Marketing for Small Businesses: Tips & Advice

Marketing for Small Businesses: Tips & Advice

Here's an interesting thought: 99% of small businesses are bleeding money daily on ineffective marketing strategies.

I've seen countless entrepreneurs throw thousands into Facebook advertising, SEO ‘experts' and polished websites but then wonder why they're struggling to make a profit.

What if I told you that the businesses dominating their local markets aren't using magical strategies you don't know about? They execute the fundamentals that work while everyone else follows shiny objects.

I've helped scale over 100+ businesses that generate$100m+ in revenue. I've identified the framework that separates the 1% that do well from the 99% that shut up shop.

In the next few minutes, I will show you how to stop wasting your marketing budget on stuff that doesn't work and start implementing strategies to help you move the needle.

Sound good?

Understanding the Marketing Basics

For small businesses, marketing is a wild, mysterious beast. Let's demystify that and help you get confident in spreading the word.

Defining Marketing for Small Businesses

At its core, marketing is just about getting your product or service into the hands of the right people. This may not be about selling but creating relationships for small businesses.

Think of marketing as a bridge that connects you and your potential customers. To build that bridge:

• Identify your unique values: What makes you (or your product) unique? You need to highlight this in your marketing.
• Understand your audience: You must know your ideal customers and their pain points.
• Choose the proper channels: Social media platforms, email marketing, or just simple word-of-mouth; pick the best platforms and be where your audience is.

Here's one thing you need to remember: The pre-2020 digital marketing playbook is quickly expiring. There are so many regurgitated, surface-level trends, but what's currently working is hidden in data most haven't spotted yet.

3 Stats Nobody's Talking About

1. 40% of SMBs now use AI image creation tools, not just chatbots or analytics; 28% use AI to replace their graphic designers. This isn't about efficiency; it's a new way of creating a visual identity without human input.
2. 61% of consumers abandon mobile sites after just one visit – yet 73% of SMBs still seem to focus on desktop-first websites. This disconnect costs £23bn annually in lost conversions. The weird thing is that mobile searches outpace desktops by 3:1.
3. 45% of SMBs call lead generation their ‘top challenge' – while 60% still avoid search advertising. This is like complaining about hunger whilst sitting at the dinner table, ignoring the spread.

Why These Numbers Matter More Than You Think

Using AI isn't really about cutting costs; it's democratisation. A local café using MidJourney to make merch can now compete with the large chains' digital marketing budgets. But the catch is that 78% of AI-generated content lacks brand consistency, creating a “sameness epidemic” where there's no differentiation.

The mobile gap reveals something interesting: SMEs are too focused on having a website rather than optimising it. With 55% of consumers discovering brands on social media platforms, your Instagram profile is like your new homepage.

In terms of the search advertising paradox? That's a classic case of “penny-wise, pound foolish” – businesses that focus entirely on organic traffic from Google are playing Jenga with the algorithm. One update away from collapse.

Common Misconceptions in Small Business Marketing

There's a tonne of misconceptions in the marketing world, so let me clear up a few common ones:

1. “Marketing is only for the big companies” = Nonsense. Small businesses can often be more effective, even with lower costs. It's all about targeting.
2. “You need a big budget” = You can market well with zero budget. Still, even just a tiny investment in your marketing can work wonders.
3. “Marketing is a one-and-done affair” = I don't know who still thinks like this. You have to continuously adapt and innovate based on feedback (from customers) and trends (in the industry.)

Remember that your marketing approach should be authentic and reflect your brand personality. Don't be afraid to showcase who you are and what you stand for.

The more genuine you come across, the more likely people will connect with your brand. Start small and being consistent is the best advice I could give here.

Importance of Marketing for Small Businesses

If you ever wonder why some businesses struggle and others seem to grow exponentially, the answer often comes down to effective marketing.

Enhancing Visibility

Being seen is VITAL – you want your potential customers to know that (A) you exist and (B) you are the solution. Visibility is the first element to attracting clients, and here's how marketing can help:

• Build your Brand Awareness: Use social media, local events, and promotional activities to create a buzz around your business.
• Use SEO: Optimise your website to rank higher in the search engine results, helping customers come across you naturally.

Engaging Audiences

Engagement is about how well you connect with your audience, not just how often you push your message to them. Engaging with customers creates loyalty and trust, here's how to boost it:

• Create Interactive Content: Ask questions, run polls and surveys, and encourage feedback directly.
• Personalise your Communication: Use personalised email marketing and segment your audience to ensure the messages are tailored as best possible.

Driving Business Growth

Effective marketing drives growth. It does translate to sales, but that's not the only measure of success. Here's how to ensure your marketing effort leads to actual results:

• Set Clear Goals: What do you want to achieve? Is it more followers, more website traffic or simply more sales?
• Track Progress: Use Google Analytics to measure what works and refine strategies as you go.

Remember: Big or small, every marketing effort is an investment in your future.

Identifying and Reaching Target Audiences

Let's look at one of the most critical aspects of marketing: Understanding your target audience. Really knowing who you are focusing on makes such a difference in marketing.

Creating Customer Personas

Customer personas are a fictitious representation of your ideal client (or clients). They can help you better empathise and understand your audience's needs and wants. Consider:

• Demographics: Their age, gender, income, location, etc.
• Behavioural Patterns: Shopping habits, purchasing preferences, interests, etc.
• Pain Points: What problems are they trying to solve?

I remember creating my first persona for an ideal client. Whilst it seemed like playing games, it helped guide everything from colour choices to the style of marketing messages.

Segmenting Markets

With your personas fleshed out, it's time to segment your audience into smaller groups. This allows for your marketing efforts to best resonate with each group.

• Demographic Segmentation: Target your audiences based on age, gender or income levels.
• Psychographic Segmentation: Focus on lifestyle, values or interests.
• Behavioural Segmentation: Group customers based on interactions with your business.

Setting Measurable Goals

Creating measurable goals is key to ensuring your marketing efforts aren't wasted. If you don't have goals, how can you track anything?

• Be Specific: Define your goal (e.g., “increase email list subscribers by 100 in 30 days.”
• Measurable: Use metrics to track your progress.
• Achievable: Set realistic targets based on the available resources and market conditions.

With my own goals, we focused on smaller targets like increasing engagement on social posts by 20-30% monthly. This allowed us to experiment and track what worked versus what we thought would work.

Low-Cost Marketing Strategies

With your audience identified and nailed down, it's time to explore low-cost marketing strategies to unlock your business's potential. You don't need a huge budget to make a significant impact!

Social Media Marketing

Social media can still be a powerful tool for businesses of any size to engage and connect with an audience. It's free and has a massive worldwide reach.

• Choose the right platforms: Be where your audience is. Do they hang out casually on TikTok or showcase their success on Linkedin? Be there.
• Create engaging content: Share stories, tips or behind-the-scenes looks at your brand. Visual content engages better, so try to use many images and videos.
• Interact with your audience: Respond to all comments, ask questions, and create polls to increase engagement.

With my first Instagram brand account, I posted a lot of behind-the-scenes sketches and process work in building brands. It gave both young designers an idea of what we do and business owners a glimpse of how we work. And yes, it grew our account to over 150,000 followers in just a few months.

Google Business Profiles

Your Google Business Profile is essential for anyone who deals with local customers. It literally puts you on the (Google) map! Here are a few ways you can maximise your profile.

• Actually Claim your Business: This is an obvious first step, but I'm constantly surprised when local brands haven't done it! Be consistent and include all the standard info, such as address, phone numbers, and opening hours.
• Get some Reviews: Encourage your previous customers to leave a review of their experience with you. Also, respond to reviews to help enhance your reputation!
• Be sure to post on it: The Google Business profile allows you to share updates, offers and special events – if you can, offer a discount here!

Over a few months, I noticed a boost in local visibility on our Google page after optimising the profile and posting some updates. All it takes is one new client to make it worth the effort!

Email Marketing

Email marketing is still one of the most effective, low-cost strategies to get your message right in front of your audience. It's easy to set up and doesn't cost much to get up and running.

• Build your List: Collect email addresses through website sign-up forms, competitions or events. Don't waste your time buying or scraping emails for massive blasts – we've tested that before, and it doesn't work.
• Personalise your Messaging: Segment your audience to tailor email content based on their preferences or behaviour.
• Create Value: Share exclusive content, promotions or unique newsletters to ensure your audience stays engaged and feels they are receiving value by staying subscribed.

Content Marketing Strategies

With those low-cost options explored, let's jump into a key one: Content Marketing.

This is where you can really showcase your brand and connect with an audience on a deeper level.

The best content marketing can position you as a leader in the industry, create new connections with peers and ultimately drive conversions forward.

Blogging for Small Businesses

It still works well! You have to do it right.

Besides the prominent aspects of sharing knowledge and getting your story out there, blogging can boost your website's authority and rankings.

• Identify your Relevant (Pillar) Topics: Create content around this that speaks to your audience's needs and interests. Don't forget tools like Google Trends for your industry-specific hot topics.
• Consistency is Key: Aim for a regular posting schedule that you can realistically maintain – whether daily, weekly or monthly – and having that consistency can build trust in your brand.
• Always add Value: Your posts should solve problems or provide unique insights. Whether through an expert' how-to' guide or industry updates, give your audience something they want to read.

When I first started the Inkbot Design blog, I aimed to help young designers grow the way design blogs in the past helped me. It also evolved into helping my clients (and potential clients) improve their brands. It's helped establish us as a helpful resource in the community.

Using Video Content Effectively

As with last year, video content is still on the rise, and it's a great way to engage with audiences. Here's a few tips to work it into your strategy:

• Short and Sweet Works: Aim for under two minutes unless it's direct to YouTube. You want to keep viewers' attention within the first 15-30 seconds.
• Show ‘Behind the Scenes': Whatever it is, try to show elements of your process, your personality, and your setting. Just be authentic.
• Include a Call-to-Action: Gently guide viewers on the next step you want them to take, whether visiting your website or subscribing to learn more.

Leveraging Storytelling for Brand Building

Storytelling itself is one of the most powerful marketing tools you can lean on. This isn't just about selling your product but building on the brand narrative. Here's how you can harness that:

• Share your journey: Be open to why you started your business and your mission. What struggles has your brand faced, and how did you overcome them?
• Highlight your Customer Success Stories: Show off your testimonials from satisfied customers. This adds a tonne of credibility.
• Expand on Brand Narrative: Develop a comprehensive brand story that reflects your brand values, mission and vision for a world with your brand.

We often use customer testimonials and updates in our marketing materials and websites. Having these works well when there's a moment of indecision. For example, if we quote a project and it's a little more than they had budgeted, a single testimonial that mentions how they've seen a “500% ROI since rebranding” can be all it takes to sway the discussion.

Role of SEO in Marketing

Getting all that fantastic content live online is only half the battle, arguably less than that. Getting eyes on it is a whole new topic. And that's why SEO still exists.

Basics of On-Page SEO

On-page SEO is exactly what it sounds like, ensuring the pages are optimised for search engines. There are a few things to keep in mind here:

• Keyword Research: One of the core facets of SEO for the last 20 years is finding the keywords that best represent your brand content, which the visitors also use when searching. Free tools like Google Keyword Planner are still widely used but check out AI keyword research options to avoid missing anything.
• Optimise your Titles, H1's and Meta Descriptions: Include your primary keyword and LSI terms here, along with compelling copywriting to entice the click.
• Quality Content: This sounds obvious, but it's often seen on clients' websites, where it seems like ‘good enough' was their decision. Don't forget the custom visuals to back up and help visualise things like statistics and quotes.
• Internal Linking: It's always been important, but there's been a lot of talk about it recently—deep link to your pillar pages, services pages, and contact pages (in CTAs) where relevant. Just keep an eye on the anchor text.

Just remember that small changes can make a huge difference here. Do your primary keyword research and identify secondary keywords to back them up, sprinkling them naturally throughout the content.

If you struggle to rank on page one in Google in 2025, targeting some less-competitive keywords is worthwhile. For example, if you have a local business, ‘your business type + city name' can remain a core focus.

Importance of Local SEO

That naturally brings us to Local SEO, which is highly competitive for apparent reasons. This is where we must consider people on their phones, in their cars, hunting for your services or products.

• Focus on your Google My Business Profile: You want to make it as easy as possible for all those using maps to find businesses. Accuracy of your details, lovely images of the brand, product or location and updated details are key here. Make it a point to check your Google business profile every few months, at the least.
• Collect your Reviews: Let happy customers know they can leave a review of their experience on Google. Don't be too forceful here, as it could annoy them, but just saying, “I'm glad we could help; if you could leave a quick review on Google, it makes all the difference”, can work wonders.
• Local Keyword Targeting: Incorporate your location-specific keywords into content and meta descriptions to pull in that local visibility. You don't need a specific page for each variant. Still, if you have locations in different cities or areas, each could be given its page with “Service + Working Area” as a focus. Tailor that page to the area and business (location-specific images, address, etc.)

Utilising SEO Tools and Resources

We are seeing new SEO tools and resources daily, especially with AI taking over the industry – here are some long-term must-haves:

• Google Analytics and Search Console: Track your website traffic and user behaviour at a base level. This shows you quickly what is working and what needs to be done.
• Ahrefs or SEMrush: These are comprehensive tools with free levels that can offer insights into keyword rankings, competitors, and technical site issues.
• RankMath or Yoast Plugins: if you use WordPress, these help you optimise pages for SEO. People argue that RankMath can be ‘bloated', but we use it ourselves, and it works well.

I check Analytics and GSC daily for changes. It helps understand what's attracting traffic and helps the current strategies moving forward.

Mastering the on-page SEO aspect is only part of the overall approach, but it's still a core element. Attracting millions of views is always lovely, but if there are zero conversions, it's not helping much unless repeated daily.

Digital and Traditional Marketing Methods

Balancing the ‘traditional' marketing methods with the new strategies is the best way to create a robust plan. Think of all the prominent brands – you naturally see them online, but don't forget how often you see them in offline materials.

Partnerships and Collaborations

One effective method still killing it is the partnerships and collaborations with relevant brands, ambassadors, or influencers. For good reasons, it's been huge in the last ten years.

• Find ‘Complementary' Business Partners: Partners with similar target audiences offering different products or services can be a great fit. For example, why not team up with a local coffee shop for a bakery?
• Joint Promotions: Create special offers and events together for marketing. This can be a win-win when you attract potential customers interested in both brands.
• Cross-Promotions: Share each other's posts on social media channels or include flyers in your respective locations to double the chances of people seeing things.

Years ago, we partnered with a marketing agency that drove many high-budget clients to the real estate agency. If clients lacked a coherent brand, they came to us, even though it was on the other side of the world. They trusted their marketing agency to partner with the right people, which was a win-win (win) situation.

Guerrilla Marketing Tactics

This is all about creativity and surprise without breaking the bank. The cliched ‘thinking outside the box‘ is critical here to do something unique, not just popping off a Flashdance or forcing something ‘off-brand' to try and stay relevant.

• Be Bold: Try an eye-catching mural in collaboration with local artists or a pop-up event offering free samples. It's worth asking colleagues and your target audience first to ensure they don't cringe!
• Use Social Media: Going live on TikTok and Facebook here for events can be a great way to include people who can't make it in person. Try to encourage participants to share their own experiences using branded hashtags.
• Go Hyper-local with Events: Try sponsoring local and community events to gain visibility in fun and unexpected ways. Remember to engage with people heavily when you go local like this.

Like all marketing, be sure that whatever you do is authentic to your brand. You don't want to alienate your target audience by doing things that they won't find interesting.

Experiential Marketing Techniques

This is where creating the ‘experience' for your audience comes into play. You want to foster connections here to build on brand loyalty. Here are some ideas:

• Interactive Events: This will depend on your business, but workshops, tastings, and demonstrations can help your audience experience your product for themselves. Don't be overly ‘Salesy' here; the important thing is getting the product in their mind. Often, sales will happen naturally.
• Customer Involvement: Have your customers participate in creating content (aka User-Generated Content) for marketing. Think about photo contests or co-creation.
• Immersive Environments: Create a 360-degree experience that captures your brand essence. Think of how you could use sensory experiences that resonate with your audience.

For example, if you had a product in the food industry, you could create interactive cooking tutorials using them. You could mention your partner brand pots and how your product complements them. It's all about being memorable and making genuine connections—just be creative, be yourself, and have fun!

Developing a Marketing Plan

After listing all the ideas that could work together, it's time to tie them up in a marketing plan. This is where the magic happens – your marketing plan is your roadmap!

Aligning Marketing with Business Goals

Like I've said before, your marketing strategies need to have goals; what's the point of doing it unless it's driving success for your business? So, how do you ensure marketing aligns with the goals?

• Define your goals beforehand: What does success look like in your business? Is it simply increasing sales by a certain percentage or growing your customer numbers? Be sure they are specific, like “get 100 new followers on Instagram in 30 days” or “1000 new email subscribers by the end of Q3”.
• Understand your Target Market: Knowing who your customers are is essential to tailor marketing towards them. If you don't have a rough idea, at least your conversions and engagement will be low (you'll be wasting money and time!)
• Prioritise your Strategies: If you have limited resources, your best approach is to focus on the strategies that align with your goals. For example, social media campaigns take precedence over email marketing if you want to increase brand awareness.
• Continually Review and Tweak: Keep an eye on your marketing efforts to ensure they align with the primary goal(s). You need to spot what is working and what isn't so your budget isn't drained.

This all requires clarity, commitment and the courage to pivot when necessary. Remember that a marketing plan isn't set in-store; it's a plan that evolves as things change and business grows.

Predictions: Where This Rocket Ship's Headed

Speaking of evolutions, here's some guesses as to what we expect in the coming years.

By 2027:

1. Digital channels are going to be flooded with AI-generated content. Expect email open rates to drop by at least half, as there will be a lot of generic promotions and alternative messaging sources.
2. Mobile websites with super quick loading speeds will take 83% of all local service bookings.

By 2030:

1. Augmented reality product reviews will be the norm; static product photography will be almost killed!
2. Voice search via smartwatches and glasses will drive a third of all “near me” queries. Get ready for phonetic SEO!

This roadmap is straightforward: Adapt or Evaporate!

The businesses doing well in 2030 aren't chasing trends but staying three moves ahead of their competitors.

The roadmap's clear: Adapt or evaporate. The businesses thriving in 2030 aren't those chasing trends – they're seeing three moves ahead while competitors react to yesterday's headlines. So, let's end with a quote that should make sense, “Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.”

In this game, the puck is moving so quickly that it's hard to keep up, so anticipate it… the ice is melting.