Small Business Marketing Ideas: the Complete List

In a world of vast marketing budgets, newspaper ads and national T.V. spots, it can feel like a small business has very few options when it comes to advertising.

But the truth is, small business marketing doesn’t have to be super expensive to be profitable. In fact, there are plenty of ways to put your offering in front of ready-to-buy consumers… And many of them are either completely free or so effective they immediately pay for themselves.

If that sounds like something that would benefit your business, read on – because you’re about to discover 50+ ways to market as a small business, including one with an industry average ROI of 3,800% (or £38 for every £1 spent!)

Let’s start by taking a look at the hottest way to promote right now: digital marketing.

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Online Marketing

In the third quarter of 2016 alone, online ad revenues were a staggering £17.6 billion. That’s a 20% increase from 2015, when a total of £59.6 billion was spent on digital ads… And it demonstrates just how important marketing on the internet is to all businesses, big and small.

The question is, can you market online with a small budget – or no budget at all? The answer is “yes”, and below, you’ll find some of the best ways to do just that.

Create Video Content & Promote It

64% of users are more likely to buy your product after watching a relevant video online. This means that making videos should be at the top of your priority list, especially with 87% of online marketers already using video content to promote their business!

And whilst most video marketers are heavily reliant on Youtube, something to really think about is now is the use of Facebook video to reach a wide audience.

The future of video? Facebook.

And after you watch this video, you’ll understand why.

https://youtu.be/VFTxJNxynp8

Just remember that your videos need to be seen to work and most companies FAIL miserably because they don’t understand the basic concept of business marketing.

So what is this basic concept?

To give, without asking for return.

Sorry to break the news, but no-one actually cares about you OR your business.

And please don’t take that the wrong way, because once you master this concept you will start to see RESULTS.

It’s that ‘ah-ahh’ moment you’ve been looking for.

People are BUSY so they don’t want to be reading or watching ‘salesy’ content, they want FREE information and advice on how to achieve their end-goal. So give them what they want.

Youtube & Facebook are two FREE channels you can utilise to get your message out to your target audience, by sharing and promoting content that attracts their attention.

So once you know what typical troubles your audience is facing, you can answer these questions thoroughly to build trust and authority.

And guess what? Once they need your product or service – guess who’ll they’ll be coming to?

There’s no reason not to use videos, regardless of your budget.

And even better, you can get lots of free traffic to your Youtube videos from Google if you learn a few basic SEO concepts from a guide like this one – so what are you waiting for?

Write & Promote Blog Content

‘Content is King’ right? Yes, but promotion is queen.

It doesn’t matter how great your articles and blog posts are if nobody’s reading them. This means you need to actively promote your blog content using organic channels as well as paid ads. So long as you learn to get a positive ROI on your ad spend, your business marketing will pay for itself, so never hesitate to invest in promoting your blog.

Not sure where to start? We understand you may not be a wiz when it comes down to running promotions, so here are 17 advanced methods for promoting your new piece of content.

Write and Publish an E-Book

An e-book is a smart way to create authority while providing value to your followers. Whether free or paid, an e-book shows users you can help fulfil a need or solve a problem, guiding them further along the buying process and giving you sales and new customers.

You can get a professional e-book created from just £3.98 on Fiverr as long as you have the content ready.

If not, you can hire a copywriter to take care of that for you.

Here’s one we created on the top 50 marketing tips designed to help SME’s with their business marketing.

To most, creating an e-book seems like a LOT of work, but in reality, when you get affordable freelancers involved it becomes a breeze.

If you’re not sure what type of content should be in an e-book, then you should download our free copy here.

Create Infographics

Blog posts with images produce 650 percent more engagement than text-only ones. Using infographics helps you take advantage of this effect while getting your marketing message across in a persuasive manner. Infographics may have been expensive in the past but with online services like Fiverr you can hire a professional designer to create you an infographic for an affordable cost.

But don’t just look for the cheapest price, make sure you check out their services reviews and examples, if any.

Once you’ve created your infographic, you can get some free exposure by publishing to these TOP 70 infographic submission sites.

Leverage Google AdWords

The click-through rate for the first Google ad on a user’s screen is staggering: 19.3% for desktop computers and 27.7% for mobile devices. That’s extremely effective business marketing, and with £50 vouchers available for all new sign-ups in the U.K., there’s no reason not to take advantage of it.

Google Adwords may seem extremely complicated for newbie marketers, but Google specialists are there to give you a helping hand setting up your accounts and targeting the right keywords.

If you’re still not sure, take a look at this step-by-step guide to Google Adwords (made simple).

Get Listed in Google Places

Google makes it easy to list your business on their search engine for free. With 20% of the search engine’s queries being for local information, that presents a huge opportunity for you to get free business marketing.

But what exactly do we mean by Google places?

We’re talking about the ‘Maps’ section just below the Google ads.

These are FREE listings which you can take advantage of to get more visibility from a local audience.

If you have a physical brick-and-mortar store or offices, then you can get your business registered with Google local.

Let’s say you’re a plumber located in Manchester, potential customers are searching for you so it’s important that your business is listed.

Here’s an example..

Start a Local SEO campaign

After doing a local search, 50% of mobile users and 34% of computer users visit a store the very same day. Making sure you’re on the first page of Google and other search engines maximises the chances that your store or business is where those potential customers end up.

But, not all businesses require local SEO.

If you’re an ‘online-only’ business, then local SEO isn’t going to do you any favours.

Why?

Because local SEO is carried-out to reach more local customers who are looking for a LOCAL business.

But if your business is reliant on local-footfall, then local SEO can be a gold-mine.

However, getting listed in Google places may not get you the business you expect, especially if you’re in a competitive industry and you’re competing against numerous other businesses.

Local SEO is a specialist business marketing service so there’s no quick fixes for this, however, it doesn’t have to cost the earth and you can hire an expert in this field to enhance your websites local visibility, drive more foot-fall, improve sales or online enquiries.

Start a National SEO campaign

Up to 80% of users ignore paid ads, focusing on organic results instead. This means that getting to Google’s top 3 on a national level can do wonders for your business marketing, delivering an ROI that paid ads simply can’t match.

National SEO campaigns undoubtably will be more costly, but the ROI you can achieve from national SEO campaigns can be far more superior than local.

If you sell products to the whole of the UK (or worldwide) then you’ll need to speak to an expert to achieve you the desired results you’re looking for.

Google’s algorithms are smart and they’re very good at spotting cheaters, so there’s no quick wins to an SEO campaign.

Google actually looks at more than 200 different ranking factors before ranking websites accordingly.

Answer Questions on Quora

Quora is a questions and answers platform that has over 700,000+ monthly visitors. Answering other peoples questions helps position yourself as an authority and demonstrate your business can solve needs and pain points.

Set yourself up an account, start engaging with the community and search for keywords that are related to your business.

Assuming you’re industry knowledge is up to scratch (which it should be)! Then there’s no reasons why you shouldn’t be a part of this community.

Providing long-form, actionable advice to people seeking advice on this platform can get you some serious results.

Let’s say you run a coffee business selling coffee machines, so your target audience would be coffee shop owners.

By searching for “coffee machine” within Quora, you’ll be provided with a list of related questions that require answers.

Then, take a look through the results and choose a suitable question to provide an answer to.

For example…

Do you see how easy it is to find potential customers from a simple Quora search?

Just make sure you don’t use this as an opportunity to present a sales pitch! Provide helpful advice with a link back to your store for further information will do the trick.  This is business marketing with no cost, other than your time.

Plan a Webinar or Workshop

61% of B2B marketers rate webinars as the best content marketing strategy and you can do a successful webinar by following these 10 exact steps. As an alternative, consider worksh