Small businesses are over 90% of all businesses in the U.S., U.K., and Europe.
Struggling to get noticed or generate interest from potential customers? This step-by-step guide will show you how to get noticed in the marketplace.
The products or services you sell and who they’re for is where marketing begins. Here are the important steps:
Identify the problem your customers are having based on your goods/service
List the benefits of the product
Turn those benefits into problem/solution sentences
Create a one-page document or landing page explaining your product/service and get evaluations from others
Let's look at examples from different types.
Products (E-commerce)
A makeup company has three clearly defined services: demoing the product, displaying the product and selling the goods. Each page explains the service benefits and process and contains case studies, customer reviews, and a call to action (to get in touch).
Services
Companies that sell services such as trainers, consultants, education, entertainment, ect.
For example, a company that sells workout plans to enable people to customize their workout regiments in a gym setting.
The next step to marketing your business is to consider what to charge customers for your so you make a profit. For example, if you sell goods, your pricing may be to mark up the product’s expenses to make a profit.
Consider what the competition is charging and what consumers are willing to pay.
Action: Write down the products, services, and prices you want to market.
Have a clear goal in mind so that you can structure your marketing results.
The three main goals are to acquire new customers, sell to current ones, and keep clients using and paying for your products or services.
Get new customers (Acquisition)
Sell to your current customers (Upsell)
Keep existing customers (Retention)
If you don’t sell to the same customers repeatedly, you’ll need to focus on getting new paying customers. It's easier said than done, of course.
Acquiring new customers has of four key elements as your customers go through your marketing material: Attract your audience, show them your goods as a solution to their problem, and give them a reason to buy.
Jot down the number of new customers or the revenue you need each month.
For businesses with a customer base already established, you're going to want to sell to existing customers in addition to getting new ones.
For example, I pay MailChimp to send emails for clients. Mailchimp promotes other services or add-ons to its existing customers.
Make a list of any products or services you can also provide for your current base besides your main product or service.
Lastly, if you have lots of customers, you’ll need to keep them using the product or they’ll stop using the product.
So many companies are so homed in on acquiring new customers that they forget their regular buyers.
If you have 1,000 customers paying you $50 a month; that’s $50,000 revenue a month.
But if you’re losing 5% of customers a month; that’s
50 lost customers every month.
$2,500 lost revenue every month.
Think about all the places where you can sell your products or services. For example, most companies sell on their website direct to consumer, or on Amazon and similar sites. Fashion brands and influencers like commonly sells via their websites, social channels, retail stores, and partners online and off.
Here are some of the most common ways you can use to channel your products.
Website
Your website is the homebase of your company, products, and services. Website traffic usually results from how well you promote your brand and products. In today’s world, pretty much everyone needs a website.
SEO and content marketing
SEO (search engine optimization) is the practice of growing a website’s traffic from organic search results. If your target audience looks up information related to your products online, you should likely make SEO one of your marketing priorities. That’s the case for most businesses.
To market your business to search visitors, you need to do keyword research and create content and links. Here’s a high-level overview of what that involves:
Enter a keyword related to your product or service into Google's Keywords Explorer to discover the questions people ask about your business and the keywords they use when searching online.
Create a content plan containing the keywords you’re going to target
Use a content outline template to make writing and publishing content in your content plan easier
Use tactics to get website backlinks, increasing your website rankings and traffic
For local business owners, head to an SEO guide on Fiverr to help get you started. E-commerce owners also need to apply specific e-commerce SEO techniques that are different from general best practices.
Email
There are two steps to marketing your business with email. First, you need to get subscribers onto your email list, and then you need to convert them into customers by sending emails.
Getting email subscribers
To get email subscribers, you can include a newsletter or content upgrade sign-up form using any number of email marketing solutions. For example, this company has a newsletter subscription form at the foot of every page. I offer an incentive or content upgrade on some of my webpages in exchange for the reader’s email address.
Convert customers by emailing them
Once you’ve built up a list of opted-in subscribers, then you can begin marketing to them.
In this case study, an e-commerce retailer earns 25% of its revenue by sending welcome, cart abandonment, win-back, and big spender email campaigns to its subscribers and customers.
Here’s an email marketing campaign where the company lists four services that can help subscribers; then it includes links to its sales or booking page.
Paid Search
Paid search or PPC (pay-per-click) advertising is where companies pay a fee each time someone clicks their adverts in the search results.
Paid search is an excellent option if you have marketing money to spend and you’re looking for immediate website traffic that can drive leads or sales.
For example, this report shows a company has derived over 46% of its revenue from paid search this year.
Head over to our PPC marketing guide if you’re looking to start using paid search ads. This fashion retailer is advertising with Facebook Ads. And it is also advertising with Google Ads. However, there are other types of advertising, including social media, print, direct mail, outdoor, and podcast advertising.
Partners, sponsorships, and affiliates
Many businesses use partners or affiliates to reach and promote their products and services to potential customers. For example, you can sponsor the newsletters of people in your industry with over 10,000 email subscribers with ConvertKit’s new sponsorship network. Or you can follow our guide on finding and paying influencers to endorse your products or services.
If you sell products, Shopify has introduced a program called Shopify Collabs that enables creators to partner with your company, create content about your products, and earn commissions when their audience purchases.
In-app marketing
In-app marketing is a type of marketing where adverts or messages appear within software and mobile apps.
Every time you log in to Ahrefs, we promote the latest features to existing customers.
You can use a solution like Beamer to add in-app notifications to your website or application.
In-store marketing
In-store marketing is the practice of promoting products and services at retail stores. This can include advertising on store shelves, signage, displays, point-of-sale materials, etc. This skateboarding retailer uses its shop window to promote a winter sale to people walking past the shop on the high street.
In step #3, you set some goals. Now you want to see whether your marketing activities met these objectives.
Goal: Sell products
If you are selling products using Shopify, you can see where your visitors came from, the products people looked at, best-selling products, average order value, and the conversion rate from the Analytics reports.
Goal: Get customers with Google Ads
If you’re using Google Ads to get new customers, you should focus on your cost per conversion: the cost of someone buying your product or the cost per new inquiry.
You do this by setting up conversion tracking at the start of the campaign.
Goal: Sell to existing customers with email marketing
If you use email to market to existing customers, use Google Analytics to track visitors to your site and their activities, such as purchases or leads.
Look under Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels, and you will see the number of visitors, transactions, revenue, or leads that came from email.
Ask your web developer or designer to set this tracking up for you.
At the end of each month, review your marketing results and efforts, learn from any mistakes you’ve made, and repeat whatever worked for you in the past.
For those looking to grow their business, this marketing guide will help you get started on the right foot. It showed you how to market your company (starting with your products), set prices, set goals, find where to target customers, and promote your products or services. There is also a template to keep you on track.
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