5 Easy Marketing Tips for Your Small Business

Alex Radisa

Sep 3

5 min read

Running your own business involves a lot of hard work, and most of your time will be taken up by actually running the business, which leaves little time for anything else. The downside now is that marketing has evolved into something quite complex. Long gone are the days of newer small businesses relying solely on word of mouth or footfall. A digital presence is now required for most businesses.

Three glowing LED light bulbs on yellow, orange, and green backgrounds, arranged side by side in a bright pop-art style.

The good news is, there are a lot of effective marketing tools that can help make that side of the job easier and don't involve you hiring someone purely for that. Naturally, if you have the budget, it may be something worthwhile looking into it. But my goal is to help as many small businesses as possible and share the knowledge I have picked up over the years. After all, the backbone of our society are small businesses.

Below are some things that you can do to increase your digital presence, drive traffic to your website, and showcase your business to the world!

Tip #1 - SEO

You've probably seen this everywhere, and it can be intimidating at first glance. Many marketing companies will use this term with the tactic of making it seem harder than it is. My personal experience with one marketing company was that they just used AI to write a SEO optimised blog post and then charged the business a hefty fee for that.

Personally, I try to avoid using AI. In the initial stages, it can be helpful as your own personal assistant and can produce large quantities of content very quickly. But there are a couple of things to remember with AI - what it produces is not original content; it's stolen from other people's work. Secondly, it has a terrible impact on the environment.

As a small business, it's completely understandable if you want to use it, but if you don't want to, there are plenty of ways that you can improve your SEO.

There are two places that you might want to start, and that's Seobility and Ahrefs.

Seobility

This is a tool that I've found fantastic for analysing your website and telling you what is good and what needs work. It gives you a rating, and your goal is to improve it. It will let you know if there are broken links on your webpage, if you need more words on the page, if your images need alt tags (descriptions), etc.

It's free to use, but you can't crawl every day unless you get the premium version. Either way, it's a great tool for helping get your SEO as good as you can.

Ahrefs

This tool is great for helping you write content such as blog posts. You search for a term and see the most popular keywords that come up for that search term. It shows you how competitive the keywords. You should aim to use ones that are in the yellow section and longer keywords. You want to use them throughout your text so that you strengthen your SEO and encourage search engines to rank you higher.

Tip #2 - Social Media

Social media is a blessing and a curse. For businesses, it's helpful because it offers a free way for a business to showcase itself to the world, but at the same time, it's a saturated place that's hard to get noticed.

As a small business, it can be hard to find the time to make a lot of content when you have a whole business to run. It can be beneficial to dedicate a few hours in a week to take some photos and videos or to prepare some graphics that you can post.

There are tools like Canva, which are incredibly popular and for good reason. Canva offers a variety of free templates where you can just replace certain parts of it with your own content. They also provide stock photos and graphics to help elevate your content. There's also a paid version that offers more templates, but that depends on your business's needs.

On platforms like Facebook, you can use text only to let your customers know what's happening. It's a great way to connect and build your own community. For any photos or videos, you can share across multiple platforms easily.

Tip #3 - Paid Adverts

Sometimes it can be more cost-effective to pay for adverts and spend more of your time focused on the business. Almost every platform has paid advertising. Google, Amazon, Facebook, YouTube, etc. all offer paid adverts. It's relatively easy to do, but it can get costly, and there's no guarantee that every click you get will turn into a sale.

Focus on what your goals are and then decide what is best for you. Google can be the most effective, and you usually pay per click. You set your budget and then put in your bid for certain keywords. This is when it can help to have someone familiar with digital marketing, but there's no reason you can't do it yourself. It may just take some trial and error.

The main piece of advice is to make sure that you have a clear budget in mind and that it is set as a limit on whichever platform you're using.

Tip #4 - Freebies

Everyone loves a free gift, and that can be a worthwhile investment to gain your reach. This can include pens with your logo on them, notepads, even clothing items. It depends on what your business is and where you may be able to offer these freebies.

If you have an exhibition stand, that is one of the prime spots. If you are a local business, you could offer these freebies to other local businesses or to those who visit your shop. If you're a digital business, you may be able to offer freebies with certain orders or even do a giveaway! The same goes for physical businesses too - or service-based businesses. For example, you can hold a competition to offer a free photoshoot or a free haircut.

It's a way to get people excited and talking about your business. Again, there's no guarantee that you'll get a return on your investment, but if people are more aware of your business or want to interact, then the more business it should drive.

Tip #5 - Reach Out

The final marketing tip is to reach out to potential customers. This applies more to businesses just starting out. If you don't have many customers yet, it might be worth reaching out to people who may be interested, especially if you are business-to-business.

If you need to gain a positive reputation, it can be worth offering people a free product or service in exchange for a review. It can also be worth testing the market if you are doing something new to make sure that your pricing strategy is effective. Offer people a tester of something and then a percentage off if they make a pruchase.