Today’s business world is incredibly competitive, and small business owners who desire to grow and thrive must invest time and resources in their marketing efforts to reach the $10 million revenue yearly benchmark. Effective small business marketing demands that you put in place systems, processes, and procedures to achieve your marketing goals. In today’s podcast, Ken Cook from The Prepared Group and Stephen Halasnik from Financing Solutions discuss the top five business marketing strategies for small businesses under $5 million in revenue.
Summary
How To Grow Your Small Business With Marketing
Marketing is at the heart of every small business operation. Whether you’re just starting your business or already have your own company, effective marketing is essential to growing your business to pass the $ 50 million benchmark.
Marketing allows you to create brand awareness and attract qualified leads that turn into profitable sales. Although, building a robust marketing strategy for a small business can be challenging due to a lack of resources like money and time. However, there are key strategies that can help you fine-tune and accelerate your small business marketing efforts.
What Is Small Business Marketing?
No matter the size of your business and how great your products and services are, you can hardly reach your target audience if you don’t have an effective marketing plan. That said, small business marketing is the practice of getting your product and service in front of your target customers.
It involves various online and offline strategies that aim to increase your company’s revenue and expand your market share. 
Why Is Marketing Important to Small Businesses
Marketing offers numerous benefits to small businesses. The number one reason you should embark on effective marketing is that it makes people aware of your products and services, plus it engages and helps them make buying decisions.
Moreover, effective marketing allows you to build a reputation, beat out the competition, and cultivate a loyal customer base. Below are the benefits of marketing to small businesses.
Promotes engagement: marketing helps you engage and retain your customers. By consistently creating quality and pertinent content around your product and services, you can educate your customers and, thus, engage them.
Build your brand’s reputation: through marketing, your target audience will get to know and trust your business, especially when you deliver beyond their expectation.
Build and foster lasting relationships: the sustainable growth of your business is hugely dependent on your relationship with your customers. Effective marketing allows you to develop a cordial, mutual relationship with them.
Boost sales: Effective marketing invariably leads to increased sales. In other words, through marketing, you can generate profitable leads that convert.
Make an informed decision: Marketing allows you to understand your target customers’ needs and gives you insight into how you can proffer solutions to their problems.
What Are the Best Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses?
To become successful in marketing, you need to put in place systems, processes, and procedures to capture and segment database information for effective marketing campaigns.
Below are the tips for creating small business marketing strategies.
Know and define clearly your target audience
An excellent step to setting up successful marketing is identifying who you should spend money reaching. In other words, you must know the people who want to do business with you and target them in your marketing campaign. When you have identified your target audiences, the next thing you will do is to figure out their pains, problems, motivations, and priorities and leverage them to deliver high-level service.
Create a compelling message that resonates with your target audiences, and look for good avenues to reach them. The more clearly you define your target audience, the better you can understand how to reach your ideal customers and as a result, have a profitable marketing outcome.
Position within your target audience
You should strive to position your company to drive massive success. Positioning what you’re doing in front of your customers to solve their problems will make a world of difference in your marketing effort.
As a small business owner, you should identify your unique selling point and leverage it to build your brand. If there’s no salient difference between you and your competitors, there will be the little reason customers will want to do business with you.
Positioning helps you stand out from the pack and makes your target audience see you as the ultimate solution to their problems. In other words, think of what you do better than others in your business niche and leverage it in your marketing campaign.
Have a pricing strategy
A lot of time, many small business owners don’t know why they charge what they charge. However, an effective pricing strategy should be based on your value, not what other people are charging.
Instead of offering a discount, you should rather maximize the value of your products or services and optimize your pricing strategy so that people pay what’s commensurate with your products or services.
Surprise, delight, and wow
If you want to succeed in building an army of loyalists in your small business marketing, you must systematically and intentionally provide more value than they expected.
The simple reality is that you must go beyond the minimum if you must build a loyal customer base- that’s going the extra mile to meet their needs. You should intentionally do better than expected by the customer.
Put in place a referral system.
You must have a referral system to scale your small business marketing. In other words, you should have a documented plan by which you extract referrals from every existing customer.
A comprehensive referral strategy allows customers passionate about your company to refer people to you directly. This can be done through testimonials, word-of-mouth marketing, and more.
Learn About Our Guest
Ken co-owns the marketing strategy firm, The Prepared Group, and specializes in working with marketing agencies, teaching them how to support clients with a strategy-first approach. With dedication and experience towards small businesses, Ken has successfully grown his company from a one-man operation to a small agency employing a variety of talented workers.
Learn About Financing Solutions
Financing Solutions provides an easy-to-setup unsecured small business line of credit to small businesses. The small business financing product is a great cash backup plan that costs nothing to set up, nothing until used, and is inexpensive when needed. Financing Solutions is rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and 5 stars by the BBB/Google Reviews.
Unlike a traditional business bank loan, our business credit line requires no collateral or personal guarantee (except in fraud cases), making it an excellent alternative business financing option. Small businesses often use their line of credit for short-term expenses, working capital, to make payroll, or for business investment, especially when business cash flow is temporarily down.
Get a free, no-obligation business line of credit quote by filling out our simple 2- minute business line of credit application here.
Remember: The time to set up a credit line is when you don’t need it.