SMALL BUSINESS MARKETING GUIDE

Welcome to Spin Social's Small Business Marketing Guide. This guide is for the business dipping its toes into the world of digital marketing and is ready to prioritize the growth of their business online. This guide is best for start-ups or companies with up to 3M in annual revenue.

Every business needs digital marketing to achieve its goals, whether you are looking to increase online sales volume or drive more traffic to your location. Who you are targeting, what you are saying, and where you find your customers are more important at this size of business than at any other point. Simply put, you don't have the money to be in the wrong places and say the wrong thing to people who will never spend money investing in your business.

Small business marketing includes a comprehensive social media strategy, paid digital advertising, consistent email marketing and an accessible online website. Each of these areas of marketing must be maintained and measured for constant improvement.

This Small Business Marketing Guide will focus on these four marketing aspects, which will create your sales funnel:

1. Generating quality leads at low cost

2. Converting customers

3. Generating repeat business and increasing their average spend (AOV)

4. Tools and platforms you need to support your marketing

Generate Quality Leads

The keyword here is QUALITY! To do this, you need to know who to target and what to say. This way, you can reach quality leads from highly targeted customer profiles.

Whenever I start working with a client, I ask them, "Do you have customer avatars?" The answer is usually... no. Without customer avatars, you cannot speak and market to your target audience effectively. Instead, business owners often guess who their audience is, or assume their audience is too broad to pinpoint specific types of people. This is 100%, NOT THE CASE, and results in wasted ad expenditures and mismanaged creativity.

What Is a Customer Avatar?

A customer avatar is a detailed profile of your ideal customer. Building these out should include comprehensive psycho and demographics, as well as a SWOT analysis for each. (Tip: always give your customer an avatar a name, so you “see them as a real person”). You will have more than one avatar, and should ideally start with your top three customers.

To begin your customer avatar, start with the basic demographics. This will assist in how you set up your advertisements and where you will reach them:

• Age

• Gender

• Marital Status

• Location

• Age and Number of Children

• Occupation

• Job Title

• Level of Education

• Annual Income

What Are Psychographics?

This is extremely important for how you engage with your customer. Knowing this information makes it so you can speak their language, relate to them, and show them the content of interest:

• Sources of Information such as:

• Books, magazines, TV, movies, blogs, websites, social media profiles, influencers they follow

• Goals and Values

• Challenges and Pain Points

• Objections and Roles

Without customer avatars, one of these two things will happen: You'll target the WRONG people... or you'll target everyone. It's important to remember that not everyone is your target audience. For example, Judy Bloom buys flowers from a floral shop to replicate interior design trends she reads in Home Magazine, so you know you won't show her ads promoting baby shower bouquets. If you target everybody, then you'll waste your marketing budget on a wide range of uninterested people and bring in low-quality leads. Be specific. Be relatable. Be strategic!

How do you collect this data? If you currently run any marketing, you can acquire a lot of demographic information from social media, Google and email analytics. From there, you can make assumptions based on these demographics for the psychographics. Another option is to conduct customer research by interviewing your top customers. Try and make them diverse and interview them based on the questions from the customer avatar template. Finally, if you start from scratch with no customers or data to pull from, make 3-5 avatars of who your IDEAL customer is. Design them from your imagination and adjust as you gain more data.

Note: People who are NOT your customer may deserve an avatar, so you know precisely who NOT to target.

Now, whoever is doing your marketing can be handed the avatars, know exactly whom they are talking to, and adjust the product offering and content for each. Eventually, you can pinpoint which social post, email, or ad is speaking to each avatar. These avatars should be revisited every quarter for adjustment and review.

So what's next? How else do you generate quality leads? You have your customer avatars, but now you need the customer journey to know how to talk to them and understand what your customer feels at each stage of their journey with you.

A simplified customer journey usually follows this pattern:

Awareness:

The beginning of the customer journey begins with the client becoming aware they need your services, whether it's finding a real estate agent, buying a new backpack, or thinking about a weekend getaway. How do you reach clients at this point of the journey? Social media and advertising are excellent starting points!

Consideration:

Next is the consideration of which business will achieve the client's needs. What is going to make them choose your business over the others? How do you win them over? Having a solid, Unique Selling Proposition (USP), a well-developed website, and valuable content with strong calls to action is vital.

Purchase:

This is the big moment! You made your sale. How did you do it? This can happen in various ways, from offering free trials, bundles, sales, showcasing testimonials, and email marketing for follow-ups. But this isn't the end of the journey! You want your customers to either become repeat customers or advocate on your behalf.

Advocacy:

Once you've made the sale, you want to make sure the experience was good enough for them to advocate your product or service. This could be asking for testimonials, reviews, influencer asks, or simply encouraging engagement on your social channels.

You'll want this journey visually mapped out and true to your customer experience. DON'T ASSUME. Observe how your customers interact with your business from beginning to end and how they feel at each stage, so you know how to optimize it.

You need to make sure you have the tools and strategies for each step of the sales funnel to be successful. To achieve this, you'll need to utilize social media, advertising, email marketing, and your website to its fullest potential.

Convert Customers

Okay, so you've got some high-quality leads coming through the funnel from your customer avatars and comprehensive customer journey. How do you plan on converting them? What is going to make a customer choose your business over the multitude of other options?

To convert customers, you need to stand out in a crowd, provide value, and be highly accessible.

Let's start at the beginning.

Standing Out in a Crowd:

To stand out, you need to know what makes your business special compared to your competition. Therefore, you need a Unique Selling Proposition (USP).

For example, do you ship faster than anyone else? Or are your products local-only? First, you need to solidify what makes you different and make it your brand identifier.

Creating your USP helps once you know your target market and a specialized offering. Just like you don't want to target EVERYONE, you also don't want to offer EVERYTHING. Finding a niche for your business helps you pinpoint your messaging, product offering, target market, and strategy. You don't want to stretch yourself too thin, which risks you spending too much money on sub-par offerings. Instead, specialize in something and market to that niche.

Provide Value:

Now that your client is familiar with your business, you want to start warming them up to make a sale. Providing value is a sure-fire way to gain your clients' trust. Do this by offering them exclusive discounts, free trials, or educational content such as webinars, blogs, evergreen content, vlogs, how-to guides, etc. Educational resources will keep your customers coming back for more. Remember, this is not a sales pitch; it is proof to your customers that they mean more to you than a dollar sign.

Offering value to your clients can take up some serious amount of time and resources, so you want to make sure you are leading your clients in the right direction of purchasing. You can do this by either gating the content (collecting personal information in exchange for the content) or encouraging a strong call to action like sign-up here or booking an appointment, etc.

Accessibility:

It's a given that every business needs a beautiful, functioning website. It should be clear, concise, strategically laid out, and SEO optimized. Unfortunately, many companies are still not prioritizing mobile optimization. This is crucial to being considered and found online by customers.

Once your desktop and mobile site are up and running, your SEO must be up to par. Make sure every page has a meta description populated with your keywords and alt text on images. To upkeep your SEO, take advantage of blogging, backlinking, and external linking. As always, connect to your Google account and optimize your My Business page.

Generate Repeat Business

You've done it, you've made your sale. Woohoo! Next up is making sure they STAY your customer, increase their AOV, and have such a great experience they want to recommend you to their friends and family. Repeat business generally equals out to advocacy.

This is the most important and least expensive thing you'll do. Why focus on getting new customers if you can focus on your already-won customers? Treat your customers well, and they'll stick with you.

The first conversion may be something very small to break down their barriers, like a free download or a discount to get them to buy. Now that you delivered that first promise, you can ask them to spend more and get them ready to be repeat customers.

The number one way to generate repeat business is to FOLLOW-UP. Thank your customers for their business, suggest other items they may like, offer exclusive promotions, reward programs, or recommend refills or subscriptions. Never let them forget about you.

Best way to do this? You must collect customer emails and information. Email marketing is a fantastic way to follow up and set up automated email campaigns to re-engage existing, new, or lost customers. Plus, it neatly stores and organizes your customer data with tags and segments.

Once you have a repeat buyer, you know they are more likely to either leave you a great review or advocate on your behalf. And if there is anything to say about advocacy, a micro-influencer is much more effective than paying the big bucks for a mega influencer. So you want every single one of your customers to become a micro-influencer for you.

How and where to do this?

There are so many places a business can be, but you'll want to make sure you are where your customers are. Every business should start with this foundation:

Social Media:

Facebook. Instagram. Twitter. LinkedIn. Snapchat. TikTok. Pinterest. Youtube. These are just the popular ones right now… more will come.

This doesn't mean you need to be active on ALL of them, just the ones that make sense with your business offerings and your target market.

Once you choose your platforms, you have to create goals for your social media. For example, are you trying to gain awareness, get leads, grow your sales, or increase engagement? This will determine how you structure your content and what calls to action you will utilize. Every post should have a purpose, a goal, and a next step.

Once you've determined “why” you're posting, it's time to plan, plan, PLAN! I like to plan three months ahead if possible. To do that, it's a good idea to create a weekly content planner. For example, Mondays are #MeetTheTeam, and Wednesdays are a product highlight. This is just a rough guideline for you to follow in case you draw a blank. You are not tied down by this.

Once the content strategy is mapped comes the fun part - content collection! Again, planning ahead is crucial because it can be time-consuming. Always strive for custom photography and utilize little tricks like hashtags, caption strategies, and engagement tips.

There are specific ways to encourage engagement and get more eyes on all your posts. Utilize every piece of content the social media platform offers you - for example, add your geolocation to your Instagram post or hashtag every keyword in a tweet.

Once you've started posting, stay on top of your engagement. Respond to every comment, review, and message. Responding will get more eyes on your posts, bump your content in the social media algorithms, and spur more conversation - all very good things. And don't be afraid to respond to a negative response to try and turn it around.

Digital Advertising:

Many business owners think that advertising is not worth it if they don't have a budget of $10,000 or more a month. WRONG.

With the correct targeting and the proper conversion goals, no budget is too small. But many business owners always ask the same question: What is the IDEAL monthly marketing budget to see results. There is no magic number, but a good starting point is 4-8% of your projected revenue. Start where you are comfortable, and give it time to collect data. You will start to see what works and doesn't work, and you will be able to shift funds around and make more confident decisions.

In good economic times, you can spend more on advertising to include branding and other types of "feel-good" advertising, but in tough times like a pandemic or economic hard turns, reducing your budget and focusing solely on revenue-driving campaigns is crucial.

So where should you advertise? Again, it depends on where your customers are, but the basics are Facebook and Instagram ads since they have such a comprehensive targeting platform. Google Display Ads and Google AdWords are great options too.

No matter what platform you are advertising on, every business should have three levels of advertising running AT ALL TIMES. Awareness, Traffic, and Conversion.

Awareness:

These ads will be set to target a broad demographic to get the most eyes on your ad.

Traffic:

This sets a more narrow target to engage only with those interested in your previous awareness ad. This ad will encourage customers to take the next step with your business, like viewing your website.

Retargeting:

This is the final hoorah in your advertising scheme that closes the deal. It retargets people who have already shown significant interest in your brand but have issues getting to the finish line. This is the conversion ad.

You're going to need some back-end set up to have these ads be successful, such as Pixel data on your website to feed into Facebook and custom audience creations for retargeting. Don't worry - no developer required!

When your ads are running, continue to track their results and optimize your budget. Staying on top of your reporting will help you learn what worked and what didn't to keep in mind for next time.

Remember, marketing, and advertising, in particular, is a learning game. If something didn't catch one time, you know what to tweak next time with your tracking and AB testing techniques.

Email Marketing:

As mentioned, a colossal mistake businesses make in their marketing is neglecting the follow-up. Whenever someone takes action with your brand, whether it's buying in-store, connecting via social media, buying online, or interacting with an ad, there should be the next step clearly laid out for them on their journey with your brand. A great way to do this is through email marketing.

There are a series of automated emails every business should utilize to stay top of mind with customers. Some basic examples are:

1. The Welcome Email

2. Order confirmation and related products (replenishment if possible)

3. The Happy Birthday

4. The Abandoned Cart

There's more to email marketing than one-time automation. Every target customer should be brought through an email marketing customer journey, such as communicating with the new customers, entertaining repeat customers, re-engaging lost customers, and following up with prospects. These are called nurture campaigns and are a series of emails that provide your customer with reminders of who you are, what you can offer them, calls to action, and valuable information.

On top of automated emails and nurture campaigns, you should never forgo the classic and well-loved newsletter. You can engage with the customers that aren't necessarily interacting with you on social media by sharing news, updates, sales, events, and valuable information.

Make sure your emails are branded and pleasing to the eye - MailChimp is a great platform to use and very cost-effective.

Website:

The Website is everything. It's where customers go to see your store hours, your history, your products, testimonials, meet your team, and literally everything in between. It's your hub.

If your website is not simple, modern, branded or mobile-optimized - trust me when I say this, you'll lose customers.

From personal experience, if I'm choosing between two businesses, I'll always go with a better website. It's just trust and instinct.

Websites also don't need to cost an arm and a leg to develop. Options like Wix and Shopify are SUPER easy to use and create fully functioning modern websites. All you pay for is your monthly domain and the managing software.

Once you get the hang of these simple-to-use platforms, you can be a whiz for updating your web for new products, team members, blogs, etc.

There you have it. The foundation of a small business marketing guide. Social Media. Advertising. Email Marketing. Website.

Finally, let's figure out who will be looking responsible for your marketing.

Not every small to medium-sized business can afford an agency or in-house marketer to manage their demanding and time-consuming marketing tasks. Some business owners think they are scraping by with their sales associate taking on the Facebook page or having their administrative assistant sending out a monthly newsletter - but are they really making a difference?

Whoever is in charge of your marketing needs to know the fundamentals that have been laid out in this Small Business Marketing Guide:

• Generating quality leads at a low cost

• Converting customers

• Generating repeat business and increasing their average spend

• Tools and platforms you need to support your marketing

In addition, your marketer needs to be involved in the marketing strategy from start to finish to create buy-in and ensure consistency amongst your messaging. Nothing is worse than being on two separate pages.

Here's the thing about marketing… it's like an energy bunny for your business and sales, but it moves quickly, changes constantly, and takes real-time and effort to make it tick.

At Spin Social, we understand the time, effort, and resources it takes to make marketing successful. We also understand not every business can support an outsourced or in-house marketer. That's why we provide our clients with options, such as staff marketing coaching or customized and flexible service offerings.

We are happy to help you explore the different options and look at what we can provide to get your business found online. Book a consultation today!