Robert Davis
It’s your year to find success if you’re thinking about how to market your business in 2023. There are many distractions in small business marketing, but here are some surefire ways to market your business and see growth. First, let’s look at a simple definition of marketing.
What Is Marketing?
Marketing is simply getting people interested in your product or service and then selling and delivering it. In today’s tech world, the easiest, most effective way to get people interested is to promote on the internet.
You can also sell on the internet and deliver digital products and many services there. Even if you need a physical shop or office, you still need an internet presence. The first thing most people who are thinking about your business do is check out your website or Facebook page. Not finding you is a big red flag.
How To Market Your Business in 2023 — Proven Ways That Work
All six of these small business ideas — and the bonus method at the end — are currently being used successfully by thousands of entrepreneurs because they work. Apply them, and you’ll find small business marketing success.
1. Have a Marketing Plan
Your marketing plan is your blueprint for getting the money. It may begin as scribbles on sticky notes, but your roadmap to prosperity needs to become a living document that keeps you on course. A marketing plan is the most important part of your overall business plan. You constantly update and change both as you learn more and business conditions change.
A good marketing plan has several essential parts. You’ll need to do the following to create one:
- Describe your business, product, or service. What would you say if you had only 30 seconds to describe it to a stranger? Knowing this makes creating promotional material much more manageable.
- Describe your ideal customers. Come up with the ideal age, gender, income level, lifestyle, education, interests, and location. This information makes it easy to target your promotions.
- List your competition along with their strengths and weaknesses. This is so you’ll know which areas to avoid or target.
- Examine your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT). For example, you may have the best service in an area without many services but can’t yet afford a big advertising budget.
- List your goals and tactics. Do you want a 30% market share or to achieve a certain income level? Where and how will you promote? Free or discounted trial offers? Facebook page? Paid online ads? A blog? In-store events?
Check out these excellent business plan examples to get a good idea of how your marketing plan fits into the big picture.
2. Make Your Website the Center of Your Efforts
All your online marketing efforts should revolve around your website because people just don’t take you seriously without it. Your website gives your business credibility. It also gives you an excellent place to showcase your brand, inform people, send people to, and sell from. Websites work like this. Ads, blog posts, social media posts, or other means send people to a landing page on your website that displays information about what you’re selling. Visitors make a purchase on the website page or are directed to your shop.
There are two critical parts to your website — content and design. Both will be influenced by what your business does. A freelance writer or designer service can get by with a simple one-page website design. If you’re selling products, you may need hundreds of pages.
Many small business owners successfully create their website content if they have strong writing skills. But very few can design a beautiful website that showcases their brand in a way that makes people want to buy. Professionals do some things best.
It’s vital to own your website so that you can do as you please. If you set up a Facebook business page instead of your website, you’re subject to Facebook’s ever-changing terms and conditions. It’s easy to lose your online presence.
3. Use Social Media, Because It’s Where Your Customers Live
Nearly everyone on the planet uses some form of social media. Facebook is the biggest — but Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and upstart TikTok may also contain important groups of potential customers. Which social media site do your customers live in?
Marketing on social media is different from search engine marketing. People are looking for you on search engines, so you use keywords to help them find your business. On social media, this is turned around. You are looking for customers, so you don’t use keywords. You narrow the market you advertise to by using:
- Location
- Demographics
- Interests
- Behavior
- Connections
Social media works very well for businesses that already have or can build a large following. If you don’t have a large following, you can partner with an influencer who does.
4. Be on Review Sites That Send Customers Ready to Buy
Review sites like Google, Yelp, Thumbtack, and Facebook can be excellent customer sources. Overlooking them when you’re searching for small business ideas is a mistake. Many people check review sites because they want to be sure they are doing business with reputable establishments. If your business has enough good reviews, you get the call. Don’t worry about a few bad reviews as long there are more good ones. The few bad reviews give credibility to the good comments.
Set up your profiles in review sites before you begin asking customers to leave their comments on these helpful sites:
- Google My Business: The most widely used review site is Google My Business. Many positive reviews here can help your SEO efforts on Google.
- Yelp: After Google, Yelp is the most popular review site. The demographics of Yelp users are very good for small businesses.
- Thumbtack: You’ll need to pay for leads generated from Thumbtack, but the thousands of positive reviews about Thumbtack’s benefits speak for themselves.
- Facebook Reviews: Sometimes called Facebook Recommendations, Facebook reviews are very trusted. You can turn them on in the settings of your Facebook business page.
5. Use Paid Advertising To Get Instant Traffic
Running ads on Facebook or Google and Bing brings visitors to your website when your ad starts displaying. You can have customers in as little as a few hours. Pay-per-click (PPC) ads have an excellent return on investment (ROI) that averages two for one. On average, businesses get two dollars in revenue for every dollar they spend on PPC ads. This can be higher on Facebook because of its excellent ad targeting function.
There are a lot of other ways to advertise your business in 2023, but PPC ads have proven their value over many years. If you’re uncertain about how to set up PPC ads, consulting a professional may save you time and money and get revenue flowing fast.
6. Use Search Engine Optimization (SEO) To Get Free Traffic
SEO is an excellent way to get your brand in front of the right people. To do SEO, you create content that Google will rank high in search. When people consume your content, they learn about you and can click a link in the content to go to your website. You can create blog posts, YouTube videos, graphics, or images.
SEO is built around the use of keywords and keyword phrases. Think about the keywords your customers are using when searching for you or your products. Considering the question they are trying to answer or the problem they are trying to solve will help you brainstorm keywords. Google your keyword. You’ll see a list of results that will guide you in creating the type of content people are searching for. Then you make better content. At the bottom of the search results page, you’ll see Related Searches, which gives you a list of other keywords to check out.
It takes about 4–8 weeks for a local business SEO program to get results. Other businesses can expect to spend 6–12 months working on SEO before substantial amounts of visitors come. There are many online tools to help you with SEO. Surfer SEO and Market Muse help you plan and write blog posts. If you need more help, professional SEO services will make all the facets of search engine optimization understandable. You can get results faster.
7. Bonus: Local Services Ads (LSAs)
Google has recognized that local service businesses often have difficulty competing with the big boys for keywords and PPC advertising. So they created LSAs that appear at the top of search results in the same area that your business is in.
LSAs don’t use keywords or clicks. Instead, service businesses are listed by category and pay for completed phone calls. Depending on how fast you get your documents to Google, the process of setting up can take several weeks, but users report higher returns for their ad dollars than PPC generates.
Get Started on Your Small Business Marketing Program Now
Learning how to market your business is critical to your growth. Here are four immediate actions you should take if you haven’t already. Set up a:
- Facebook business page
- Google My Business profile
- Business profile on Yelp
- Business website
You can see significant growth in 2023 by applying any of the seven surefire methods above to promote your brand that fits your small business marketing plan.
Want help? Scorpion has helped thousands of small businesses grow with marketing for over 20 years. Get started
Let’s talk about marketing success.
