Top 3 Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

Understanding your customers and successfully marketing to them is no easy feat—it takes patience, flexibility, and openness to new ideas.

Add in the market volatility of the past decade and marketers must now be able to quickly pivot in order to reach their target audience in new places and ways.

The good news for small and midsize businesses (SMBs) staring down these marketing challenges? You aren’t alone.

We talked to three experts in our network and surveyed SMB owners and leaders around the U.S. to identify three marketing strategy tactics that will help you find success:

1. Use tools to optimize your content creation and strategy

2. Stick to social media

3. Engage with your audience

1. Use tools to optimize your content creation and strategy

Content marketing is a crucial digital marketing strategy; you need to entice and excite your target audience with information about your business or services.

It also happens to be one of the more time-consuming strategies.

And while we haven’t yet tasked robots with writing everything for us, there are some shortcuts you can take to strengthen your content strategy by utilizing tools with automation features.

Look to SEO software to take advantage of automation features that can help you understand how your target audience searches for your products and services online and what you can do to achieve better search engine results. This same software can help you develop the right content by finding good long-tail keywords, keep an eye on competing marketing efforts, and track your content performance in order to know what works.

Marketing automation software can help with developing and brainstorming content via tools that plan and measure marketing activities while automating repetitive tasks.

2. Stick to social media

Social media success doesn’t happen overnight. You have to attract followers and keep them interested with a consistent stream of engaging content.

The good news is that social media tools can help you schedule posts, create custom content for each channel, and automatically link other published content (like a blog post) across your social media profiles.

Setting up scheduled posts in Buffer (Source)

In a recent GetApp survey (methodology at the bottom of this page), we asked which digital channels SMB owners and leaders are focusing on to attract customers for the remainder of 2021. Nearly a third of respondents cited social media as their main focus, followed by digital ads and email.

When it comes to which channels had the biggest impact on retaining and engaging customers since COVID-19, the leading response was connecting with customers through social media.

The top method for communicating business changes during the pandemic was social media again, and when we asked how respondents currently generate B2B leads nearly a quarter said—you guessed it—social media marketing.

3. Engage with your audience

One of the biggest challenges busy small-business owners have is balancing digital marketing and sales activities with servicing existing customers. That's where an email marketing platform can help.

Features like email campaign management enable marketers to deploy different types of campaigns (like a drip campaign), serving the right types of content and offers to the right audience.

Customer segmentation allows marketers to sort contacts by shared characteristics and personalized tagging based on interest in order to target those needs.

Email marketing tools often provide analytics to help you track the percentage of people who open your emails and links, taking the guesswork out of how your customers engage and move through your sales cycle.

EmailOctopus’ campaign analytics dashboard (Source)