Marketing can be a massive challenge. Especially for small business owners that want to focus on providing their service or making their products rather than focusing on getting new customers. I’ll be teaching you the very basics on how to create a marketing strategy that works and that doesn't take all your time and effort. I am the CEO of 2 small businesses and marketing is a responsibility of mine for both businesses, so I understand the challenge of balancing marketing tasks with the rest of the work that you have to put into your business. By the end of this article, you should know enough to create a basic marketing strategy to get you new leads, customers, or visibility.

The very first thing that you need to know is who your customers are. Get a very good idea of exactly who you are going to be marketing to. This will help you decide the form of marketing that you’ll do, where you will market, and when you will market to them. Once you know exactly who it is you will be marketing to, you need to learn about them. Learn where they spend their time, how they use social medias and if so, which ones they use, learn what their problems tend to be, and what offers may stick out to them.

Once you know exactly who it is you’re selling to and know enough about them, you can decide how and where you will market to them. If your customers are young and are very active on let’s say Instagram, using Instagram for your marketing is a great idea. Now if you sell services for large companies, Instagram may not be the best place to advertise. You’d want to use things like LinkedIn as it’ll make it much easier to target the right people, but you also target them at the right times. I think targeting people in the right space of mind is one of the most important things. If you offer services to large businesses, it’d be good to target the right people at the times when they’re thinking of how to improve their business rather than when they are at home trying to relax. So, try to find a good platform or combination of platforms, and the right moments to advertise to them.

Let’s talk about content. What are you going to show your potential customers? This matters just as much as the platform that you use, but it also depends on the platform that you’ll use. Long-form blog content may be better for platforms like LinkedIn, but short-form videos will be much better on platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Also be sure to choose content that will resonate with your target audience, that is the most important step, no matter the platform.

Now that we know who we are going to target, where we will target them, and how we will target them, we can get started. The first thing to do now is to set goals. What do we want to get out of this next campaign. Do we want to get our name out to more people? Do we want more email subscribers? Do we want more sales? Do we want more leads? It is super super important to set a clear goal for each campaign. This way all your content in that campaign works for the same goal.

Paid vs Organic. A good mixture of paid and organic content is going to be the most beneficial. My recommendation on how to balance this is creating good organic content to generate views and then using paid ads to re-target the people that see this. Creating good organic content can be extremely beneficial for your business so I highly recommend that you take your time with it and create the best content you can. Now this guide is supposed to help you make one that doesn’t require a full-time marketing team, so how do you create good organic content without taking your attention away from the other parts of running your business? Make content of the things you do. Show behind the scenes of how you make your product, make content of you providing your service, just record the other parts of your business and post them! This not only can help you make good content in less time, but it also gives a very good view to your potential customers of how you work and who you are.

So now that you have good organic content, catered to the right audience, and posted on the right platforms, let’s convert them. Do not just go for conversion ads without first building brand and building trust with your target audience. It’ll just make it much more expensive and less effective if you skip that part. So, if your organic content is doing well, you can re-target those same people for the conversion, if it isn’t doing so well, run some visibility and website visit ads first. People will most likely not buy from a business the very first time they see it, so focus on building trust and presence in your potential customer’s mind.

Once you have the full strategy in effect, it is super important to analyze. Try slightly different content and wording in that content and test to see which performs better. Always look at the data and find ways to improve from it. When creating tests, make sure you only change 1 thing at a time, so you know exactly what changes actually make a difference.

Well now you’re ready to create a marketing strategy for your small business that will work for you! Make sure to constantly monitor all your marketing efforts to see which ones are worthwhile to put effort into and which other ones may not be worthwhile. It will take some time and effort at first but once you understand what works and what doesn’t work for your business, it’ll be much more automatic and profitable, so stick with it because it will get easier!