A well-laid-out small business marketing plan is key to attracting the right customers at the best moments in the customer journey. It also narrows your focus on marketing channels that actually work, so you don’t waste precious time and resources on strategies that don’t.
Here are a few steps to create your small business marketing plan.
Step 1: Identify your target audience and their needs
Understanding your customers through market research is the starting point of any small business marketing journey. Your customers have unique concerns and your product or service helps them fulfill a specific job they need to do.
For example, a construction company may build residential houses, but simply expressing that they build houses isn’t going to win over the market. Market research might reveal that quality and efficient project management are the top concerns of their customers. These concerns should be embedded into the company’s brand messaging and value proposition to appeal to the customer and overcome objections right away.
Step 2: Map your marketing funnel and customer journey
Here is a classic example of a marketing funnel․
- Top of the funnel (TOFU): Awareness and discovery
- Middle of the funnel (MOFU): Researching solutions (also called “Consideration”)
- Bottom of the funnel (BOFU): Making an educated purchase decision (also called “Conversion” or “Decision”)
Step 3: Assess the competition
A formal competitor assessment will clarify exactly how other brands are marketing their product. Identify areas of weakness in their strategy and consider improvements to your own approach.
Take notes on your competitors' online presence, and answer the following questions for each brand:
- Website: Is the website aesthetically pleasing and functional? Does it provide a good user experience?
- Social media marketing: What social media channels are they optimizing and do they respond to customers there? Look at customer reviews and feedback.
- Brand visibility: Where do they appear in search engine results? Has this changed over time?
- Marketing strategy: Are they working with any other brands or influencers? Where are they advertising? It’s important to know if you’ll be able to outbid the big players when advertising your small business.
Step 4: Small business marketing strategies to focus your efforts
Once you’ve completed the first part of your research, you can start to refine and develop your overall strategy.
Step 5: Your brand story and messaging
Your brand’s story aims to build resonance with potential buyers. It needs to be inspirational, persuasive and memorable enough to make customers pay attention and recall your brand.
Brand messaging meanwhile is the underlying foundation that sets the tone for every piece of content and messaging you produce. Honing your messaging is crucial for your small business advertising, as it ensures that your output is always consistent and on-brand.
Step 6: Build an SEO and user-friendly website
Your website is a good place to start. It’s your virtual shop front and acts as a primer for your audience, engaging them to eventually buy.
If you’re building a site yourself, drag-and-drop website builders such as Squarespace and Wix are great options that don’t require any coding knowledge.
You can optimize the site for search engine optimization (SEO) by including relevant keywords throughout and following best-practice SEO guidelines. This means adding keywords throughout in website copy, page titles and meta descriptions.
Pay attention to site hierarchy and create internal page links, as search engines prioritize well-structured sites and it improves navigation for users.
Final thoughts
There are myriad ways to advertise your small business online. It’s just a matter of focusing on the channels that are right for your audience and brand. It’s entirely possible to bootstrap your business with low-cost marketing channels that we’ve covered here, even if you are learning as you go or operating as a marketing team of one.
Spending time on market research and your small business marketing strategy will serve you well further down the line, as you refine your online marketing plans. You’ll find that a lot of marketing is trial and error, but tracking your analytics and performance data from the very start will give you the confidence to make data-driven decisions as your brand grows.