Green Peaks Marketing Services LLC

5 Simple Ways to Small Business Owners Get Started

Running your own business is hard work. Overseeing the day-to-day operations, managing finances and accounting, searching for and hiring new talent, handling legal issues… the list goes on.

There are 32.5M small businesses in the US, and 50% fail in the first 5 years, with the driving factors being a lack of demand, lack of talent/expertise, and poor marketing – the latter being one of several possible reasons for lack of demand. Further, according to a survey by Keap, around 21% of SBO’s (Small Business Owners) simply don’t have the time to handle marketing, and amongst those who do, nearly half don’t know if it’s actually working!

All that said, it’s enough to make any aspiring and hard working business owner feel like this….

Poorly planned and executed marketing makes things worse

As a result of the aforementioned reasons, many businesses understandably resort to throwing together a Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn advertisement, letting it run for a couple of weeks, and hope for the best.

The truth is, hastily put together ads seldom work. Without a proper strategy the most likely outcome is money wasted. Strategy includes taking the time to understand your market and target customer, their behaviors related to how they make purchase decisions. Further, it entails using data and other audience tools to reach them, the creation of compelling messaging & creative, and planning the timing and cadence to make sure your marketing shows up at the right moment in the purchasing journey.

So, let’s dive in with some suggestions and advice on fundamental marketing actions you can take to help your small business.

1. Understand your customer purchasing journey and decision making influences

There are some pretty compelling reasons as to why you need your business to have a carefully planned online presence.

1. 87% of consumers start their product searches and research online. Most research is done through popular search engines or retail sites such as Google and Amazon, or directly on a brand website, and this isn’t just for online purchases.
2. A phenomenon known as the ROBO Economy, (Research Online, Buy Offline), is backed up by research that shows 8 in 10 people with a smartphone (which is pretty much everyone) who intend to make a purchase from a physical store still start the journey online, paying close attention to product ratings and customer reviews.

It’s impossible to be everywhere online, so that’s why it’s important to be strategic – put another way, work out where you do need to be present.

2. Be part of the conversation on social media and review sites

Being present on the social media platforms where your target audience is most active is particularly important. Being present where your customers are, not where you like to be is the essence of ‘Purposeful Online Presence’. Being where it matters will help consumers become familiar with your company (also called brand awareness), and enable you to favorably influence their decision making when they are considering making a purchase.

Using social media to respond to consumer questions, engage in community conversations and sharing content can help make consumers feel more confident about doing business with your company.

A client I recently worked with told me they “checked review sites now and then.” After taking a look at a handful of sites myself, including niche local community platforms, we found more than a few one-star ratings along with some comments that cut deep – after all, this business was his baby that he’d poured his blood, sweat and tears into (and there were tears!). Worse still, those comments were left to fester without any response from the company. Such a lack of active management harms the credibility of a company that can take a long time to recover from and leads to lost sales.

On the flipside, positive comments from happy customers are golden. Even better, by engaging with those happy customers through conversation or helpful, entertaining or interesting content you can boost your company reputation and exposure, helping lead to more sales and providing a boost to your company (brand) awareness.

3. Consider paid online advertising to give your business a boost, but choose wisely.

In addition to being present ‘naturally’ on social media and review sites to proactively manage company reputation and influence purchasing decisions, small companies can further boost awareness of their company in the local community and short term sales, through paid online advertising.

Paid online advertising involves paying money to advertising networks to displaying advertisements on other company websites or mobile apps. However, advertisers (you) often have limited control over the specific sites and apps where their ads are displayed. There are several categories for ad placement, including standard websites like news and informational or e-commerce sites, social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram (both owned by Meta), LinkedIn and YouTube, ads shown within Mobile apps (e.g., while playing Candy Crush), and Paid Search ads typically displayed near the top of Search Engine results.

There are many ad formats options, with the most popular being banner format (big ads at the top of websites), display ads (smaller ads on other website), native ads (where it’s harder to tell if it’s an ad or just part of a website’s native info), video ads, text ads, and voice ads… the list goes on, and grows seemingly daily.

Again, the key thing is to make decisions grounded in purpose and your intent, which ties back to a carefully planned strategy. Of course, this is particularly important when it comes to paid advertising because you’ll simply be burning money if you put an advertisement in the wrong place or go with an ineffective format.

It’s very tempting indeed to start advertising on Facebook because it remains hugely popular with 186M people in the US alone using it, and apparently 60-70% of those checking it daily. But if your goal is to build awareness of your company you can’t do this through a 1-2 week campaign on Facebook – it is not the silver bullet that can provide immediate success for all business goals. In this instance, Facebook is the wrong strategy.

If you have a short term objective to increase sales over a limited set duration then a campaign executed through Facebook or Instagram can be highly effective. If you are confident in your ability to define your target audience using Meta tools, have a proven and clear product proposition, compelling offer (ideally a time sensitive offer to drive urgency), and engaging creative then your goal and strategy are better aligned. A good example of this might be landscape gardening company running a seasonal campaign in the Spring such as ‘20% Off Garden Spring Clean-Up Before March 31st’. This is well timed, a strong offer with urgency that will attract new clients at the beginning of the year.

4. Make sure your website is inviting and lives up to your marketing promises

When prospects do end up at your website it has to make a strong first impression, clearly reflecting what you offer, your brand identity and how you can meet the very need that brought them to your site in the first place – whether to learn more about your company, request a quote / info, or make a purchase. Critical things to consider include branding, website layout, quality of the photography and graphics, ease of navigation, and of course the content itself which must be well written and produced and most importantly, it has to be relevant and helpful.

If you saw an advertisement in the local paper for a restaurant claiming to provide the best dining experience in town with the finest selection of wines and quality service you already have an expectation in your mind of what the experience will look like. So, if you showed-up in your Saturday night shoes, only to find a tired looking facade with peeling paint and the chef smoking a cigarette while propping himself up against the front door while scratching his crotch, are you going to go in? You hear those words of wisdom your grandmother spoke to you as a child, reminding you to “never judge a book by its cover”, so decide to go in and give it a chance. There’s nobody to greet you or seat you at a table, the menu is so covered in food stains that you can barely read it and you see your grandmother at the other side of the dining room throwing the stale bread she was served at the waiter and storming out. Does this all match with the advertisement you saw in the paper?

The point being, the marketing that drives awareness and action to get people to the point of purchase will never be enough if your online home (website) doesn’t live up to the expectation that it set. The website itself might actually BE the end product if you are offering software or an online service, in which case it has to look and function perfectly.

5. Optimize your website to make it discoverable by the customers you want

Not only does you website need to look good and be easy to navigate, it needs to be optimized for search engines – this is called SEO (search engine optimization). SEO is the process that helps make your company more discoverable for very specific search requests being made by consumers. It goes back to point #! in this article- understand your customer journey, and how they search for and research the very product / service that you offer, including the words (known as key words or phrases) they use to search.

Your website and the content within it needs to be relevant to those consumer search behaviors and it needs to be refreshed regularly with a steady stream of relevant content. SEO in itself is a complex and time consuming marketing discipline, but with careful research, the right tools and following best practices it can make a big difference to small businesses.

I’ll end this article with a final, often overlooked point, when it comes to SEO. Search engines like Google not only favor businesses with relevant keywords, but also those with physical proximity to the use. You must have your business profile information, name, address and phone number added to, and consistent, across the internet. This includes your website in the (contact page and footer) as well as other business profile pages such as Google’s Business Profile page and other local business directories too.

There are many other best practices that small businesses can follow to improve their chances of success, such as following a Customer-Centric Approach, Focusing on Content Quality and Consistency, Identifying Strategic Partnerships and Following Data-Driven Decision Making. But first, focus on the basics of establishing a meaningful online presence.