Happy holidays! To celebrate the holiday season we want to bring you our top 12 marketing tips we want small businesses to take with them into 2025.
Know Your Target Audience
This is the MOST important marketing tip. If you only take one thing from this article, we hope it is this. Knowing and understanding your target audience is what makes your marketing successful. Also revisiting your target audience should be on your to do list for the coming year. Just like you and your small business changes, your target audience also changes. Make sure you are checking up with their wants and preferences so that your small business can continue to be top of mind for them.
Tweak initiatives based on data at least twice.
Marketing is all about pivoting. Rarely is your first idea the perfect one, and this is true for marketing initiatives. We encourage small business owners to check in with marketing initiatives and look over the data. You will likely find that there are tweaks you can make to improve the efficiency of the ad or initiative.
Pick 3 initiatives to do at a time.
As a small business owner, you are already juggling so many different tasks to keep your business functioning. While you absolutely do want to be consistent with your marketing efforts, you also need to be reasonable with what you can accomplish. Pick 3 marketing initiatives to work on at a time. This way you can give each of these initiatives the proper attention to make sure they are profitable and optimized. The more you put on your plate, the more likely you are to let something slip through the cracks.
Check up quarterly on your marketing.
4 times a year (or quarterly) small businesses need to look back and check up on their marketing. It could be that your small business has changed and your marketing goals with it. A marketing plan can help you with this process. If you are unfamiliar with marketing plans, learn more by listening to our S.O.B. (Small Owned Business) Marketing podcast episodes on the subject. These episodes are filled with marketing tips and ways to create a marketing plan.
Go to 5 networking events in 2025.
Networking is extremely important, especially for small businesses. Small businesses thrive on their local community, and the connections they have with other businesses/customers/clients. The key to getting the most out of your networking opportunities is to go in with a goal and a game plan. Many of our marketing tips involve community, and networking is a great way to build up your community.
6 days a week practice gratitude.
We recently made a point to practice gratitude and share with one another what we are grateful for during our weekly meetings. We found that it helped us stay positive and focused with our business and marketing. It might be too difficult for you to find the time to do a weekly deep dive into what you are grateful for, but even taking a few minutes out of your day to just reframe your mind and think positively about your business can help you stay on track.
Notice we did not say 7 days a week. We get it. Sometimes it’s difficult to see the good in what is around you. Have a free day to be upset and annoyed, but then move on from that mindset. Do not let it stop you from being the best S.O.B. you can be!
Every 7 weeks look at your data.
Data is the backbone to effective marketing, but the type of data you collect can have an impact on the effectiveness. If you wait a week, look at your data, and then decide that said marketing campaign is not working – that may or may not be true. Even though you collected data, you did not give your marketing enough time to collect enough data. It could be that during that first week, your target audience was not online, or maybe during the third week of the campaign is when your target audience began to drive by the billboard you installed.
Looking back at your data every 7 weeks will give you enough data to get a true picture of what is happening within your audience, and how they are reacting to your marketing.
Consider 8 marketing strategies/initiatives you’ve never considered before and pick one.
Marketing is about experimentation! In 2025 we want you to step outside your comfort zone and try new marketing strategies. They might be the perfect fit for your small business, you just never gave them a chance. This is your moment to get creative and come up with unique marketing campaigns and ideas. We absolutely are not suggesting trying out all 8 (just look at the third tip we listed), but the more options you have to choose from the better!
9 times a year reach out to other small businesses and be kind and personable.
Connecting with fellow entrepreneurs can help you build a community and strong relationships to help you succeed. These relationships may lead to collaborations or just overall support from others. Give yourself a goal, whether that be 9 or higher, of different small businesses you may want to connect with.
Get on your preferred social media platform and interact with at least 10 other people.
Here at The Seasoned Marketer, we try to do this. If you want more interaction with your target audience on social media, you have to also interact with them! It may also be helpful to clear out your followers and following list to make sure that you are interacting with others who are in your target audience.
A great example of this is our own Instagram profile. For a while, we were following a good number of other marketers. Then we realized that – that is not our target audience. If we want to attract more small business owners to share marketing tips with them, we need to interact with them specifically. So we went back and removed a lot of marketing profiles to instead focus on and follow small business owners.
Visualize and map out your customer journey.
This may be one of the most powerful marketing tips on this list, and definitely one of our favorites.
If you visualize the number 11 and separate the ones, it can look like a start and finish line. Using this visualization, we want small business owners to think about their target audience and potential customers and the journey they take when first discovering or interacting with your business. Your customer journey is extremely important and can easily be forgotten. When you take the time to map it out, you can easily see bottlenecks or opportunities for growth.
What does a customer journey look like? An example would be: I’m a new coffee shop. A potential customer sees my grand opening announcement on social media and looks through my profile. They then decide to come to the location for a coffee. Are you asking them for an email or phone number so you can nurture a relationship? Maybe you have a loyalty program to pitch them. It could be that you forgot to add the address on your social media profile so the customer does not even get this far along in their journey.
12 months filled with marketing.
Consistency is a big dealbreaker when it comes to successful marketing. It does not matter which marketing tips you follow if this is not one of them.
If you are not being consistent with your marketing efforts, then you are likely to be forgotten by your target audience. When creating a marketing plan, or considering what marketing initiatives you want to focus on in 2025 – make sure that you are covering the entire year. Small businesses who only focus on marketing during the spring are going to fall off in the fall and winter.
If you are looking for a deeper dive into each of these 12 marketing tips and of the entire conversation, check out the video below.
Did you find this content useful? Check out our other free resources.
Feel free to share your thoughts with me, I can be reached at vivian@theseasonedmarketer.com!
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