4 Smart Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

Marketing is a vital component of any successful business.

Marketing will determine how potential customers, as well as the wider market, come to perceive your business. In order to achieve the level of success that most entrepreneurs are aiming for, they will need to develop a keen sense for what does and doesn’t work with regards to their marketing.

Some of this will come from trial and error, the longer you spend as an entrepreneur the more you will learn from experience alone. In particular, you will come to understand what marketing techniques consumers respond to the best. Sometimes the reactions of audiences to marketing campaigns are wildly different to what was intended, for better or for worse.

These marketing tips are designed to help your business embrace smart marketing. Instead of simply throwing more money at your marketing campaigns and hoping that this is enough to see them through, you should instead aim to do more with less. Smart marketing is more informed marketing and produces much better results.

What is Smart Marketing?

When we refer to smart marketing, we are referring to marketing methods that are about more than the final advert. For example, a TV ad spot is not smart marketing. However, a video made for social media that will be shown only to select demographics of users is an example of smart marketing. smart marketing is about being able to achieve more with less.

Many smart marketing methods, such as guerrilla marketing, don’t appear to be traditional marketing to the end user. This makes people less resistant and more likely to absorb the marketing message and, therefore, more likely to buy the advertised product or service.

Here are some top tips to help small businesses make the most of their future marketing campaigns. Embrace the principles of smart marketing and your small business will be growing in no time.

Go Guerrilla

Guerrilla marketing refers to marketing materials that are organic and natural. This means that, unless you now that what you are looking at is marketing materials, you wouldn’t be able to tell just by looking at it. For example, if you were to print out a bunch of stickers featuring your business’s logo, and then you went and plastered those stickers around your hometown, that would be guerrilla marketing.

On the other hand, if you put the same image on a billboard, that would not be guerrilla marketing. In the case of the stickers, they would not appear where people expect marketing to appear, this makes make them feel organic. Someone seeing one of these stickers might reasonably assume that they were placed by a fan of the business, rather than the business itself. But the billboard is obviously marketing materials and, therefore, often raises the natural defenses of its audience.

Use Social Media Properly

Simply maintaining a social media account won’t do much good for your small business. In order to reap the full benefits, and to grow your business as much as possible, you need to have your social media account managed by someone with a good understanding of the individual platforms.

Despite what Facebook might like to pretend, all their rhetoric about bringing people together, for example, they are ultimately nothing but an incredibly sophisticated advertising platform. Social media marketing is now a vital component of the marketing strategies of large and small businesses alike. The reason for this is simple, social media websites, and Facebook, in particular, are able to target ads at very select groups of users.

When you are showing an advert to the general population, you expect only a relatively small number to respond to it in the way you hope. Social media shifts the odds in your favor by allowing you to only show your adverts to specific demographics of users. Make sure that you allocate some of your budget to both social media management and social media marketing.

Set up a Toll-Free Number

Setting up a toll-free number might not seem immediately relevant to marketing your business, but it is actually a smart move to make. Making your business easy to contact isn’t exactly a marketing move, but it will have the same effect of giving you a nice sales bump. A toll-free number enables your customers to contact you free of charge and allows you to set a contact number that’s easy to remember. You can also include a phone number with certain marketing materials and then use the number of calls to that number as a measure of the reach of your marketing.

If you choose a more advanced toll-free number service, you will also gain access to a raft of useful features. For example, Branded Bridge Line offer a toll free conference call service. Look to the bottom of that page for other examples of the advanced features on offer.

Always be Collecting

The ABC of smart marketing is Always Be Collecting, meaning that you should be taking every opportunity to gather more data about your customers, competitors, and your own marketing efforts. Data is power in today’s world; the more data you have about your customers and your business, the more you can refine your marketing approach.

Of course, all that data is no good if you don’t know how to use it. An experienced data analyst will not only be able to help you analyze your data; they will also be able to assist you and help ensure that you gather relevant and useful data. If you gather too much junk data that you don’t need, it will only make it harder to pick out useful data. You should always be collecting data, but make sure it’s useful data.

Smart marketing can be game-changing for small businesses. It used to be that small businesses would rely on word of mouth to help them break through the marketing saturation of their much larger competitors. Today, it’s possible for small businesses to achieve a great deal with a relatively small amount of money. Introduce smart marketing to your business today.