You’ve decided to take the next step and start your business, but a key component is missing. People don’t know your business exists, which makes it very difficult to sell products or services.

So how can we fix that problem? With good marketing, and if your product is good enough, your customers might just become ambassadors and do the marketing for you.

9 Steps to start marketing your small business

You know you need to market your business, but where do you start? Below you’ll find a list of steps to help get more people exposed to your business.

Step 1: Set goals

Setting a destination is very useful in creating a direction. Without them, we would find ourselves walking around in circles, not really going anywhere. Perhaps you’d like to get more leads to your business, increase your brand awareness, or generate more sales. Giving yourself a target will help you to focus your energy and give a reference point when you’re measuring your progress.

Step 2: Identify your target market

Identifying your target market is crucial when forming a marketing strategy. Not everyone will be interested in your product. Ensuring that you’re directing your efforts in the direction of people who are already invested in a product like yours is the smart thing to do.

If you sell cow heels, you know that not everyone is up for it, but there’s a community that loves them. Remember that you’re catering to them and not everyone.

Understanding what your target audience is into, and the platforms that they frequent will further assist you in developing your marketing strategy.

Step 3: Build a professional website

The two steps before were a part of the thinking behind the marketing strategy. In this step, we are getting into the tactics of the marketing strategy.

Building a website provides your customers with a single platform to find all the information they need. The products and services you offer, how they can contact you, and the type of person you are.

This increases the importance of having a website with a great user experience. This refers to both desktop and mobile platforms, the website needs to be interactive and responsive and set you apart from your competitors. The development of a website requires a lot of attention to ensure that your customers have a great user experience.

Step 4: Optimise your website for search engines

Now that you’ve got your user-friendly site on the internet. Great job. Next you’ll have to implement search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques to make your website more visible on search engines like Google and Bing. When a person searches for a certain keyword that’s relevant to your business, you’d like your business to appear on the search engine results page (SERP).

Let me give you an example. Let’s say someone searched “Cow heel recipe”, your business will show up for the user to potentially click on your article. Of course, you’ll want to leave the secret ingredients out of the recipe to avoid any copycats.

Step 5: Create content

A cow heel recipe is a form of content on your site. You get several types, namely, blog posts, infographics, videos, podcasts, and more. The type of content you use depends on your target audience.

Maybe they respond better to short video tutorials as opposed to recipe blog posts. Perhaps they prefer short and to-the-point written content over long descriptive content.

The form of content prioritised can be different from business to business. One thing is non-negotiable though, there must be content.

Step 6: Use social media

Find out which social media platforms your customers spend most of their time on, and meet them there. Social media is a great place to deliver content for your business to be potentially discovered by your target audience. Who knows, maybe your customers are into ASMR eating videos. There’s a content idea for you.

Step 7: Invest in email marketing

There is a saying in marketing that goes, “The money is in the list”. This speaks about the emails you’ve collected from your prospects. Looking after prospects by updating them on any changes or giving them discounts for products and services will increase the possibility of returning customers.

Step 8: Invest in digital advertising

Using ads on digital platforms will help bring in the first few people to your website. Ads on search engines like Google and social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram have the potential to increase the exposure of your business.

Set up a budget to target keywords, demographics, and the interests of your audience. These campaigns will help you see what works and what doesn’t, and how you could structure them differently the next time around.

Step 9: Measure your results

Analytics tools will help you document and track your results from your campaigns and interactions with your site. This is great for seeing whether you’ve met certain goals or what you need to do to make progress towards them.

Maybe you haven’t generated as many leads as you thought you did. Adding more relevant content could be the next step, maybe your content isn’t well received by your audience, or perhaps it is just a case of having patience to achieve certain results.

Final thoughts

Acquiring customers is not only important but also crucial for the success of any business. These steps outline a general roadmap to attract customers and effectively scale your business. It’s every business owner’s dream to achieve this level of success. Instead, let’s turn this dream into a reality.