3 affordable small business marketing strategies

The best small business marketing strategies are built on the same foundations as good marketing for global conglomerates: knowing your target audience and playing to your strengths. Every business needs to know who they’re marketing to and what their consumers want before beginning a successful strategy. Whether you’re brand-new to the business or you’re a stalwart in your local area, you have strengths that you can leverage without splashing the cash if you’re speaking to the right audience. So, let’s dive into a few of the best strategies you can utilise on a budget.

Segment your audience

We’ve already mentioned knowing your target audience, and this ties in neatly with segmenting or profiling your content, but it goes beyond that. For example, with email marketing campaigns, a major brand will segment their email database into profiled consumers so they can target them with more specific marketing content.

In its most basic form, that means an email about clothing for men only going to consumers profiled as men (this data can be collected via surveys, email sign-up forms or even filtering via previous purchase history), but the strategy can be expanded to hobbies & interests, age, size and so on. While, as Neil Patel points out, this benefits bigger businesses because it improves click-through rates and open rates (something it will also do for your small business marketing strategies), it brings the additional benefit of saving resources when you’re on a tighter budget.

But there’s one area that can be particularly effective for a small business: localised marketing. You can target your marketing geographically and utilise your advantage of being a part of the local community. This could be offering discounts to people in the local area, organising events and encouraging local people to get involved and so on. Then, if you’ve managed to create customer profiles, you can segment your email database by location.

But this isn’t restricted to email marketing – you can embed localised content throughout all your small business marketing strategies by getting creative with social media, blogs, out of home advertising, etc.

Build personal relationships

This is predominantly a case of your tone of voice in the marketing content you create; shaping the way you communicate with your customer base and how they perceive your brand. As a small business, you have value that larger, global businesses lack. Extract that value. Play to your strengths. You have the chance to build personal relationships with your consumers; allowing your friendly personality to shine through and create a positive brand persona. This allows you to take advantage of emotional maketing as you’ve built a connection with your consumers and earned their trust.

Emotional marketing is arguably the best-known and most effective of small business marketing strategies, with “Shop local” being a phrase on everybody’s post-pandemic lips and plenty of moral crusaders, like those with the sign below, hammering this message home. You’re going on a journey from turning a dream into a reality as you start the business, and then working hard to make your business successful. Take your consumers on that journey with you.

Personally, I feel this sign is far too direct and could almost be seen as begging for business. With that said, allowing others to generate this sentiment and public opinion lets you indirectly capitalise on it. Just a subtle reminder here & there that there is a person/people behind the business should do the trick!

Let your customers do the talking

Last summer, when visiting Athens with my partner, we stopped by a tiny local bakery to grab some lunch. The staff were friendly and the food was delicious, and we told them exactly that. Then, just as we were setting off into the Greek sunshine, the owner approached us with free drinks for the road. Having already told them it was our last day in the city, we tried to refuse them as we couldn’t provide any repeat business. But they weren’t trying to get us to return or earn a tip – no, they wanted a Google review.

Now, more than ever, consumers have influence over each other. There are people literally called ‘influencers’ (as discussed in Kris Britton & Toni Kent’s podcast) with huge sway over millions of people. Whether it’s gifting a free holiday to a vlogger or paying a social media influencer to promote your products, this can be a very powerful tool. But, if you can’t afford to invest that much, a simple online review request can be really powerful.

While encouraging customers to spread the word around your local area in the old-fashioned way can be effective, it does dramatically limit your reach when you compare it to digital marketing.

What can KAYBE do for small businesses?

Small business owners don’t tend to have budgets that facilitate hiring trained, qualified marketing professionals, but creating any content for your brand without marketing expertise risks wasting resources and even damaging your brand’s reputation. But our team at KAYBE have plenty of experience working with businesses of all sizes across a variety of industries, and we can lean on that experience & expertise to deliver the best small business marketing strategies for you.