Overview
So you are a small business looking to get new customers, drive more revenue, or create more leads. Well, marketing is a great way to begin to grow your business but what is marketing? Is it Facebook? Google? Email? Blogs? Social Media? The short answer is yes. Each one of those things is known as a channel and they are all marketing. The difference is that each one of those channels has different strategies, best practices, and effectiveness depending on what you are trying to accomplish.
While the marketing landscape is vast and at times overwhelming, let this article serve as your small business’s guide to growing using marketing. Here we will cover everything you will need to know to begin to understand the marketing landscape, effective strategies depending on your business, and the tools you will need to use along the way to make sure you are getting the best results.
Understanding the Language of Marketing
Like most industries, there is lingo or special phrases that are used to describe certain tactics, metrics, and other commonplace things. It is important that you know the basics of the language of marketing so you can understand articles like this, platforms, and other marketing tools.
Here is a list of the most important words, phrases, and terms that will be used in this article and are used every day by marketing professionals.
- Channel: A marketing channel is described as the set of people, organizations, and activities that work together to transfer goods (products and services) from the point of origin to the point of consumption. The primary purpose of a marketing channel is to create a connection between the organization that creates a product or service and prospective customers who may want to purchase it.
- Funnel: The marketing funnel is a visualization for understanding the process of turning leads into customers, as understood from a marketing (and sales) perspective. The idea is that, like a funnel, marketers cast a broad net to capture as many leads as possible, and then slowly nurture prospective customers through the purchasing decision, narrowing down these candidates in each stage of the funnel.
- ROI (Return on Investment) / ROAS (Return on Ad Spend): ROI/ROIA is the practice of attributing profit and revenue growth to the impact of marketing initiatives. By calculating the return on marketing investment, organizations can measure the degree to which marketing efforts either holistically, or on a campaign basis, contribute to revenue growth.
- CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization): CRO is the practice of increasing the percentage of users who perform a desired action on a website. Desired actions can include purchasing a product, clicking ‘add to cart, signing up for a service, filling out a form, or clicking on a link.
- SEO (Search Engine Optimization): SEO is the process of improving your site to increase its visibility when people search for products or services related to your business on Google, Bing, and other search engines.
- Landing Page: A dedicated page on a website that you land on directly from an external source such as a paid ad or email.
- Bounce Rate: Calculated when someone visits a single page on your website and does nothing on the page before leaving. More specifically, a website’s bounce rate measures how many visitors leave a page without performing a specific action, such as buying something, filling out a form, or clicking on a link.
- B2B (Business to Business): This term refers to a business that's product(s) are designed to be used by other businesses. B2B businesses normally fall into two categories, software as a service (SAAS) or service as a service where a business supplies physical services for another business. Examples: IBM, Slack, Salesforce
- B2C (Business to Customer): Refers to a business that's product(s) are designed to be used by customers that are not another business but individuals.
- B2B2C (Business to Business to Customer): A newer model of business where a business’s product(s) are used by both businesses and individual consumers, usually providing a platform where businesses and individuals can interact. Examples: Amazon, Alibaba, TripAdvisor, Airbnb
- Product: This term refers to what your business sells. It could be a physical product or a set of services.
What, Who, Where, Why?
Before you start marketing your business, you need to understand what your business does, who your customers are, where your customers are located, and why they should care about your business and choose it over the competitors.
What does your business do?
Understanding what your business is will determine what type of marketing will be most effective. Some channels work better than others depending on the type of business and we will look at those later in this article. Right now, let's figure out what kind of business yours is.
- Are you B2C or B2B?
- Do you provide a service?
- How do you make money?
- Is your product cheap, expensive, or a range?
Who are your customers?
Finding who your target customers are is one of the most difficult things when it comes to businesses. It is easy to say that your product is for everyone but the simple fact is that not everyone will buy or want your product. So how do you figure out who your target customer is?
You can answer this question by asking “why did you create your product/business or who is the perfect customer in your mind?” You can also talk to your existing customers! Find out more about them! Is there a pattern or maybe a few?
Do these customers match that “perfect” customer you had in mind? Yes or no? If not, then what is different about them? Why might this customer be using your product and not the customer you envisioned?
Where are your customers?
If you are trying to use marketing to find new customers to increase revenue then you need to know where your potential customers are. Above you figured out who your customer was, now it is time to find out where that customer is. This can be either physically, in the online space, or a combination of both.
Physically: If you are a brick-and-mortar business then it doesn’t make sense to market in places where you don’t have a shop! If your business is online then where your customer physically is isn’t as important.
Online: Everyone uses the internet differently. Because of this, you need to know where the best place is to get your marketing in front of the best pool of potential new customers. You do this to make sure that you have the best ROI possible because if you aren’t making more than you are spending on marketing then why do it? It doesn’t make sense if you are a B2B company to market on Tik Tok, does it? Of course not! Very few businesses are scrolling through Tik Tok trying to find B2B product solutions for their problems. Every place, platform, or app where people congregate on the internet has the ability to market to them but they each have different ways to market, different audiences, and different best practices. We will dive into the popular online channels later in this article.
Why should people choose to spend money on your business's product?
Here we are going to help you establish your Competitive Advantage. What is this? To put it simply, your competitive advantage is your secret sauce. It is what makes your product different from everyone else. It is the reason why someone will purchase your product. There are some questions to look at that might help your business find its competitive advantage.
Do you solve a problem?
The best businesses solve a problem for their customers. What is this problem? How do you solve it? Why is your solution the best on the market?
Are you cheaper?
Is there a business like yours already but it is too expensive for a whole economic class of customers? Many businesses are built to help provide an affordable alternative to an existing product.
Is your product of higher quality?
Does your product last longer, made with better materials, or is just overall of better quality than an existing product? This is another competitive advantage that has been the backbone of many businesses.
Is your business sustainable?
In recent years there has been a huge emphasis placed on sustainable businesses and products. There are lots of consumers that only purchase sustainable products or use sustainable businesses. Is your business or product the only sustainable option available in the competitive landscape?
These four are the most common competitive advantages that you find but there are many other ones. So what is yours? It is important to know what your competitive advantage is because it will influence the messaging that you will use in your marketing and will be a driving factor behind establishing brand loyalty with your existing customers.
Understanding Marketing Funnels
At this point, you have a good understanding of your potential customer. You know who they are, where they are located either physically or online, and why they, in theory, will want to use your product. So how do you reach them? How do you get your business or product in front of them?
This is where the concept of marketing funnels comes in.
What is a marketing funnel? To put it simply, it is the process a potential customer will go through to convert through a marketing campaign. Now, a conversion can mean many different things which is why it is important to know what your goal is for marketing.
Every way to accomplish the same goal and each way has its pros and cons and it is your job to weigh those and decide on the best option for your business.
Let's take a look at a funnel.
Awareness
Before people can choose to interact with your business, they need to know that it exists. Awareness level marketing is about making your business or product's existence known to people who otherwise wouldn’t know.
Consideration
Marketing can help promote your business so that when people need your product, they pick you over your competition. At this stage of the funnel, it is essential that your marketing messaging highlights why people should choose your business or product. This is where your competitive advantage comes into play.
Conversion
These types of marketing campaigns are the final push to get a potential customer to actually go to your website, your store, or wherever people can find your business and buy your product or convert on the goal you have set.
There are many types of goals when it comes to marketing campaigns. Other goals include:
- Filling out a form
- Signing up for a newsletter
- Creating an account.
- Booking a call
I know what you’re thinking. Why don’t I just run conversion campaigns? In a perfect world, conversion campaigns should be the only thing any marketer needs to run but humans are complex and complicated individuals. We want to know, trust, relate to, and believe in the brands that we use. That is why it is very important to understand who your customers are. You can’t appeal to everyone but if you can find a group that you do appeal to then you have a customer base for life.
Picking The Correct Marketing Channel
Up to this point, we have covered who, what, where, and why of our business and customers and how a marketing funnel works, but now we have to get your business in front of the right people!
Here we are going to break down all of the marketing channels so you can decide which one is the best for your business.
There are six core marketing channels. These are the channels that are used by all organizations, big and small. For this article, we are going to break them up into Unpaid and Paid Channels.
Unpaid
Content Marketing | SEO
Have you ever searched for something on Google, clicked the first links, ended up purchasing something, or found what you were looking for and closed the browser? Most people have and the reason that you landed on that webpage is because of Content Marketing and SEO.
Search Engine Optimization is “the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.”
Also known as Content Marketing, SEO is a long, methodical, and strategic process that involves everything from keyword rankings to creating web pages that others link to so that search engines place your pages higher on the search engine results page (SERP).
The ultimate goal of SEO is to rank as the top search result when someone searches for something but there are so many factors that go into that process.
SEO, at its core, is a content growth game. Your business will never succeed in utilizing SEO unless you produce large amounts of content. There are different types of content that a business can create or use to curate. Below are the types of content that different companies use as part of their SEO strategy.
Although SEO is considered an “Unpaid” marketing channel, the cost of being successful in this channel comes from the time, energy, and resources that it takes to create, implement, and maintain.
For a more in-depth guide to SEO, check out Moz’s “Beginners Guide to SEO”.
For strategies for Content Growth, check out Lennysnewletter’s “Content-driven growth”
PR (Public Relations)
Public Relations is all about Brand Awareness. It is all about how the public views your organization. As a small business, you probably will not need to worry about PR too much. Should your small or medium-sized business go out and hire a PR firm? Probably not. But that doesn’t mean that PR can’t be something that your organization is constantly aware of.
Does your business have social media? That is a form of PR. Your website is a form of PR. Everything that represents your business and is seen by potential customers is a form of PR. It is how the outside world develops and creates a perception of your business.
For most small and medium-sized organizations, PR is handled internally by the CEO or marketing team.
If you are interested in learning more about Public Relations and how it is used by organizations check out HubSpot’s “What is Public Relations?”
Partnerships
Partnership Marketing is another vast channel of the marketing ecosphere.
Partnerships can be used by any sized business. For many smaller businesses, partnerships afford them a level of exposure to potential customers that they would otherwise not be able to reach on their own.
If you want to dive deeper into all the facets and ways that businesses can use partner marketing, check out SuperMetrics’s “Ultimate Guide to Partner Marketing.”
Paid
Paid Advertising
Probably the most common and well-known form of marketing there is in the digital space. Paid advertising covers everything from ads you see on social media (Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok, Twitter, Pinterest) to Google Paid listings (search, display, video, shopping, app) to programmatic ads that you see on websites and apps.
Every one of the platforms that we will look at is able to track how their users interact with your ads and how they interact with your website after they have clicked on the ad. They are able to accomplish this by having you embed a simple line of code into your website that lets them see if people from their platform convert the way you want them to. This code is called a pixel and can be placed there manually or by using Google Tag Manager, which we will look at later in this article.
To begin we will take a brief look at these three paid advertising segments and I will provide additional resources for you to understand them deeper if you would like:
Social Media
With nearly one-third of the planet using social media, if you have the money you can market to a lot of people fairly quickly. With that said, there are a lot of things that go into social media marketing that can make or break it for a company.
Remember when you were narrowing down who your customers were at the beginning of this article? Well, you need to remember that information if and when you begin to utilize social media marketing. With 3 billion people using social media outlets, you need to make sure that you have a good idea of who you are looking for so you can target those people and ensure a good ROI.
Here is a very basic breakdown of the top 8 social media platforms for marketing:
To learn more about how to get the most out of social media marketing, check out Hubspot’s Social Media Marketing: The Ultimate Guide
Google Paid
Google has 3 billion unique monthly visitors and 5 billion daily interactions. Google has many different ways to market using its platform. We will take a brief look into each of them.
Search Ads: These are text-based ads that show up when people search for specific terms within the Google Search Engine. These types of ads require businesses to choose which keywords they would like its ads to appear in. Something to be aware of is that some keywords cost more to appear in than others. For example, “running shoes” is a highly searched and competitive keyword and will cost more per impression and click than a keyword like “yellow 22-inch shoelaces”.
Display Ads: These are Google’s programmatic ads. These are visual ads that let you reach a large relevant customer base while browsing the internet, mobile apps, and other Google-owned channels such as Youtube.
Video Ads: These are video-based ads that are displayed primarily on Youtube.
Shopping Ads: Designed for online retailers, these ads appear within the search engine results page or within the Google Shopping tab. These ads display products based on what someone searched in Google’s search bar.
There are a lot of dynamic ways to utilize Google to market your business, but like all paid marketing platforms there is a financial barrier to entry. To learn more about Google Paid ads and best practices check out, Hubspot’s Ultimate Guide to Google Ads and Google Ads Homepage.
Programmatic
Have you ever been on your favorite news website and at the top, along the side, and sometimes right in the middle of the webpage there are ads? Those are programmatic ads.
Programmatic Advertising is a process of buying and optimizing digital display campaigns through a single source, rather than purchasing digital space directly from a single publisher. For example, we just learned about social media marketing where you are purchasing display space directly from a social media platform. If you run campaigns on Facebook, they will not show up on Twitter.
Programmatic on the other hand relies on the use of Artificial Intelligence and machine learning to buy and place ads in real-time based on bidding.
As a small business, you do not need to worry about Programmatic advertising. It is something that is used by large-scale organizations as a way of diversifying their marketing efforts after they begin to see diminishing returns on other more traditional paid marketing channels.
But if you would like to learn more about the interesting and complex world of programmatic advertising and real-time bidding, check out Match2One’s article, “What is Programmatic Advertising? The Ultimate 2022 Guide”
Affiliate
Affiliate marketing is an established agreement between a business and another business or affiliate to promote a product for a commission of the revenue, traffic, or leads generated.
You see this type of marketing strategy employed all over the internet with influencers who promote products on their channels and tell their followers to use their link to purchase.
Your channel needs to lead somewhere
One of the most powerful things that you can do, outside of marketing, is to have a website for your business. It is the face and personality that people will see, evaluate, and choose if they trust when thinking about buying your product. Also, the simple fact is that if you are going to be marketing in the digital space, you need to have a website where your marketing effort leads to.
Now, when it comes to digital marketing best practices, it is best to have campaign-specific landing pages that mirror your ads and drive users to convert as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Since this is a beginners guide we will look at key things that should be present both on your website's homepage and landing pages.
Website
Here are some of the key things our website needs:
- Your website doesn’t need to be anything fancy but there are some things that it should have.
- Logo
- Navigation Menu
- Great Hero Image
- A headline about the business
- CTA
- Contact Info
Those 6 things are the base of a great website but if you are looking to be a little bit more advanced there are some extra things that you can add to your business's homepage to give it that little extra something.
- Social Proof
- Portfolio
- Blog
- Extra Content
- Subscription to Newsletter
- Offer
- Resources
To learn more about how to make a great homepage, check out Orbit Media’s “What to Put on Your Homepage.
Landing Page
When it comes to digital marketing, landing pages are the best practice. They are standalone web pages that are created specifically for a marketing campaign that you are running. As the name suggests, these are the pages that a potential customer “lands” on after clicking on an ad that you are currently running.
The main difference between landing pages and your website is that your website has many different goals while a landing page is designed with a single goal in mind, driving people who land on it to convert. Let's take your business’s website’s homepage for example. In the section above we went over all the key things that make a good homepage for a website and it is a lot of information designed to give anyone who visits the best overall image of your business. On the other hand, a landing page is there to close the deal after someone saw an ad that was running and decided that they wanted to know more about what that ad was promoting.
For example, your business sells shoes and you are running a 2 for 1 sale on all running shoes on Facebook. Someone sees your ad and clicks on it because they want running shoes and want to learn more about the offer and the products you have available. If you send them to your homepage, they may never find the offer or have to spend time navigating around your website to find it, but if you send them to a landing page that looks like the ad they clicked on, is talking about the offer in the ad, shows all the products available for this special offer, and only CTA on that page is to “Buy Running Shoes”. Then, you are going to see a much higher conversion rate.
Maximizing Conversions and ROI
Setting up and launching marketing campaigns is only half the battle. The other half is analyzing, optimizing, and updating campaigns and strategies to make sure that you are getting the most bang for your buck.
For example, if you are using paid social advertising with Facebook, they are going to spend all the money you give them. Obviously, they want you to succeed so that you continue to spend money with them but they are only going to give you the tools to succeed. Facebook can’t make your ads be successful.
That responsibility rests on your shoulders and this is where most people are turned off from marketing. They run a campaign, don’t see a positive ROI, and then never do it again. What people do not understand is that running a marketing campaign and doing nothing else is like getting in a boat with no engine, sails, or ores and expecting to get anywhere. You might get lucky once and the current will take you somewhere but you have no control over where and most of the time you just end up stranded, worse off than when you started.
We are going to look at some key things that will help your business get the most out of its marketing efforts. This is called CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization).
Offer
The easiest way to drive traffic through an ad is to promote an offer, a discount, or some type of special that grabs a potential customer's attention and makes them want to click on your ad.
Ads with offers will normally perform better than ads without offers or more brand awareness ads. Remember the funnel? Ads that are only promoting your brand or business are at the top of the funnel, Awareness. On the other hand, ads that are promoting an offer, discount, or special fall more into the middle or even closer to the bottom of the funnel, Consideration and Conversion.
Remember, the more expensive your product is the longer it will take for a user to move through the funnel. Offering 20% off a product that is $5000, might be a huge discount but the price of the product is still $4000 and most people are not going to just click on an ad and spend that type of money.
Landing Pages
As discussed in the section above, landing pages are web pages that live within your website and act as the doorway from your ad to your business. Landing pages are built to mirror the messaging and design of your ad while also providing potential customers with other valuable information all in an attempt to have them convert.
CTA (Call to Action)
CTA’s are present on your website, landing pages, and ads. They are the final message or push to get a potential customer to do what you want them to do.
If you are a small B2C business maybe your CTA would be “Buy Now” or “Learn More”. If you are a B2B business then your CTA might be “Schedule a Call” or “Request More Info”
Your CTA needs to not be pushy but guiding and most importantly, consistent throughout your marketing efforts.
Email can be used in a couple of different ways when it comes to your business and how to optimize conversions. It can be used to generate leads, sell products, or communicate with your existing customers. You can use it for one of those functions or all of them. Email is something that big companies have teams of people dedicated to because it has been proven to be a channel that consistently drives engagement and revenue.
Email is a very complex and powerful tool and we are only going to touch the very surface of what you can accomplish with it but it is something that can yield great results if done properly. Below we will look at some core functionalities of using email in your business but if you are looking for more information about email marketing, email service providers, and email best practices check out the following resources.
Note: Each one of these resources comes from an ESP(Email Service Provider). This is a service that your business would pay for to manage, build, automate, and send emails through.
Mailchimp’s Email Marketing Guide for Successful Campaigns
Constant Contact’s Benefits of Email Marketing for Small Business
Send Grid’s Email Marketing for Beginners: A Step-By-Step Guide
So let's take a look at some of the ways that you can use emails to maximize conversions.
Leads Generation
Remember when we were talking about funnels and how the bottom of any good marketing funnel is conversion? We said that there are many different types of conversion that can occur and one of those was filling out a form. Normally, this type of conversion is for B2B products or products that are expensive and require more than an ad and a landing page to have someone convert.
When someone fills out that form, they are turning themselves into a lead and that lead will need to be contacted by you or your sales team to begin the process of trying to sell this individual your product. This is an important step in B2B and expense product sales because buyers need to know that they are making the right choice with your product.
Selling Products
We have all received those emails that are promoting products from brands that we have purchased from in the past. That is because when you create an account on a brand website before you purchase a product, you are giving them permission to email you about promotions and product releases.
Creating mailing lists of past customers and sending offers and content tailored to them is a great way to drive revenue and it doesn’t directly rely on ads or marketing.
Communicate With Your Customers
You don’t always have to be trying to sell things to people through email. It is also a great tool to get meaningful information from your existing customer base. You can send surveys about what products people are more willing to buy or want. You can also incentivize people to leave your business a review in exchange for a discount. You can also just ask them if they would be willing to email you back with their experience with your product or business.
Never underestimate the power of an email.
Test, Test, and Test Again
Testing your strategies and tactics is one of the key factors in running successful marketing campaigns. Use data and feedback that you're receiving to make informed choices on how to change and adapt your marketing campaigns to better suit your audience.
- A/B testing
- Multivariate testing
- Google Optimize
Use Data to increase CRO
All marketing platforms from Google to Facebook will provide you with feedback and data about the campaigns you are running. Use it to help make informed choices about your marketing strategy.
Paid Marketing Platforms
If you are paying a platform, Facebook, Reddit, Pinterest, TikToK, to advertise on their platform, they will supply you with baseline data. This data will include things like spend, reach, impressions, clicks, CPC, and conversions.
These platforms supply you data because THEY WANT YOU TO BE SUCCESSFUL. Think about it. If you are running ads for your business on Facebook and they end up being very successful and you consistently have an ROI of 10:1 then you will continue to pay to advertise on Facebook and probably increase your spending.
Google Analytics
Knowing how your ads are doing from the platform side is only half the battle but if you want to knock your marketing efforts out of the way then you need to invest time into analyzing how customers are interacting with your website.
With a simple line of code placed within your website, analytic platforms can track a plethora of information.
There are many tools out there that will give you valuable insights into your website with only a few lines of simple code added to the header of your website but there is one that is free and will do everything that you need. Google Analytics is by far, one of the most powerful free tools on the internet.
So what type of information can Google Analytics provide you with? Let's check out the basics:
Where are people coming to your website from?
- Search | SEO working?
- Paid | Ads working?
- Referral | Partnerships are working and SEO
- Social Media | Are you going viral?
- Email | Is your newsletter driving traffic and revenue?
What are people doing on your website?
- Where are people landing?
- How many pages are they viewing?
- What pages are they viewing?
- Are the pages they are viewing revenue-generating pages? They should be.
- Where are they bouncing?
- Where are people leaving your site? How can you fix that?
Who is coming to your site?
- Are the people you thought were your customers using the ones using your site?
- Are different demographics using your site differently? Can you use this to your advantage?
Google Tag Manager
Google Tag Manager is a free tag management system that allows information from two sources, your website and Google Analytics, to be shared with one another. Google Tag Manager allows users to deploy tracking code or pixels (tags) on your website without having to go into the website and manually add them.
As your marketing efforts become more advanced, Google Tag Manager is an essential tool to view and manage all of your tags in one place. This saves time and energy when it comes to updating, adding, or removing these snippets of code or pixels.
Resources about how to set up, use, and understand Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager.
How to install Google Analytics on your site.
How to install Google Analytics and Tag Manager and set up conversion goals.
More Than Marketing
It can be easy to invest time, money, and resources into a marketing strategy and let other crucial things needed to drive business fall to the wayside. Remember that in its simplest form, marketing is anything that drives people to your business. Within that definition, there are lots of things that companies tend to not think about.
Branding | Content | Copywriting
Brand: Make sure your brand is the same across all channels. It’s the personality that people will connect with and trust. Make sure you use the same logo, colors, fonts, and messaging across your outbound channels.
Content: People judge everything by the way it looks. If your content is low grade or looks cheap then people will relate that to your business. This includes pictures on your website, social media, ads, or any collateral that you create. Make sure you are using content to position your brand as a professional entity.
Copywriting: Command authority through your writing.If you are not a skilled writer use tools like Grammarly or hire a copywriter from a service like Fiverr.
Referral
Technically, referral marketing is a type of Paid Marketing. There are structured strategies that involve promoting a business's products to new customers through usually existing customers or brand advocates.
For this article, since this is a Beginners Guide, we are going to look at referrals as a way to drive new customers through providing an amazing product, developing relationships with your customers, and being a business that people are passionate about telling others about.
Creating customers who are willing to go out of their way to tell others about your business or products is the goal of every organization.
To do this you need to create meaningful relationships and experiences for your existing customers.
Conclusion
Marketing is not meant to be an uphill battle but unfortunately for many, that is exactly what it feels like. The important thing to remember is that marketing isn’t an all-or-nothing game. You can start as small as you would like and start to grow from there as you and your business get more comfortable.
We covered a lot but here are the key takeaways you should take from this article:
- Find what works for you.
- Start small then grow.
- You don’t have to start big. Depending on the channel that you use you can start small, find what works for your brand, and then scale up.
- If at first, you don’t succeed, try again but try something different.
- Once you find the lane that works for your business, you will be happy you didn't give up.
- If you have a question, the internet has an answer.
- You aren’t the first person to embark on a digital marketing journey with little or no knowledge.
- There are TONS of free resources out there. Here are some of my favorites.
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