Modern marketing is incredibly complex, involving multiple strategies and techniques. While small business owners don’t necessarily need to understand every single aspect of marketing right away, you should have a good grasp of the marketing basics. Knowing the marketing fundamentals will get you started growing your business.
Marketing Basics for Every Business Owner
Treat this article as marketing 101, your complete guide to the basic concepts of marketing. After making sure you understand the marketing basics, we’ll go into some strategies that small business owners can try. This article will be more than enough for you to start effectively marketing your small business, or you can use it as an introduction before you learn more about specific types of marketing.
What is marketing?
Marketing is the tactics and strategies that a company uses to position its products or services. It refers to the process of making those products or services attractive to potential customers.
Various activities are part of marketing, including market research, advertising, and competitor analysis. Modern marketing takes place over multiple channels that all work together, letting you reach your target audience on their preferred channel.
Why is marketing important?
Every business owner understands the importance of marketing essentials to some extent. After all, it helps you grow your sales and gain new customers. But this is far from the only reason to learn small business marketing 101. Marketing is also important for the following reasons:
Increases Brand Awareness
One of the most obvious benefits of marketing is its ability to increase your brand awareness. You don’t just increase the number of people who know about your brand. You increase the number of people who view your company as experts in your field. This, in turn, leads to an increase in qualified leads.
Provides Insights into Your Market and Customers
Effective marketing is not one-sided. You market to your customers and their feedback provides valuable insights, even if that response results in sales or leads. Once you understand the 4 Ps of marketing (product, price, place, and promotion), you can look at the data related to each marketing campaign. How does a certain campaign impact your sales, leads, or other metrics?
Use that data to determine what marketing strategies work best and then focus your efforts on them. You can also use the data for A/B testing for various strategies.
Helps You Reach Your Ideal Customer
An effective understanding of marketing basics lets you use audience targeting. In other words, you can directly promote your products or services to your ideal customers. As they are your ideal customers, you should find it easier to convert those leads into sales.
Encourages Conversions and Sales
That increase in qualified leads turns into more conversions and sales. Additionally, marketing analytics lets you learn which technique gets the most favorable response from your target customers, letting you efficiently grow your audience and sales.
In addition to those initial conversions, marketing fundamentals also encourage repeat purchases from loyal customers. It costs less to retain a client than to attract a new one, and effective marketing takes advantage of this. You can even use your marketing to encourage those loyal customers to leave reviews, expanding your reach even more.
Improves Decision-Making Process
Effective marketing also improves the decision-making process, both for your company and your customers. We already mentioned how the data and insights you get from marketing let you determine what strategies are the most effective. These insights help inform long-term marketing strategies to achieve business goals.
What about your customers? Effective marketing makes the features, benefits, and use cases of your product clear to customers. This, in turn, lets them make an informed decision.
Types of Marketing
An important part of small business marketing is understanding that there are several different types of marketing. You will need to understand these, as the right marketing type for your business will depend entirely on your company, goals, resources, and more.
The following are some of the most important types of marketing that you should consider for your small business.
B2B vs. B2C Marketing
B2B stands for business-to-business marketing while B2C marketing is business-to-consumer marketing. This is a crucial distinction because each of these requires slightly different tactics.
For example, B2B businesses may want to consider using account-based marketing. In account-based marketing, you focus your marketing strategies and resources on specific accounts that would benefit from your products and services. For example, you could email a case study to businesses, showing them how your new feature will solve their biggest pain points. Account-based marketing often involves using highly personalized campaigns.
A classic example of B2C marketing is influencer marketing. The influencer shares how they use your product or service, and this acts as an endorsement. Their followers see it as a personal recommendation or review, one of the most powerful lead generators in B2C marketing. As a result, you may see an increase in leads and conversions.
Inbound vs. Outbound Marketing
The differences between inbound and outbound marketing are another example of the basic concepts of marketing. With inbound marketing, you “pull the customer in.” For example, you can give them useful content that helps them decide.
With outbound marketing, you push your offer to the customer with a message that “interrupts.” Advertising is a classic example of this.
So, publishing an article about how to use your product or service or an introduction to your industry would be inbound marketing, as long as you stick to organic search. When you add PPC advertising to the article, it becomes outbound marketing.
The key difference here is that outbound marketing reaches out to customers who may not be ready to learn more or even be interested in your brand.
Content Marketing
The article about using your product or introducing your industry is just one example of content marketing. Content marketing refers to creating and distributing content with the goal of attracting and retaining customers. Blog posts are a very common example, but you can also use podcasts, infographics, eBooks, videos, and nearly any other type of content.
As you create your content for content marketing, you want to solve a need for your prospect. B2B companies must focus on clients’ need for multiple choices and collaborative solutions, while B2C companies can focus on providing quick fixes to customers’ problems.
Digital Marketing
Digital marketing refers to any type of marketing that occurs online. The most common examples are social media marketing and email marketing, although they are far from the only types.
With both social media marketing and email marketing, you work to grow an audience on an owned marketing channel. Then, you use that channel for direct messaging.
Digital marketing has a lot of overlap with other types of marketing. You will commonly use it to share the content you created for content marketing. How you distribute that content and what that content is will depend on whether you are a B2B or B2C business and whether your goal is inbound or outbound marketing.
Growth Marketing
Growth marketing is a newer strategy that uses an integrated, experiment-driven approach to every stage of attracting customers. In other words, you don’t just see what strategies work well for your current marketing. Instead, you come up with a hypothesis for a new type of marketing or strategy. Then, you conduct marketing experiments to gather data and verify your hypotheses.
The key to growth marketing is that it can include any channel or type of marketing. The only requirement is that you have data showing that the strategy, type, or channel works.
The other crucial aspect of growth marketing is that it applies across the full marketing funnel. Most types of marketing focus on attracting new prospects. However, growth marketing includes the entire funnel, from optimizing digital content to attract customers to gathering feedback from satisfied customers to improve the product.
Marketing Essentials: The 4 P’s of Marketing
The four P’s of marketing are a crucial element of marketing 101. The four Ps are product, price, promotion, and place. You will find these four principles at the core of every part of marketing and every single strategy.
1. Product
The product is what you sell, whether it is a service or a physical good. When considering the product, figure out the following:
- Product variations
- Product packaging
- How to service the products
The last of these, servicing the products, can include aspects like returns and warranties. In many cases, the marketing team even works with the product development team to convey ideas and customer feedback.
2. Price
At the most basic level, price is the cost of your product or service. But at a deeper level, it also includes how you set that price. You will need to consider the following:
- The market rate of your product, accounting for what people will pay and the cost to produce
- How you offer and apply discounts
- Whether offering financing or payment plans makes sense
3. Promotion
Promotion is the first thing most people think of when they imagine marketing. It is how you will make sure that people know your product, service, or business exists. The marketing essentials of promotion include the following:
- Whether you want to promote it online, offline, at events, in stores, or a combination
- Choosing the channels to promote it on
- What message you communicate in the promotions
Specifically, the messaging in your promotions will need to inform prospects about the product as well as provide encouragement to buy it.
4. Place
This point refers to the fact that you need your product to be in the right place, so people can find it and purchase it. This comes back to the following main considerations:
- Will you distribute it online via ecommerce, offline, or both?
- What locations or regions will receive the product
This is where local marketing comes into play. An example is that you won’t necessarily want to sell skis or snowboards in Florida, at least not in the quantities you would in Minnesota. Vice versa, you would maybe only sell swimsuits in Minnesota seasonally but sell them year-round in Florida.
Marketing Tips and Strategies
Before you can start to design and implement your marketing strategies, entrepreneurs will need to consider a few important factors. Be sure to consider the following as basics of marketing management:
1. Research your audience.
One of the marketing essentials is to always take the time to research your audience. For example, think about their preferred marketing channel. Most audiences prefer text marketing, but certain audiences may prefer email marketing. Your target market’s needs and preferences will also influence what tone you take, what information you share, and factors such as whether you use emojis in your texts.
2. Set your goals.
No matter your marketing strategy, make sure that you have clear goals. These goals also need to be measurable. By having clear, measurable goals, you can effectively track the impact of your marketing campaigns. That, in turn, lets you determine if a given strategy is successful or needs to be adjusted.
3. Evaluate your financial health.
Don’t forget to evaluate your financial health as you plan your marketing strategies. Your company’s financial health will have a direct impact on your marketing budget as well as what qualifies as a realistic goal.
With those considerations in mind, you will be ready to decide which marketing strategy you want to use. The following are some of the most useful strategies for small business owners. This list is far from inclusive, as we don’t include some popular types of online marketing, such as SEO (search engine optimization) or PPC (pay-per-click) advertising.
4. Text Marketing
Savvy small businesses incorporate text marketing because of text messages’ high open rate. Additionally, many audiences prefer to interact with companies over text compared to other channels. You can even text links, whether they are to products, review invitations, video content, or something else.
With the right texting templates and software like Podium, you can send one text that drives thousands in revenue.
5. Email Marketing
Email marketing is easily one of the most common forms of marketing, and something nearly every company should consider. It has a high return on investment, although not quite as high as text marketing. It also gives you the chance to include longer content than you could in a text as well as opportunities to drive traffic to websites and landing pages.
6. Event Marketing
With event marketing, you host events designed to promote your brand or product. Traditional examples are in-store workshops or product open houses. But you can also do this with webinars or live streams on social media.
7. Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing refers to marketing efforts on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. While some parts of social media marketing are declining, others are growing, and you need a strategy that integrates newly popular platforms, including TikTok and Instagram.
Social media marketing is incredibly effective at increasing brand awareness and a sense of community. It also helps you expand your reach. The channels to include in your marketing plan will depend on your demographic research. For example, some companies may want to focus on LinkedIn while others will focus on Facebook or another platform.
Influencer marketing is a subset of social media marketing. This is when you have popular people within a niche share your products. This lets you expand your reach to the influencer’s audience and encourages that audience to view your brand favorably.
8. Video Marketing
With the rise of platforms like TikTok and the always-popular YouTube, video marketing has become crucial. Even with video on social media platforms, YouTube remains the most important part of your video marketing strategy. You may also want to consider platforms like Wistia.
Understanding the Marketing Funnel
The marketing funnel is a very important concept for small business owners to understand since it outlines the steps that leads may go through before purchasing from your business. This outline helps businesses tailor their marketing strategies based on where the customer stands in their decision-making process. The funnel, for the most part, consists of 3 main stages:
- Awareness: At the top of the funnel, customers become aware of your services or product. This stage involves creating visibility and capturing the attention of your target audience through different channels, such as advertising, content marketing, or social media.
- Consideration: In the middle of the funnel, potential customers show interest in your products and services and start evaluating whether they meet their needs. This stage involves providing detailed information, addressing concerns, and showing the value of your product or service.
- Decision: The bottom of the funnel is where customers make the final decision to purchase. This stage includes providing incentives, and special offers, and creating an easy purchasing process to convert potential customers into actual buyers.
Understanding each part of the marketing funnel is vital for creating targeted and effective marketing campaigns that guide customers through their journey.
Types of Marketing Funnels
To navigate the marketing world, small business owners should be aware of various types of marketing funnels. Here is a list of key marketing funnels:
- Sales Funnel: A traditional funnel guiding customers from awareness to purchase with specific steps and actions designed to convert leads into sales.
- Lead Generation Funnel: Focuses on capturing potential customers’ information to build a database for future marketing efforts.
- Email Funnel: Utilizes email campaigns to cater to leads, provide valuable content, and eventually drive conversions.
- Webinar Funnel: Leverages webinars to engage and educate potential customers, creating trust and guiding them toward a purchase decision.
- Product Launch Funnel: Introducing a new product or service, and converting leads into customers during the launch phase.
- Retention Funnel: Targets existing customers with loyalty programs, exclusive offers, and personalized content to encourage repeat purchases.
Understanding these types of marketing funnels allows small business owners to choose the best approach based on their goals and targeted customers. By implementing the right funnel, small businesses can guide potential customers through the marketing journey and drive successful outcomes.
Small Business Marketing 101
As a small business, you likely don’t have the budget to try every single marketing strategy. Instead, you will have to prioritize strategies that match your goals and find tools that let you get more return on your investment, creating a marketing mix.
Podium focuses on helping small and local businesses grow by providing solutions specifically designed for them.
For example, you can generate more reviews and get more business. With tools like our Google Review link generator, you can streamline the process of asking customers for reviews. From there, the new reviews will drive future conversions by attracting customers and positioning you as a well-respected brand.
Or you can make your website a conversation starter with Webchat. See Webchat in action on your site and see how it lets you take the conversation offline to the channel that customers prefer, texting.
Streamline Your Entire Business
After reading all that you need to know about marketing for small business owners, it’s time to take these strategies and implement them in your own small business! There are many ways to begin marketing your business to potential clients, however, there is one platform that stands out as the premier option to use in your small business. With Podium, you can easily streamline your small business operations, and manage and communicate with leads effectively!
Tailored to support the growth of businesses like yours, Podium offers many solutions designed to elevate your brand and turn leads into long-term customers.
With its many tools including text marketing, customer profiles, and Podium’s Webchat, a tool that transforms online interactions into meaningful conversations, Podium offers small business owners like yourself the ability to exponentially grow your business. Witness Webchat in action on your site, providing a seamless transition to your customer’s preferred communication channel – texting. This personalized touch goes a long way in improving customer engagement and satisfaction!
With Podium’s user-friendly tools, you can effortlessly guide potential customers through each stage of the marketing funnel, from awareness to conversion.
