about your product or service, you must first outline the marketing strategies you will execute.

Think about your resources. Do you have enough money to spend on the promotions? Do you have enough time as well to act out those strategies?

If you have a limited budget now, think about the convenient ways you can do it for free. Planning will not only allow you to brainstorm about the things you should and shouldn’t do, but it will also help you focus on the most practical strategies to help you advance even with little money.

In small business marketing with a tight budget on hand, Asian Dragon Dan Lok once advised that “When you cannot spend money, you have to spend the time” It means that if you are using free resources to promote your business, you have to devote long hours of getting people to see you several times a day.

Create a list of the marketing strategies that you are going to try. Are you going to do referral marketing, partner marketing, social media marketing, or email marketing? Can you afford SEO marketing, affiliate marketing, or radio advertising? As a small business owner, you have to maximize your sources.

2. Understand Your Target Market

In every business, there will always be a specific market or group of people that will mostly buy your products or avail of your service.

For example, you have a small business of an internet cafe that also offers graphics and printing services. Your target audience will likely be adolescents and young adults more adept with computers. Your customers will likely be gamers, students, and teachers.

If you run a small Korean food restaurant, your target market will likely be Koreans, people who love Korean cuisines or are fascinated with Korean pop culture.

Having a target market will help you narrow down the needs you must address in your business. First, you have to anticipate the desires, problems, and pain points that your potential customers will face.

Then, find the solutions to those problems and desires so you can improve your products and service better. It is helpful to create a persona of your target market to have a specific overview of a customer’s needs.

For example, in the internet café business, you can create a persona of a college student named John who struggles with his home works because he doesn’t have a laptop and internet connection at home.

To address John’s problem, your business will likely provide him with an efficient internet connection and upgraded tools and equipment so he can do his homework in your café and keep coming back because of the excellent service.

3. Make Use of Social Media

Social Media is a powerful tool that will boost the promotion of your small business. Not only that it is effective and convenient to use, but it also comes free!

If you’re a new business owner and are not active on social media, you must start building your presence now! Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tiktok, and Reddit have a huge online population where you can reach out to customers for free.

For example, you can create a Facebook page intended for business, and you can start creating content that many potential customers may browse. However, if you want to level it up and have a budget for Facebook ads, you can try using it to promote your products and services, so Facebook’s tools and algorithm may help you select the target users for your small business.

Social media can be your first step toward customer engagement. Attracting followers before taking them to your website or online store is an effective way to gauge them and build an interest in your small business.

4. Create a Website and Optimize it

In our technologically-advanced world, customers will be going online to check the legitimacy and credibility of your business, so you have to create a website that everyone can visit. Your website will be your frontline, becoming the overview of your products and services.

Like your actual store or business, your website must have an eye-catching interface, comprehensive homepage, and easy-to-read product detail pages. It must be easy to navigate and accessible from all devices, especially mobile phones.

Your other contacts, such as social media accounts, phone numbers, and email addresses, must also be linked to your website, so customers know how to reach you.

Besides creating a user-friendly website, you may also try to optimize it by using Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is a great way to attract more traffic to your website.

SEO is a process where search engines use their algorithms to rank websites based on their relevance to a particular query. Search engines like Google use SEO to provide the most relevant websites and pages to the keywords that users enter on Google Search.

SEO aims to make your website rank higher on the first pages of search engines so people can find you faster. If you don’t know about SEO Marketing, you may hire an expert to do it for you. This technique, however, may take time and money, so you have to be well-prepared for it.

If people can access you faster and find relevant content, they are more likely to click on your headlines and browse your website.

5. Join a Community of Small Business Owners

When you were a school kid, there’s nothing more comforting than finding a group of children that share your favorite food or hobby. This is somehow similar to finding a group of small business owners who will share the same ideas, experiences, and sentiments as you.

Making friends with beginners like you will gain solid and genuine support because they know exactly how you feel.

People with the same goals and mindsets will likely support each other on their way up. You must build healthy relationships with small business owners to learn and grow.

It is also important to join a group of experts who can teach you well in your field. You may join a community of experienced entrepreneurs, and you can treat them as mentors whom you can ask for help or pieces of advice.

You can find online community groups everywhere on social media. Some coaches offer their courses for free, and some group administrators even guide their members towards helpful information about your business. You have to be persistent in finding the right groups for you.

6. Promote Your Small Business Locally

Having tons of followers and customers online can be exciting, but there’s nothing more satisfying than having actual customers patronize your product from the beginning. Your first local customers, particularly friends, neighbors, and acquaintances, can help build your customer base.

They are the first people to try using your product or service, so you must provide them with a good experience they will return for.

Online presence may be an advantage to your small business but remember that not everyone who follows your page or asks about your products will buy them. So as a beginner, you must think about your target market in your local area and keep a balance between local and online customers.

7. Team Up with Other Businesses

Business requires social interaction and connections to thrive. As a beginner, there are things that you cannot do alone, so you have to find other people who can help you grow.

You can try partnership marketing this time. In partnership marketing, two businesses or brands collaborate to promote their products or services and bring in more customers or clients.

An example of partnership marketing is using influencers to promote a product or service. Celebrities and social media influencers may help you promote your product to their fan base while increasing their followers.

Other examples of partnership marketing are affiliate marketing, joint products, licensing, content partnerships, and product placement. Partnership marketing benefits both parties by reaching a wider audience and increasing sales.

In our previous example of small businesses like the internet cafe and Korean food restaurant, these two can collaborate by promoting each other’s products and services.

The restaurant will avail of the graphics and printing services for making flyers and posters of their menu. At the same time, the internet café will promote their service by including their contact information in those promotional items.

8. Offer Free Products and Services

One way to promote your product is to offer free samples to potential customers. An example of this is the strategy used by franchise businesses in malls where they provide a free taste of the food item that they sell. They ask passers-by to give a shot of their new product; once the customer likes it, they will start promoting it.

Another example is the strategy used by newbie freelance graphic designers, writers, and video editors. They offer their services for free to gain experience, build a portfolio, and earn reviews and testimonials from clients.

Graphic designers would offer to design a logo for a client and ask them if they can include that project in their portfolio. They will also gather reviews and testimonials that they can use to prove their skills and abilities in the field.

If you have the budget, another thing that you can do to market your small business is to offer free promotional items such as mugs, graphic T-shirts, umbrellas, pens, baseball caps, and key chains to serve as walking promotions for your product or service.

According to Forbes Business, the “rule of seven” is an effective strategy to make people recognize you. It uses the art of repetition, wherein people have to see your product at least seven times before they can take action on it. This way, people will subconsciously learn about your small business, and the more they see it, the more they will be curious about it.

You have to be persistent in marketing your small business because sooner or later, people will eventually start asking about it.

9. Believe in the Power of Word of Mouth

Never underestimate the power of raw experiences that people talk about. Firsthand experiences of an excellent service are like primary sources that will give you credibility and gain more customers in no time.

Positive word of mouth comes from happy customers that tell other people about you; this is why customer reviews are essential. If you can add value to your customers’ or clients’ lives, they will likely provide great feedback, making you more attractive and credible.

10. Provide Quality Service

Nothing can equal excellent service as the primary reason why people return to you. No matter how attractive your website and pages are, customers and clients will appreciate and remember you better because of what you do for them. How you solve their problems and address their pain points will be more remarkable than the graphic T-shirt with your logo.

Making a customer’s life better and adding value to it will increase more return on investment than any other marketing strategy will ever do.

Conclusion