7 Marketing Ideas for Small Business You Shouldn’t Miss

Are you looking for marketing ideas for your small business?

Then you’ve arrived at the right spot. Starting and growing your business is a challenging task. This is especially true for a small business as there are several constraints that you need to look at.

These include your funding, staff size, and so much more.

So, in such dire circumstances, how can you grow your business?

The simple answer lies in the efficient use of your budget for marketing by leveraging powerful marketing strategies.

That said, what are the best ideas you can use to market your small business?

Let’s find out.

Best Marketing Ideas for Small Business

Here are the best marketing ideas you can leverage to grow your small business.

1. Create a Google My Business Listing

One of the best ideas to market your small business is through a Google My Business (GMB) listing. This is a must-have especially if your ecommerce business is a local one with a brick-and-mortar establishment.

The reason?

When you’ve got a GMB listing, your small business will show up either as a Knowledge Graph result in searches or as a Google Maps result.

While a Knowledge Graph would almost exclusively help you get the attention of your audience, Maps Pack isn’t far behind.

According to a study, nearly 42% of searchers click on the results that show up inside the Google Maps Pack.

Image via Backlinko

This means — you guessed it — more leads. And the best part about this is that a lot of these leads would translate into footfalls and help drive your small business revenue and growth.

And guess what?

Google My Business isn’t the only way through which you can get access to your local audience. One of the other good ideas is that you could sign up for Bing Places to access those people among your audience who prefer to search on Bing.

2. Launch a Customer Referral Program

One of the other most helpful ideas for marketing your small business is through the launch of a customer referral program.

And why is this method of marketing effective?

The simple reason here is that referral marketing lets you harness the power of word-of-mouth marketing to drive sales.

When your customers convey good things about your brand within their immediate circles, their words will be taken more seriously than yours. The reason for this being that it comes off as a first-hand experience of your brand.

Also, to say the least, it’s far better than a brand tooting its own horn.

But if word-of-mouth marketing is enough to drive your sales, why should you have a customer referral program?

The idea here is to incentivize your customers to convey good things about your brand and get you more customers.

And how exactly can you do that?

By providing free goodies or discounts, of course (And a little help from referral marketing software).

You could decide on an incentive for those customers who refer others to your brand. This incentive would motivate them to refer your brand to more people. It’s a win-win situation, really.

Dropbox, for example, came up with a splendid referral program. For every new user referred, a customer would get 500MB space if they hold a Basic account.

On the other hand, each Plus and Professional account holder gets 1GB per referral. This incentive helped them grow their customer base by 3900% in just 15 months.

Image via Dropbox

3. Run Contests

Launching contests is one of the best ideas for marketing your small business online. Let’s be honest — everyone adores contests.

After all, who doesn’t like the prospect of winning some free goodies?

It’s this spirit of contests that can come in handy for brands that are looking to grow their brand awareness and engagement. As people want to try their luck at winning the contest, they’ll likely engage with your content. This boosts both its reach and engagement.

Contests can also help you unlock a lot of leads if you choose to get your audience to provide their contact information to sign up for the contest.

However, for contests to work the way you want them to and generate a buzz online, you need to have a valuable prize. It should be something that your audience can’t wait to get their hands on.

For example, note how Pascha Chocolate, a food brand, launched this giveaway on Instagram. Within just 3 hours, the post has garnered 230+ comments and 120+ likes.

Image via Instagram

4. Leverage Social Media Marketing

One of the other more reliable marketing ideas for a small business is social media marketing. The total number of social media users has swelled to well over 4.48 billion now.

This essentially means that you get access to over 50% of the world’s population potentially through social media marketing.

Image via We Are Social

And how can you go about social media marketing?

You can start by sharing helpful and relevant information on your social media account in the form of text, images, or videos. This information doesn’t necessarily have to be created by you too (although that would be preferred).

The idea is to become a valuable source of information for your audience and then drive them to buy from you.

However, when you go about it, make sure you don’t go out all guns blazing on multiple social platforms. Instead, concentrate on the ones where your target audience is the most active. These are the ones where your efforts will have maximum impact.

Another helpful thing to keep in mind is to be consistent while posting on social media. Make sure you regularly post something to keep your audience engaged. Else, you may start losing the attention of your target audience.

One way of going about this is by leveraging social media scheduling tools like Buffer and Hootsuite. Using these tools, you can schedule your social posts in advance so that they’re published at the right time on autopilot.

5. Create High-Quality Content

Content is at the heart of any marketing strategy and is one of the best ideas for promoting your small business both online and offline.

You can start by building a website with compelling content to attract visitors. Additionally, you can incorporate a blog into it and create helpful blog posts for your audience.

The goal of the blog posts would be to become a valuable resource for information that can solve their problems.

This would lead to them trusting your brand more and would boost your website traffic. That, in turn, can go a long way in driving sufficient leads and conversions for you.

It’s one of the reasons why nearly 90% of content marketers leverage blog posts to reach their overall marketing goals.

Image via Semrush

But blog posts aren’t the only form of content you should be chasing.

You can also create content for social media in the form of infographics and videos to tap into those audience segments who may not be very keen on reading long pieces of text.

Videos, in particular, can play a major role in helping you take your small business to the next level. In fact, a Wyzowl study found that 78% of marketers say that videos have helped them boost their sales directly. That’s perhaps the reason why nearly 94% of marketers say that video is an important part of their marketing strategy.

Image via Wyzowl

So, what are the different types of video content you can create?

You can create:

• How-to videos
• Explainer videos
• Interviews
• Behind the scenes videos
• Live videos
• Q&A videos

6. Partner with Influencers

One of the other good ideas for marketing your small business is to partner with social media influencers. These are social media personalities who already have a large and active audience.

They can promote your brand to these followers in exchange for monetary compensation, shoutout, or freebies.

As a small business owner, you should look into nano- and micro-influencers in particular. The reason being that these influencers would be ready to work with you for a small monetary compensation or even freebies.

But why is it worth having an influencer strategy?

The simple reason being that influencers have already done the heavy lifting of amassing your target audience under a single roof.

As a result, collaborating with them would save you the added effort of finding your target audience. All you’ve got to do is find the right influencers who have an audience that’s similar to yours. Bingo! There you have a simple way to reach your audience without much effort.

And guess what?

An influencer’s audience can be even more receptive to your small business’ promotion as it’d be coming from a person they trust.

It’s due to this and many other reasons that the influencer marketing industry is expected to grow to $13.6 billion this year.

Image via Influencer Marketing Hub

For instance, note how Zevia has partnered with Christine to promote their brand on Instagram.

Image via Instagram

7. Repurpose Your Content

If you’re a small business owner, you’ll likely have a small team and a tiny marketing budget as compared to larger businesses.

In such a situation, you’ll not have the liberty to go about content creation with all guns blazing. The limitations of staff and budget would mean that you can only produce so much original content every day, week, or month.

But it doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t scale up your content production.

There are some ideas you can leverage. And one of those ideas is repurposed content.

The content you create caters to a particular segment of your audience. But when you change the format in which it’s distributed, you may be able to tap into a completely different audience segment.

What’s more?

Even those who’ve seen your content in another form may still be inclined to check it out in the new format.

For instance, not everyone prefers reading long-form blog posts and fewer even share them. In fact, people are 2x more likely to share videos with their friends than other forms of content like blog posts according to the Wyzowl study mentioned previously.

So, how can you go about content repurposing?

Here are a few steps to follow:

1. Identify content that’s already performing well in one form
2. Come up with ideas for the formats in which the content could be repurposed
3. Modify the content into those different formats
4. Publish the content and share it

FAQs

Q1. What are some good marketing ideas?

A. Some of the best marketing ideas for a small business are:

• Create a Google My Business (GMB) listing
• Launch a customer referral program
• Run contests
• Leverage social media marketing
• Use infographics

Q2. What are the 4 types of marketing strategies?

A. The four main types of marketing strategies are:

• Paid marketing
• Transactional marketing
• Content marketing
• Word of mouth marketing

Q3. How do you attract customers?

A. To attract customers to your brand, you can leverage one of the many small business marketing ideas such as:

• Creating a Google My Business listing
• Developing high-quality content
• Running contests
• Launching a customer referral program
• Creating infographics

Q4. How do I get my business noticed?

A. Some of the ideas through which you can get your small business noticed online include:

• List your small business in Google My Business (GMB)
• Ask for reviews
• Leverage content marketing
• Publish content on social media
• Set up listings in business directories
• Write guest posts

Q5. What is the most effective form of marketing?

A. The most effective form of marketing is word of mouth marketing. The reason for this is simple — people trust the recommendations of other customers more than they would believe the brand. When people hear good things about your small business from current customers, they’ll likely buy from you.

Q6. How can I make my business stand out from the crowd?

A. Marketing is the best way to make your small business stand out from the crowd. Some of the marketing ideas you can implement to achieve this are:

• Creating a Google My Business listing
• Launch a referral program
• Run contests and giveaways
• Create high-quality content

Q7. What are the most successful small businesses?

A. Some of the most successful types of small business ideas are:

• Auto repair and car wash services
• Electronics repair
• Fitness trainers
• Real estate agency
• Dental businesses
• IT support
• Online education

Q8. How can I promote my business in a small town?

A. The best ideas to promote your business in a small town is through local SEO and content creation. This involves targeting your local crowd by getting your small business listed in local directories like Google My Business and Bing Places. It also includes the creation of content that’s meant for the local audience. Both of these can work to grow your business in your town.

Q9. What is strategic planning for a small business?

A. Strategic planning for a small business involves building a strategy that helps you reach the goals and objectives of your business. It outlines all the necessary steps required to drive your business growth in the current times and also the future by effectively utilizing the resources at your disposal.

Q10. What are the 5 functional areas of business?

A. The five key functional areas of businesses are:

• Management
• Operations
• Marketing
• Finance
• Accounting

Start Marketing Your Small Business

Launching and marketing a small business is a major challenge as there’s just so much to do with a lot of constraints. You’ve got to create content, find influencers, manage social media, and so much more with limited staff and budget.

That’s where these marketing ideas can come in handy. You can easily get your GMB or Bing Places listing and instantly expose your business to a wider audience.

What’s more?

You could launch a customer referral program and contests to get more leads and conversions. Creating high-quality content in the form of blog posts, infographics, and videos can also help boost your brand’s visibility online.

It also helps to repurpose the content that you’ve already created to make the most out of it.

Finally, partnering with nano- and micro-influencers can be helpful as they can help you reach a wide audience without hefty fees.

Do you have any questions about the marketing ideas mentioned above for your small business? Ask them in the comments.