Marketing a standout small business isn’t just good for business owners; it makes a massive difference for the UK economy. 17.7 million of us work in a small business today, and women-led small businesses alone contribute £85 billion to the UK economy every year.
Which is to say, if you’re running a small business, you have something to shout about! But, how do you tell your story in a way that inspires, lets you scale, and takes advantage of low-hanging fruit for visibility?
Read on for five tried-and-tested marketing tips we’ve picked up from growing our small business, and the 100+ small businesses we’ve worked on.
1. Get Clear on Your ‘Why’
To gain any marketing traction with your small business, you have to inspire people. That’s why our first tip comes back to the question: why do you do what you do?
In his viral 2009 TED talk, Simon Sinek shares how the businesses that inspire employees, customers, and even fans all have a clear sense of ‘why’. You can think of Why as the purpose behind your business and the change you’re trying to make in the world, whether that’s:
- Apple: Challenge the status quo.
- Liquid Death: Rebel against boring wellness and plastic waste.
- By Rotation: Open up the world’s largest shared wardrobe of designer fashion.
Before you get into the weeds of marketing, it’s worth first pausing to get clear about your Why. From there, your Why feeds into How you run your business and What you offer in your products, services and marketing. Get this right, and your small business can act like a big player, standing out from businesses that only focus on the What.
Getting Your Targeting Right
One mistake a lot of small businesses make when starting out is feeling they have to appeal to everyone. Time and time again, the best strategy we’ve found when it comes to marketing is finding and owning your niche.
Yes, most people drink Coca-Cola, and most people have a Windows PC. If you want to get your brand new product or service to stand out though, you aren’t here to convince most people. The people you do need to convince are the ones who are inspired by your Why – the ones who feel a shared sense of identity with your brand.
So as we start to get more into the How of marketing, just remember, you’re targeting the innovators and early adopters in your niche. They’re the ones who can tell everyone else.
And, if you’re curious to learn more about the power of Why, you can watch Simon Sinek’s TED talk here:
2. Tell Your Story
With a massive 5.45 million small businesses in the UK, what makes you unique is your Why and how you tell your story. After all, no one has the same story as you and your team, the same dreams, motivation and everyday life.
That’s why we see a lot of founders front and centre in small business marketing, from Holly & Co to Faith Rowan Leeves and our own Aled at Lumen.
Social Media Marketing
Social media is a great way to tell your story, whether you’re a B2C business on TikTok or Instagram, or a B2B business focusing on LinkedIn.
Consistent posting, repeating your Why and creating content that speaks to your people is the best way to grow on whatever social platform you choose. It’s also one of the best places to build relationships.
Email Marketing
If you think of social media marketing as what you say at a party, email marketing is how you speak to your close friends. People will only sign up to your email list if they’re interested in your business, so emails are the place to nurture your community.
This can mean:
- Keeping up a regular newsletter – The more consistent you are, the more likely people are to open it. Weekly or fortnightly is best.
- Having a welcome sequence – This is a series of emails that nurtures new subscribers, giving them value, telling your story and sharing your best products and services.
- Creating promotional emails that convert – Your email audience is most likely to buy from you whenever you release a new launch or promotion.
Once you get into it, email marketing can be a space to share a more personal view of your business and your story, as well as reward your inner circle. The simplest way to do this is, whenever you offer anything new to your customers, think: can I offer a little bit extra or early access to my email subscribers?
Do this, and your marketing will nurture a community that cares about your brand.
3. Work On Your SEO
Every day, people make 16.4 billion searches on Google and, if you’re not optimising your website for SEO, you’ll miss out on some quick wins and essentially free, organic traffic for your business.
Of course, as a small business owner, you’re not going to know everything there is to know about SEO, and you don’t need to. There are some simple things you can do, though, that can make a massive difference to your website’s visibility on Google and other search engines, including ChatGPT.
If it’s your first time doing SEO, here are five tips to get you started:
- For every page of your website, choose your 4-6 keywords. You can use free tools like Google Keyword Planner and UberSuggest. Try to include these keywords in your page headings, text and metadata.
- Update your Google My Business profile for local search terms, and add keywords to your business description.
- Write the metadata for each page on your website. This is built into Shopify and Squarespace, and we like free plugins like Yoast SEO for WordPress. Use Spotibo to make sure you get the length right.
- Write blog posts to target longer, question keywords that your customers will be searching for. We use Answer The Public and Ask.com to find ideas.
- Use PR to gain backlinks to your website, which we’ll cover below.
If growing your website traffic is a goal, and you want the tools to do it yourself, find out more about our SEO Essentials Course. With 6 years of experience growing website search traffic for clients from dog trainers to AI startups, we share proven techniques you can use, without spending a penny on tools.
4. Collaborate and Gain PR
If you’ve ever wondered about investing in a product or service, you’ll know it’s way more impactful when a person or publication you trust tells you how good it is. So, how can you achieve that through your marketing?
Collaborations
Now that you’re clear on the Why behind your business, chances are there will be other businesses, influencers and events that share your values. This is a prerequisite for any good collaboration because it’s likely their audience will identify with your Why as well.
Great collaborations can look like:
- Giveaways
- Joint events
- Product collaborations
- Speaking or showcasing your products at an event
- Inviting an influencer who’s a genuine fit to sample your product or service
PR
For small business owners starting out, gaining a press feature can feel a long way away. Surprisingly though, it is completely doable! What you might not realise is that small businesses often have the best stories and are relatable, making them much more interesting to journalists.
Here are five ways to gain more PR for your business:
- Answer journalist requests on platforms like Qwoted, Featured and Pressflow.
- When you win an award or have a story, send a press release to your local media outlet.
- Pitch your products to journalists who do round-ups and particularly Christmas gift guides in your niche.
- Get into the habit of browsing magazines on apps like Readly to help you find your journalist – sometimes you’ll find their email address, other times you can guess it. You can also buy journalist details through services like PR Dispatch.
- Build a relationship with journalists who have featured you before. Follow them on social media and send them stories or product ideas that will interest them.
5. Measure and Learn
If you do nothing else when it comes to your small business marketing, start with your Why and measure your results so you can learn from them.
In practice, any marketing tactic you try is a hypothesis: ‘If I do x, I expect y to happen.’ To help you get your marketing right and scale your small business, you’ll need to set SMART goals for your marketing.
These are:
- Specific – What will you do and what are you hoping to achieve?
- Measurable – What metric will you track? E.g. Sales, website visits, footfall, etc.
- Achievable – Setting goals that are challenging, but achievable makes it more likely for you to hit them.
- Relevant – Your goal needs to be relevant to your strategy for you to feel motivated.
- Time-Bound – Over what period of time will you measure your goal?
In practice, experimentation in your marketing can look like setting a SMART goal ahead of a marketing campaign, month or quarter. Then, afterwards, it’s making sure to come back to your initial goal to track the results and review your progress.
Some questions we like to ask ourselves when evaluating are:
- What went well?
- What didn’t go well?
- How motivated did you feel?
- What would you improve next time?
- What actions can you now take?
If you run a small product business, we also love The Resilient Retail Club for teaching you this habit of testing and learning from your campaigns.
Marketing Your Small Business
Here’s where the rubber hits the road. Now you have five tried-and-tested marketing tips to grow your small business, it’s up to you to make them work. Experiment, record what you learn, and remember that your Why and your story are key to finding your people and standing out.
As a small business owner, you’ll need to pick up a lot of skills. Picking the right teachers can be a great way to fast-track your marketing and save valuable effort and time.
If you’re ready to boost your SEO and learn the skills you need to do it yourself, you can learn more about our SEO Essentials Course here. For small businesses who aren’t ready for an SEO agency, we’ve distilled all our favourite tips and tools into intuitive lessons you can build on to start finding your people on search.
