7 Fascinating Small Business Marketing Strategies that Should Apply from Day One

Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard. 

–Guy Kawasaki, Alltop Co-Founder, and Entrepreneur

Are you planning for a startup or small business? Well, it’s a fantastic idea to grow your wealth in the 21st century. According to a survey run by the US Census Bureau, the survival rate of the new business is 51.3%.

But most of the startups fail for not paying attention to the customers. Besides that, there are more small business marketing strategies you need to focus on to become successful. As a startup owner, you should apply those techniques from day one. 

So in this blog, we will show you some of the proven marketing hacks you should implement to grow your business, and then overcome all the impending challenges as an SME owner.

A Crucial Pre-launch Checklist for Your Small Business

Launching a new business or startup is not an easy job. You should have some proper plans to hit the market from the orientation. Most SME owners may well aware of the steps of certain marketing strategies. But to get on top of the crowd, you must understand the exact flow of the process.

So, before you start learning the small business marketing strategies we are going to show you in this blog, a short tour on the pre-launch checklist of SMEs would be much helpful. Let’s follow-through.

Choose a Unique Name and Register

The name of a company is quite important for impacting a positive impression on the customers. Plus, the name should be authentic and edgy with your business purpose. 

After fixing a unique name, you should go for registering the company. If you have partners then it’s a must-have step for you. Always stay transparent when you are deciding a long-run process with different people. 

Permit License from the Government 

It is another essential pre-launch step for a new business. For not having a license, your company may face numerous legal issues. You can have problems like- 

• Charge on not having a license
• Penalties from the state government
• Notices of violation
• Possible criminal prosecution
• Taxation difficulties

Your business will get the license after a test which will show you are skilled in that trade and follow all the relevant rules and regulations.  Besides working for license or permission, you should gain some knowledge on Tax and VAT laws of your locality. Try to skip all the possible problems you can. 

Set Short and Long-Term Business Goals

No matter whether you are trying to extend your business in a new marketplace or acquire new customers, your short and long-term business goals will help you to be in the first place. So, before you hop in, set your goals by measuring and assuming different perspectives.

Design and Launch a Website for Your Business

Having a niche and WordPress website can be an excellent milestone for your company. It will present your brand value and act as a foundation for your audience. 

You can share your journey, product description, and success story of your happy customers. All these will have a positive impact on your new customers. Moreover, you can generate authentically yet lifetime traffic in your business if you always update the content of that site. 

With the rise of AI website builders, creating and maintaining a professional website has become even more accessible and efficient.

Connect with a Reliable Payment Method

As a business owner, you have to ensure that the payment gateway or payment processor you are using is safe for your customers. Apart from that, it should be available in most of the countries in the world. To understand how the payment process works for SMEs or any business, you can check this blog on Marketplace Payment Gateway.

7 Small Business Marketing Strategies 

Well, now that you have come through this far, you should start with the marketing strategies below. Every small business has its own strength to gain a potential customer base. So depending on which business you are planning to do, you must tailor these impending techniques following the types of your venture and situations.

1. Analyze Your Marketplace

Suppose you want to run a business by selling electric equipment. Whether you are trying to cover the local or global market place you have to analyze the market value of your product. 

Typically, collecting essential data of a market within an industry is known as market analysis. Your analysis will help you to take the next step forward and find out what brings customers. 

If you are new to the business, it may seem difficult for you. Once you get the proper information of your marketplace you will get the right direction soon. The step you should follow for market analyzing are –

• Find out the purpose of your analysis
• Measure your marketplace’s outlook
• Specify your possible customers
• Gather as much as data you can
• Analyze your information  

For customer-centric online marketing, you should do a proper analysis of your entire marketplace. You will get to know-

• How your client’s research and chooses your goods
• Different marketing strategies
• Future opportunities or warnings
• Where your business should improve 
• Possible monthly or yearly revenue

This information can help to build and run the company so precisely. Therefore, they are mandatory small business marketing strategies for any type of company. 

2. Analyze Your Competitors and Learn From Them

After analyzing the marketplace and your customers, you may have also figure out who are your competitors and how they are rocking the industry.

For analyzing them, you have to spend some extra time. Because without understanding their strategy you can’t make a plan for at least gaining a secure place. 

Research run by Crayon predicts that 41% of business owners fully agree on the pre-competitive study is essential for a successful company. 

For an insightful analysis, you must –

• Recognize your top opponents
• Follow their social media campaigns
• Analyze their content and compare
• Find out their SEO methods
• Make a list of your head-to-head rivals 
• Specify the areas where you need improvement
• Evaluate their power and weakness
• Follow their policies and tactics

To get a better hand at this strategy, you can check this Ultimate Guide to Competitor Analysis for eCommerce anytime you want.

3. Work on Customer Engagement

The relationship between a customer and a seller or company is known as customer engagement. There is a core difference between user and customer. And that is Price. A user is who utilizes your product or service free of cost. On the other side, a customer purchases your service to fulfill his/her necessities. 

Not only your sales ratio but also your longevity in that industry depends on customer engagement. Because they are the fuel of your company. 

To get loyal and long-lasting customers, you need to focus on their demand and satisfaction. Moreover, you can follow some strategies or smart ways to enlarge your customer number.  

• Use social media advertising to introduce your company
• Post edgy content with relevant information about your product
• Contact with the quiet customers
• Surprise your previous buyers with gift cards or offers
• Re-target your customers by emailing them individually
• Arrange webinars or events 
• Find out the negative comments and solve them

Therefore, one particular thing you should never ignore is customer retention. Getting a customer is easy, but retaining them always poses a great challenge for any business owner.

4. Use Paid Social Marketing if You Have the Balance

Paid social campaigns can be a game-changing strategy for small businesses. Here, you have to calculate your finances and then find out the suitable package for your marketing. 

Undoubtedly, free social marketing is effective but when you are wishing to get enormous sales and more potential customers then paid marketing is the only way. 

Do you have any plans for proper paid marketing? If your answer is no then don’t worry. Here we are sharing some tips for running successful paid campaigns –

• Find out and set your goal
• Understand your buyer’s pain point
• Fix your budget
• Build a website
• Participate in global and local events
• Arrange competitions for the customers
• Analyze the whole cycle and increase your sales
• Use an efficient conversion tracker software

Influencer or affiliate marketing can be much expensive for a startup. But display marketing, Video Advertisement, Google AdWords, or Email Marketing cost can be affordable to any small business owner. 

5. Maintain a Sound Support Team for Customer Service

In most cases, people switch to different companies for not get the expected after-sale service or support. Thus, market experts suggest building a reliable and customer-oriented support team. This team will only listen and solve the problems of customers. It should be open 24/7. 

Apart from that, there are more reasons to invest in the customer service team. You need to guide your support to achieve the following –

• Represents the company’s brand value, image, and goal
• The outstanding customer service team creates happy customers.
• Good customer service inspires clients to stay loyal
• Satisfied customers refer to others
• Customers don’t bother with the price if they get the desired support
• A good support team provides you with a chance of effective marketing
• Superior customer service is the power of competing rivals. 

You can pull more customers through a satisfying and highly responsive customer service team. Your loyal customers will bring new customers while they will describe your brand to their friends. 

6. Accept Payments from Customers and Measure Accountings

It’s difficult to measure the company accounting for non-accountants. You have to calculate all the customer payments. Also, count the trial balance, ledger report, balance sheets, income statement, and more even without understanding debits & credits.

If you are new to an organization’s accounting then you may need to contact a professional accountant or accounting software. For a small business, you can check WP ERP which is an open-source software to monitor your business accounting without any hassle. We will suggest you take the starter plan to experience their service. 

7. Build a Mobile App for Your Small Business

Most of the customer of your business use mobile. And, a mobile app is the easiest way to track their requirement, likes, dislikes, and interacting with them directly. 

On top of that, you can notify your special offer or discounts who will have your business app. Your app features will enhance your customers for shopping and at the same time, it will build a bridge between you and the customers.

Your mobile app should have – 

• Buyer profile
• Cart Management
• Social login
• Rating option
• Product search and filtering

Building a mobile app can solve your problem to get connected with the customer more frequently. As of 2020, Statista showed that more than 3 billion people were already using smartphones. Hence, you can not get these large numbers of people at your disposal without a smart app for your SME.

Final Thoughts on Small Business Marketing Strategies

Without a proper marketing plan, you can not go for a long run. It would help if you analyzed the possible ways before utilizing your resources.

After applying the pre-launch activities, you should apply the marketing strategies one by one. Here, we have tried to cover all essential and effective marketing tactics for small and medium enterprises. We hope they will help you to organize your business from scratch and you should apply marketing strategies from day one.

If you are using furthermore small business marketing strategies, feel free to share in the comment section below. We will reply to you in the meantime.