02 Apr
You need to market your business to become or remain visible to your target audience. Small businesses are often short on time, money, and other resources. If you own a small business, you face a variety of challenges when it comes to marketing.
There are many more ways than ever to promote your small business even with limited budget and resources. Let’s dive into this in detail and see what challenges are faced by small businesses and how can we overcome them.
Challenges and how to overcome them
Here is the list of challenges and solution to them too:
1. Limited marketing budget
In small businesses, every penny counts. Before jumping into any marketing campaign with a limited budget, it’s important to fully understand your audience, and goals ahead of time. It’s also critical that you test every message before investing in an expensive campaign. Also, It’s difficult to work within a tight budget but there are steps that can be taken to manage in the limited budget successfully.
Invest intelligently in paid ad spend. If you’re putting your money exactly where it needs to be, reducing ad spend waste, you’ll see more of an impact. Start by defining your overall digital marketing objectives, and then decide which of the paid advertising options we’ve outlined in this guide will help you to achieve your goals. Select 2-3 paid traffic sources which make the most sense for your goals and start experimenting.
Invest in what’s already working. If you’re on a tighter-than-normal budget, it’s typically a good call to go all-in on what you know is performing. This prevents the need to spend exorbitant portions of ad spend on split tests or platforms that may not work for you.
Look for your competition’s best-performing channels. If you want to break out into new channels, looking at your competitor’s marketing mix with SEMrush’s Traffic Analytics tool can be a safe bet. This can help you see what’s working for them, and you can test out the platforms with less risk.
Limited budgets on ads. When you are on a limited budget, you can run a few tests to see what works best for you. Start testing Google ads for a month, then Facebook ads for a month, then Instagram ads for a month, and so on. Find the ads that perform the best and start there.
2. Organic traffic requires a lot of effort and patience
To generate organic traffic requires lots of effort, patience and time. Here’s what you can do to fight back against slow progress with organic traffic:
Identify SEO issues that need resolving first. Most sites have a few changes that can be made to improve their SEO potential. Using a tool like our On-Page SEO Checker will help you identify what issues are impacting you so that they can be fixed right away.
Prioritize paid advertising. PPC campaigns are able to quickly drive short-term results while also allowing you to take time to establish a long-term SEO strategy. Find out how to launch a successful PPC campaign in our checklist.
Establishing an optimized website can be a great success for your small business.
3. Keep up the competition in digital world
Small businesses face visibility issues, as large established businesses often come in first in the SERP. Here’s what you can do to fight back against this major challenge:
Develop strong buyer personas. The better you understand your target audience, the more effectively you’ll be able to reach them with improved messaging and content.
Target long-tail keywords. These keywords are more specific, meaning it’s easier to align with search intent, and they also typically have less competition. This makes them easier to rank for and easier to deliver on. Our Keyword Magic Tool can help you find these keywords.
Establish a customer-centric approach. Don’t be afraid to get personal, establishing relationships with your customers. Big companies, after all, rely heavily on automated approaches with scripts and online chatbots, so here’s where your customer service team can stand out. Send personal emails, and get detailed feedback from your customers.
4. Building a visible brand is a challenge
Building a recognizable brand with a careful strategy does require time. Here are some steps you can take to build a visible brand more effectively:
Create an appealing website. This should include your home page and individual product pages. Make it clear what makes you unique.
Use a funnel approach in content marketing. Understanding which format works best at each customer journey stage is a great asset in terms of delivering value to your audience and building a visible brand. To learn how to successfully map content to the different funnel stages (Attract > Engage > Convert), discover our recent survey-based study.
Boost your social media presence. Create business profiles on the major platforms you know your followers are using. It gives you a great way to stay in touch with interested followers while building brand awareness.
5. Keep a positive marketing ROI
Marketing can be expensive and making sure that you make a profit off of the ad spend that you put in can be challenging. Fortunately, there are steps you can take to increase your overall ROI:
Use budget calculators. This will help you plan your campaigns accordingly, helping you to assess how much you should spend. When choosing maximum CPCs, for example, this can help increase positive ROI.
Use a marketing ROI formula. The following formula will help you assess a campaign’s potential ROI: [((number of leads x lead-to-customer rate x average sales price) – cost or ad spend) ÷ cost or ad spend] x 100
Invest in campaigns that you know bring conversions. Retargeting, for example, will often be more successful at driving conversions than trying to reach cold audiences. If you want to reach out to the new audience, you can try out Maximize Conversions – one of the automated bidding strategies, that tells Google and Microsoft to spend your budget, driving as many conversions as it can.
6. Set up business and marketing goals
It’s hard to know exactly what we should be optimizing for or how good our progress actually is if we haven’t set strong goals beforehand. Fortunately, these tips can all help with that:
Create SMART goals. These goals are specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and timely. You should know exactly what you want to accomplish, by when, how you plan to do so, and how you’ll measure success.
Set up your goals in Google Analytics properly. Whatever your site’s goals, Google Analytics Goals provide a way for you to assess how well it fulfills them. In this detailed guide you can find out how to correctly set up your goals and track their progress.
7. Expand a variety of marketing channels
It’s overwhelming for most business owners to look at every potential marketing channel out there and to feel like they need to be on all of them at once. Knowing where to invest your time is the key. Here’s what we recommend:
Start slow. Don’t invest everywhere at once. Instead, test different platforms gradually to see what works best for you.
Test and adapt. If Pinterest really isn’t working for you, that’s okay. Now you know; invest your time elsewhere. You can also test outsourcing marketing on certain platforms to qualified freelancers or agencies that align with your budget.
Prioritize. Prioritize the platforms that you believe will have the most significant potential.
Create a marketing plan
Creating a simple marketing plan will help alleviate many of your marketing challenges.
A simple marketing plan:
- Guides your efforts based on your goals and resource constraints.
- Enables you to more effectively market your business to your ideal client.
Without a plan:
- Everything looks like an opportunity and now you are chasing the shiny object.
- You most likely will look at your competition and copy what they are doing.
In either case, you will most likely waste time and money with little to show for it.
A marketing plan will focus your efforts on attracting your target audience and help you determine if you are veering off track and what you need to do to reach your destination (or marketing goals).
Moreover, your marketing plan will help you address the first 3 challenges.
- Determine your marketing goals. Focus your goals on increasing your brand visibility and generating quality leads so your activities help you overcome those two challenges.
- Define your marketing strategies that will help achieve your goals. Be practical about what you can and cannot do based on your resource constraints.
- Outline what activities you will use within each strategy. There are many activities you can use. Figure out which ones make sense for your target audience and will work for you in terms of resources.
Create an action plan and editorial calendar
Once you have your marketing plan in place, then you should create an action plan and editorial calendar, addressing challenges. The action plan is a schedule of each step leading up to successful execution of an activity. For example, if you plan to do webinars, you will need a schedule for finalizing the presentation and promoting the event across various channels.
The editorial calendar will set the schedule for what content needs to be produced by whom and by when. This helps you achieve consistency in your content marketing efforts.
Setting schedules for tactical execution and content creation points out whether you may be trying to do too much at once. Deadlines help keep you on track as to what you can get done on your own.
Remember, marketing is not an event, but a process that has to be consistently executed to achieve success.
Outsource tasks when necessary
Small businesses and solo professionals have resource constraints. We normally lack people, rarely have a huge budget and there are only 24 hours in a day. With the many marketing strategies available to you, trying to do it all is overwhelming.
This is why the marketing plan is so critical. The plan should take into account your resources and provide you with the most effective strategies that you can do given your limited resources.
Once you are focused, you can then determine where you need help and what you can do yourself:
- Need a website refresh? Find someone who can deliver a well-designed responsive website that supports your marketing goals.
- Need help with social media? Partner with someone who can manage your visibility on the right social media platforms.
- Aren’t proficient writing your blog posts? Hire a writer who can turn your knowledge into quality content.
Conclusion
Small businesses regularly face many challenges. Running a business always comes with certain challenges. Many of these relate to marketing. Keep in mind that there are plenty of marketing strategies for small businesses that were built around tight budgets and a learning curve. Taking one challenge at a time and use the above mentioned action to overcome them.