Marketing 101: marketing basics for small business owners
Get the lowdown on Marketing 101: what you need to know
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How well do you know your marketing basics? As a new business owner, it’s likely not the top of your list of skills to refresh or learn, but it should be an important one. After you’ve just launched a new business, created the perfect products and services, built your website, and worked out how you’re going to serve your customers with the help of thebest CRM software, you’ll need to think about how to keep growing your business via strategic marketing.
In this article, we’ll be answering questions like: How do I get my brand’s message out there? Which is the right marketing channel to reach my target audience on? How do I advertise my website? How do I encourage customers to buy?
It’s all about small business marketing basics. In this “Marketing 101” guide, we’ll walk you through these key areas:
You’ll learn how to get your message out to people who need your products and services. The best part? Marketing isn’t just for big companies with huge marketing departments. With the right strategy, planning, and tools, you can do it yourself—and get fantastic results.
Let’s get into it.
Marketing 101: Why you need to market your business and website
What is Marketing?
Marketing is the way that you create awareness of your products and services, communicate the features and benefits, and get people to buy from you. You can achieve this in many different ways, depending on who your customers are, your business niche, what you sell, and if you want to market locally, online, or a combination of the two.
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You need to market your website and business for one simple reason: people don’t know that you exist—yet. Good marketing puts your business, products, and services in front of the right people, with the right needs, at the right time.
The best marketing approach depends on several factors, including how much money you have available, your business niche, the best channels for reaching potential customers in that niche, and whether you want to do it all yourself.
With the right combination of marketing software and tools, you can start marketing today. Then, as your business grows, you can decide to outsource your small business marketing needs to specialized agencies.
Overview: the best marketing channels for small business and medium size business owners
The best marketing campaigns use multiple channels to maximize your reach and effectiveness. Marketing channels are the tools you use and the path you take to get your message out there.
Your business is unique, so what works for one business won’t necessarily work for another. Before you start planning your marketing campaign, it’s important to understand the main marketing channels, their advantages and drawbacks, and how they can help you reach your customers.
Keep in mind that a big part of marketing is choosing the best channel for reaching your potential customers. These channels can change from product to product, so it’s a good idea to experiment and see where you can optimize your return on investment.
The main online marketing channels are:
Pay-per-click advertising on Google
GoogleAdwords is a pay-per-click advertising tool, and can be a very effective marketing channel for small business owners. You bid on keywords, and when people search for those terms on Google, your ads have a chance of showing up. If a user likes your ad, they click on it and are sent to your website. Google charges you each time someone clicks your ad.
Advantages of pay-per-click
Disadvantages of pay-per-click
The best marketing software and tools for pay-per-click marketing
Google Adwords and Google Analytics are the two most effective tools for managing your PPC campaigns.
Display advertising for your small business
Online display advertising helps you reach potential customers as they’re browsing different websites. You create ads on various websites (called “publishers”), which appear on those sites when users visit them. These ads can be text-based or graphics-based, and they can also include video clips, animations, or interactive content.
Advantages of display advertising
Disadvantages of display advertising
The best marketing software and tools for display advertising
Social media marketingfor your small business
Social media marketing uses social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to share great content with your customers. The best part about this kind of marketing is that it’s highly targeted and flexible.
Social media marketing comes in a couple of different flavors:
Advantages of social media marketing
Disadvantages of social media marketing
The best marketing software and tools for social media marketing
Content marketingand SEO for your small business
Content marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) help you appear in search engine results when people type in specific keywords. Content marketing means you’ll need to create different types of content, such as web copy, blog posts, and white papers.
You can provide content as text, audio, video, graphics, or interactive widgets—whatever best suits your product or service.
Advantages of content marketing
Disadvantages of content marketing
The best marketing software and tools for content marketing and SEO
Email marketingfor small businesses
Email marketing involves getting people’s email addresses and sending them messages that inform, educate, and engage them. These messages might be directly related to your products and services, or they could offer helpful advice, different perspectives, interesting research, and other formats.
The key part of effective email marketing is building up your email address list. It’s a good idea to create “lead magnets” to get people to sign up, and to put email collection forms on each page of your website.
Advantages of email marketing
Disadvantages of email marketing
Decide whether to do small business marketing yourself or hire a marketing company
Many of the marketing tools and software platforms that we’ve listed are easy to learn and use. In the early days of your business, as you’re just starting out, it makes sense to keep your marketing in-house. You want to keep your costs down, and you’re still figuring out the best marketing channels and approaches.
As your business grows, you might want to outsource some or all of your marketing to a specialist company. There are many marketing agencies to choose from. Here are some factors to consider when deciding on the best marketing company:
Track your small business marketing results and tweak them to maximize your ROI
You will need to get measures in place so you can track how much you’re spending on marketing, how effective each channel and campaign is at getting customers to your business, and how much those customers spend.
The best way to track your small business marketing results and tweak them to maximize your return on investment (ROI) is by using a marketing system like HubSpot. These types of marketing tools will monitor your social media efforts, SEO and content marketing, paid ad campaigns, and other marketing channels.
You can see what’s working and what’s not, make improvements, and track any changes. This will help you focus on the most effective marketing strategies, campaigns, and channels.
Experiment and try out different marketing approaches
The time to start is now. You have a great business, and you can get this right. This guide is an excellent starting point, and now it’s down to you. These strategies work, and will help to boost your conversions and sales.
Don’t be afraid to experiment. Your business has unique needs, products, and services. Getting your marketing right takes practice. As long as you record the channels you’re using, develop a strategy, and track results, you can optimize your marketing in just a few months.
That way, you’ll know that every penny you spend will create a great ROI and bring the right customers to your website.
Further reading on marketing
If you want to learn more about marketing, and are new to it all, we’ve outlinedsix small business marketing strategies that work.
Should you be wondering how you can automate marketing functions between businesses, or just in general, make sure to read our explainers answering the questions:what is digital marketing;what is marketing automation; andwhat is B2B marketing automation.
Paul is a professional writer who creates extensively researched, expert, in-depth guides across business, finance, and technology. He loves the challenge of taking complex subjects and breaking them down so they are easy to understand. He can quote ‘The Princess Bride’ in its entirety and believes the secret to good writing is Earl Grey tea.
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