Small Business Marketing For Beginners

Beginners guide to marketing your small business online

Marketing your small business online does not come without its challenges, and if you are a complete beginner, it can feel like there is so much to learn. I want to help you break down some of the essentials when it comes to marketing your business online. Let’s look at some of the important factors for successful online business marketing:

1. Knowing your audience
2. Building your tribe
3. Having a great offering
4. Understanding how free marketing works
5. Understanding how paid marketing works

Knowing your audience when marketing online:

The first rule when marketing your business online is to know your audience well. The better you know your audience, the easier it is to sell to them. One of the best ways to learn about your audience is by using a mind map.

Start brainstorming who you are trying to reach with your marketing, your product, and your service. As someone who is new to the world of marketing your business online, you want to ensure that you gather as much data and information as possible about your ideal client. You should be obsessed with details such as where they spend their time online, what key terms they might be searching for on Google, and what YouTube channels they may find interesting or gain value from.

This initial exercise will give you really good insight into where you should be focusing your marketing efforts. A quick Google search will provide you with a lot of information about who uses different social media platforms. For example, Pinterest is a female-dominated platform, and TikTok has a disproportionate youth audience. Knowing this information puts you in a good position to pick the right social media channels to market your small business.

I wouldn’t recommend creating a marketing strategy for your small business on every single social media platform. Just because a platform is new and seems to have a great buzz does not necessarily mean that the platform is the right one for your marketing needs. Find out where your customers are, and prioritize creating marketing campaigns for those platforms, regardless of whether they seem to be the most trending or not.

You also want to take into consideration your current resources. Do you have the capacity to create content or ads on multiple social media platforms right now? If the answer is no, that is even more of a reason for you to pick the social media platforms that you feel will reach your target audience the best and stick to those. Once you grow your business, you can always diversify into new markets.

Beginner marketer’s guide to building your tribe:

Every successful online brand has a tribe, whether we are aware of it or not. We hear arguments all the time about what is better: Android or Samsung. These two brands have built their tribes, and people are loyal to their products. You can do similar things with your brand online.

The best way to build your tribe online is through content marketing. Once you know who your customer is and what platforms they spend their time on, it is time for you to start thinking about creating content on those platforms. You can also create ads on social media, but I will get into that later in this article. I highly recommend a combination of paid marketing and free marketing, especially if you are a beginner marketer. You risk a lot less money when you are using free marketing methods.

Content marketing is essentially when you create useful content that will help your ideal customer and help to build trust and create an audience of people that you can sell to. Some of the popular ways to create content that will attract your target audience include:

1. Creating a niche blog
2. Posting niche content on social media
3. Creating a niche-specific YouTube channel

Notice my use of the word ‘niche’ in these three examples. Your content should help your target audience. For example, let’s say you want to market your business that sells sports equipment for young athletes. Where do young athletes spend their time online? It might be TikTok, and you can create TikToks that answer the questions that young athletes might have. Young athletes might want tips on nutrition and fitness. If you were to create a TikTok account that specializes in creating useful free tips specifically for young athletes, you can quickly build a following of people who are interested in those topics and, as a result, gain awareness from your target audience. You can do the same with a blog on your website and a YouTube channel.

Understanding conversions for beginner marketers:

Many business owners question the return on investment of social media marketing and blogging when it comes to marketing their business online. If you are only creating content and not tracking how well that content is converting into views, new followers, and most importantly, leads and sales for your business, then this will cost you in the long run.

I recommend having strong calls to action in your free content when you are blogging or when you are creating social media content.

Going back to my example of trying to reach young athletes and starting a TikTok and a blog to create useful information to attract them to your website and social media presence. Now that you have their attention, you want to let them know how they can go deeper with you, where they can find you online to buy your products or invest in your services. The best way to do this when doing free marketing is to use what is known in marketing as a lead magnet.

Your lead magnet is something of value that you give away for free in return for a name and email address. Once you have their details, you can then email them often with offers around the products and services that you offer.

Let’s break this down a little bit further. Imagine you were able to build a following on TikTok by creating useful content that appealed to young athletes. You signpost your followers and viewers to a free lead magnet, which in this example, I am going to say is a free eBook that teaches young athletes the basics of nutrition. Let’s say, for example, that after posting regularly for 3 months, you manage to grow an audience of 10,000 young athletes. Out of those 10,000, 2,000 of them download your free guide and join your email list. You now have an email list of 2,000 people to market your products and services to on a regular basis, and this is how you see the return on investment for social media marketing. You can replicate this process for any social media platform and for your website’s blog to gain traction and turn that traction into leads and ultimately sales for your business. I speak about this in more depth in my free guide “The Formula.”

Understanding paid marketing for small businesses:

There are many platforms that you can use to help buy visitors to your website. Let’s break down what some of those platforms are and what some of the best practices are when it comes to marketing on those platforms.

Firstly, you have social media paid ads. The big social media platforms include TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Snapchat. If you discover that your target audience is on one of these platforms, you may decide to create ads to target them, either as well as or alongside your content marketing on these platforms.

You can also make use of search engines. So, you can pay for advertisements using Google, Yahoo, Bing ads, and YouTube ads.

The major thing to consider when starting as a beginner marketer using paid ads is your current budget. How much do you have to spend each month to invest in buying data?

Where a lot of business owners who are new to digital marketing go wrong is they assume their ads will be profitable from week one. They put up an ad for their product or service and don’t see the results they were looking for and stop running ads completely and leave all of their traffic to their competitors.

The first few weeks and even sometimes months of a new advertisement campaign should be you paying for ads so that you can read the data that comes back and analyze it to make data-driven decisions when running your ads the following month.

Obviously, you want to try and create ads that are profitable, but the process of doing so often requires iterations. You want to ensure that you are not reliant on the money each month that you spend on ads. Make sure you can afford to invest what you decide to invest in your online ads every month with the assumption that for the next 2 or 3 months you may not see that money back.

There are things you can do to ensure that your paid ad campaigns work better for you. Some of these things include:

1. Making sure you are split-testing your advert and your landing page
2. Making sure you are tracking the conversions and where they are coming from on your website
3. Following up with your customers by doing retargeting and email marketing
4. Learning the nuances of the paid ad platform that you choose to ensure that you spend less and make more

To learn more about driving leads and sales to your business using proven digital marketing methods, make sure you download “The Formula.”