Small businesses must come out with unique marketing strategies if they want to be ahead of competitors. Although, the conventional ways of marketing a product or service are still relevant but try using them along with new strategies to reach out to the audience.

For example, inviting potential customers to an event that displays your products or services is a traditional approach to spreading a good word for your business. But you cannot win consumers solely by organising such events since modern people are busy and you should be searching for them everywhere to interact with them. So, use a whole gamut of marketing tactics, old and new, instead of relying on a few ones only.

Here are the 10 marketing strategies for small businesses

1. Use Google My Business

One of the most powerful marketing strategies for your small business is to use “Google My Business” to your advantage. Your business listing gets a promotion on the GMB. For businesses targeting local markets, this platform is a powerful marketing medium. The listing appears at the top half of the search page ahead of the search results.
So, try to get your small business in the top listings. If your marketing team is able to get your business listings in the top 3 listings, you are bound to get an enormous amount of traffic, which solely can bring you huge business without spending much on ads. Google My Business is the platform that combines all the other Google marketing tools such as Google+. Google Analytics, Google Reviews Google Insights and Google Maps profile.GMB is a creditable way to ensure that your potential customers take notice of your small business more often. What is more, you do not have to work hard to rank your GMB listings higher. All you need to do is to optimize your profile. Then, get some reviews and citation for your company’s small business.

2. Pair your strategy with google adwords

Google AdWords is an old but proven online marketing channel. It may be a bit expensive but it is competitive and if you are a master of exploring this platform, you will reap the benefits. If you are doing your on-page SEO perfectly, it will deliver you the relevant search results to drive traffic.

Depending on your CTR [Click Through Rate] and the amount of traffic your landing page gets from your ad, Google assigns a quality score to your ad. Your bid cost will be reduced if your ad score is higher.
AdWords is your marketing tool to get the results immediately. For maximum output, it would be good if you pair this channel with your other marketing strategies.

3. Explore Content Marketing

You should create relevant content showcasing your business values and the care you take to resolve people’s problems with your products or services. Then, distribute the content through a wide range of channels online. This way of content marketing is a proven tactic to drive the traffic towards your business from varied sources.

However, you need to have some patience, as the results will take time to materialize. Content marketing should be your strategy for the sustainable growth of visitors and customers of your business in the long term.

But make sure that you produce quality content on relevant topics. You must also optimize the content for SEO and readers.

Along with written content, pay equal attention also to videos, online courses, podcasts, infographics and many other forms of content. Note that content marketing is not just about writing and distributing big posts. But make sure that you formulate a perfect content marketing strategy specifically for your small business.

4. Create Facebook Ads

Facebook advertising is another effective strategy that your small business can benefit from immensely. For small entrepreneurs, Facebook is an inexpensive platform to reach out to virtually any audience.
You can place Facebook ads to target your specific set of consumers based on their location, online behaviour, sex, age etc. It should be among your top marketing strategies for small business.
You do not require experienced people to use this social platform for marketing. Only a few steps such as creating a catchy headline and adding some description, an image and a link to the ad are good enough to draw the attention of the audience to your ad and business.

Facebook Ads Manager will guide you to create, run and test many ad tests so that you can find out which ad formula is catching the attention of your consumers.

5. Partner with other brands

Small business can reach out to more people by collaborating with other ventures. This is an effective way of marketing your products or services as you are using the consumers of the other ventures for promoting your products.
For example, if you are a beauty therapist, you can approach a hairstylist with the proposal of offering free manicure to its clients. In this way, you will advertise your small business amid the ready-made clients of the other enterprise. Similarly, your coffee shop can provide free vouchers to other businesses such as plumber’s customers.

6. Use Social Media

A majority of your target customers are on different social channels. Most of your target audience is using social media for customer support. Your small business must be present on all the major social platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

Make sure that you devote your time to efforts for the growth of your social media audience. Many clever marketing professionals invests a lot of time and money toward building their social media presence.
So, find out which social channels your audience is using more and make special marketing plans to target such channels.

7. Promote On Coupon Deal Sites

Coupon deal sites have a massive number of your target consumers. You should explore the marketing opportunities presented by big coupon deal sites. Even big businesses offer limited-time-discounts to their members on these sites.
You can easily target local advertising on the coupon deal sites. Your brand awareness amongst the audience increases manifold and new customers come searching for your small business.
Keep in mind that your main purpose of using coupon deal sites should not be to earn profit and sales. The purpose should be to generate awareness about your small and unknown business by encouraging people to try your products.

8. Advertise In Print Media

Print media such as newspapers and magazines have a large readership. A reputed newspaper reaches to a huge number of people from different educational and social backgrounds. In fact, newspapers are read by almost all section of populations. This means that your advertisements of products or services will catch the attention of people who rely more on print media for detailed news and views.
Many retail consumers make their purchasing decisions based on the information they get from advertisements in newspapers. Your small enterprise can now afford to place ads in print media as the advertisements rates have decreased over the years. Make sure that you combine print media with online marketing strategies.

9. Email Marketing

Email marketing is a time-tested way to convince consumers about the usefulness of a product or service. Remember that many people want to have more information and convincing before making a purchasing decision.
Email marketing is a low-cost strategy that you can use to enhance your global reach of the business. You can send emails in an automatic way without wasting your time. Emails are easy to setup and run and you can establish communication with your consumers immediately.

10. Direct Mail Marketing

Direct mail marketing is a conventional way of business promotion. Many small businesses still use it effectively. Since online channels already have a massive amount of content, people want to be engaged in a different way.

But you need to make your direct mail attractive to draw the recipients’ attention. Start with creating an eye-catching envelope design and make it appear bulky so that people open it to satisfy their curiosity. Use all the tricks such as creating unique shapes of an envelope, use attractive colors, make envelope lumpy to grab the attention.

Make sure that the letter inside of the envelope has a compelling content for the best results. Right from the headline to the main body of the letter, everything must send your message to the readers in quick time.