A Simple Marketing Strategy for Small Business

Many small business owners handle their marketing on their own, opting out of spending hundreds of dollars on ad agencies. However, it can sometimes be difficult to know where to focus your marketing efforts and how to organize when you are one person. This is your simple marketing strategy – everything you should focus your time on when it comes to marketing your small business on your own.

1. Know The Basics

The foundation of your marketing as a small business should be: target audience, branding, and goals. While there is so much more that goes into marketing, if you are looking for a simple way to market your business, these are what you should start with.

Target Audience: Who is your product or service for? Understanding who your target audience is will help you become more effective in your marketing. Target audience should include basic demographics (sex, gender, age, etc.), as well as more in depth knowledge. What are your audience’s hopes and fears? Where do they land on the technology adaption curve? Creating a customer avatar can help you visualize and better understand who you are trying to reach with your marketing.

Learn more about customer avatars and how to create one here.

Branding: Your small business needs to be thought out for you to be able to reach and attract potential customers. Knowing your brand colors, having a logo, choosing fonts to consistently use – these are all the basics of branding. However, there is so much more that is involved. Your brand voice, the consistency of your customer service, these are just 2 other examples of branding. 

Goals: If you are looking to handle your small business’s marketing in-house, then you need to create goals. Goals will help keep you on track, narrow down marketing initiatives that are worth your time, and help you analyze your data to see if your campaigns are effective.

2. Prioritize

As a small business, you likely do not have an army of people to help you with your marketing. If you are handling your marketing on your own, prioritizing is essential. There are about 19 different marketing channels for small business owners to choose from.  When trying to create a simple marketing strategy, you need to decide which marketing channels will help you achieve your goals and focus on those. 

Prioritizing your efforts may mean limiting the amount of social media platforms you are on. The key to marketing is consistency. If you cannot consistently show up on 3 or 4 social media platforms, cut it down to 1 or 2. Quality is better than quantity.

 3. Organization

Organization may seem like a small thing you can ignore, but it can honestly make or break your simple marketing strategy. As aforementioned, marketing is all about consistency. Organization can help you stay consistent. Creating a schedule, whether that be for your social media content or your email marketing, can help you plan ahead and stay on track. 

Keeping your content organized in a Google Drive or somewhere equivalent can help with easily repurposing content. This also makes it easier if your small business ever gets to a point where you can afford to hire an ad agency or marketing firm to take over your marketing. All of your content is an easily accessed place for them to review.

 4. Low Hanging Fruit

There are many simple ways to elevate your marketing. Tools and strategies can help you convert potential customers and interact with your target audience. These tools and strategies are like low hanging fruit, easy to reach and will reap the benefits. They are essential for a simple marketing strategy.

Let’s go over some examples of ways you can make your life easier. Automation is a wonderful tool for email marketing. You can automate a welcome email sequence. Whenever someone signs up for your mailing list, they should receive a welcome email within 24 hours. Automating this email allows you to set it up and then forget about it.

Pro tip: While it is great not having to worry about your welcome email, you should still review it every once in a while. Whether it is once a quarter or once a year, it’s important to just check in and make sure that all the information in the email is still relevant.

It could be that you are looking for ways to make creating content easier. Creating a social media schedule or scheduling out posts can help you stay on track and on top of your platforms. (Need a social media schedule template? We have one for you!) You could also focus on creating evergreen content, or finding ways to repurpose your past content. 

Take time to look over your simple marketing strategy and find ways you can make your life simpler, either with automation or other tools and strategies.

5. Find Resources

In line with trying to make your life easier (because you are one person handling it all), finding resources that can help you with your marketing is important. Tools like Opus Clip, Canva, and the right email marketing platform can all help you with your marketing.

Here at The Seasoned Marketer, we offer many resources designed specifically for small businesses. We offer: free downloads, templates, blog posts, YouTube videos and tutorials, and the S.O.B. Community. 

The S.O.B. Community is designed for the small business owner who wants to handle their marketing in-house, but still needs a little bit of support and guidance (without the ad agency price tag). Discuss your marketing questions with other small business owners, and ask specific questions to two marketing professionals ready to help you succeed. To learn more information, click here.

As a small business owner, it can be difficult handling your marketing on your own. If you focus your simple marketing strategy on knowing your basics, prioritizing, staying organized, low hanging fruit, and resources – you will find marketing success!