Small Business Marketing: Practical Tips and What You Need to Know

Whether we’re dealing with the owner of a small restaurant or a local store, or a talented individual selling simple handcrafted products online, some marketing practices must be followed and effort put in to introduce audiences to this small business’s existence and attract customers to it.

Sure, marketing campaigns can become taxing and costly — especially the traditional ones — but there are many practices small companies can follow to attract customers in a way that fits their modest capabilities.

In this article, we’ll talk about small business marketing, the channels that can be used for marketing without heavy costs and with excellent efficiency, and some additional tips.

The Importance of Small Business Marketing

Most people spend a portion of their time on the internet — browsing social media platforms, checking their email, or looking up something they need using search engines. This gives small companies an opportunity to invest every available resource to promote themselves and grow awareness of their brand and put it in front of audiences’ eyes.

Marketing is no longer limited to magazine and newspaper ads and TV commercials. Digital marketing has opened up a wide field for companies to communicate with customers, and by choosing the right channels any company can attract customers to it and generate sales at costs suited to its available budget.

Small Business Marketing Strategies

There are many practices small business owners can follow to market themselves that don’t require major costs, such as:

1: Creating Accounts on Social Media Platforms

Let’s suppose we’re working with a talented painter who sells their paintings online. Platforms like Instagram and Pinterest are excellent places to market this type of product. They should first create accounts dedicated to marketing their paintings, so the content published on these accounts is specific to the paintings and doesn’t mix with their personal posts — and from the followers’ point of view, this is exactly the kind of content they expect from that account.

Publishing high-quality photos of the finished product, short videos of the paintings during the painting process, and videos discussing topics related to painting and the skills and challenges the painter faces — all forms of content they can publish to attract users’ interest and market their paintings on these platforms.

2: Publishing Up-to-Date Product Details

Among the simple things worth caring about, which display the entrepreneur’s professionalism in managing their business and dealing with customers, is being precise about the details describing their products or services and updating them constantly.

For example: if we had a restaurant that offers a menu of various meals and provides home delivery, having a WhatsApp Business account lets it benefit from a feature (WhatsApp Catalogwhich lets them create a list of meals, prices, and details, add professional photos for them, hide or show a product (if it isn’t available), and edit all these details to keep them accurate.

3: Creating Pages Introducing Local Services

For small businesses that offer their services in specific areas, it’s essential to spell out these details and grab the attention of users searching for this type of service in their cities and towns using search engines.

This is done by building a free web page or a simple site using WordPress or Blogger, where we lay out all the details of the service on offer and the areas where it’s available. For example: if we had a workshop offering plumbing services in Cairo and its suburbs, we’d build a simple website with several pages carrying titles like: Cairo Plumber, Plumber in Al-Zaytoun District – Cairo, Plumber in Al-Ameriya District – Cairo, and other titles for the areas this workshop operates in — plus all the details and contact information the customer needs.

This strategy falls under what’s called Local SEO, and it offers significant marketing value in winning customers who use search engines to find services in their local area.

4: Showcasing Expertise

One of the effective methods for attracting customers is delivering value to them and impressing them with the extent of information and expertise the entrepreneur has in the field — this type of marketing is called content marketing.

For example: a dentist who wants to market their clinic and attract patients can prepare content pieces about oral health and dental care and publish them on social media accounts and on the website, if any, alongside photos and videos of cases they’ve treated, and other forms of content. All of this shows customers the extent of expertise this doctor has and draws them to the clinic without any major costs.

5: Running Paid Ads at the Right Time

All the practices I mentioned earlier help attract customers organically and inexpensively, but there are times of the year when business slows down and demand drops on certain products. In those times, running paid ads on search engines or social media platforms can help generate sales and revive activity.

For example: a store selling ornaments and home decor may see business slow in the second half of every month, since the type of products it sells isn’t a basic consumer need and demand for them thins out. Here, paid ads can be run in these periods to capture customers’ interest and win some sales.

Small Business Marketing Tips

• At the start, for a small company, it’s better to focus on practices that have a fast impact and generate a return on investment in the near term — so it has the cash flow and budget to move on to larger projects that contribute to long-term growth.
• Acquiring a new customer costs five times more than selling to an existing one, since the previous customer knows the company and trusts its products. So previous customers should never be neglected — every available opportunity should be used to encourage them to make repeat purchases.
• Sticking to a publishing schedule on social media platforms keeps this small business in front of audiences’ eyes, but the more important thing is preserving the quality of the content and its relevance to the field. Publishing high-quality videos weekly, for example, is better than daily publishing of weak content or content unrelated to the field.
• Customer experience matters more than anything — a satisfied customer promotes the company through word of mouth. It’s useful to encourage customers to leave positive ratings and reviews and to recommend the company to friends and acquaintances. That way, customer loyalty to it grows and its name spreads in the market.
• Sometimes trying the product is all it takes to convince the customer to buy. Offering free samples  and easy return methods is often the initial push a company needs to build relationships with customers and gain new ones.

Important Topics in Small Business Marketing and Its Methods

On top of all the simple practices we’ve discussed, there are several channels small companies can use to take marketing to another level of professionalism, of which we mention:

1: Creating a Company Website

All companies — big and small alike — benefit from a website that acts as a front for them, through which they introduce themselves and what they offer in products and services. If the company operates in digital commerce, this site functions as an e-commerce store through which it sells its products, and it also provides visitors with everything they need in the way of contact information, address, and business hours if the company has a physical store on the ground.

The website is the destination the company drives visitors toward, whether those visits come from social media posts, paid ads, or organic search visits. So attention must go to optimizing the site for search engines (SEO) and to carefully choosing popular, on-point keywords and putting them to work in the product and service descriptions across the site’s content.

Using analytics tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics, plenty of data can be collected about visitors’ interaction with the website, the number of visits pages receive, and how long visitors spend on the site — all of which offers a glimpse of what needs to be developed on the site to achieve its marketing goals.

2: Social Media Marketing

Billions of users spend part of their time on social media platforms, which makes them an excellent digital marketing tool — companies must build a strong presence on them.

By creating official company accounts on sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Pinterest, the company can engage with its customers and prospects, spread awareness of its brand, and promote its products and services. But you must first study the target audience, identify the platforms they spend the most time on, and focus the marketing efforts there to get the greatest benefit from this type of marketing.

Social media marketing is done by preparing high-quality content — product photos, short videos (Reels), and longer introductory videos. Paid ads can also be run, or influencers engaged to promote the products if the budget allows. Time also needs to be set aside to engage with followers and answer their questions and inquiries, announce upcoming events, and repost user-generated content — encouraging users to tag the company’s accounts in their content related to it.

Tools like Hootsuite and Sprout Social can be used to manage all social media accounts from one place.

3: Content Marketing

Content marketing is one of the long-term marketing methods that relies on building relationships with audiences by offering them value and benefit — preparing diverse content pieces and publishing them across various platforms for free. In doing so, the company showcases its expertise and knowledge of the field and builds audiences’ trust in it, in order to ultimately turn them into customers who do business with it and shop from its store.

Content marketing has many benefits, such as: growing brand awareness, drawing traffic and organic visits to the website through good SEO, and spreading knowledge and awareness about topics related to the products and services the company offers — which turns it into a thought leader in the field.

4: Search Engine Optimization

A large portion of users discover small and local businesses through search engines, so SEO is an essential practice for the website’s pages to earn a good ranking and a high position on the search results page — and thereby win the site plenty of unpaid, organic visits.

This is done by conducting an in-depth study of the most popular keywords the target audience uses in searches and putting them to work in articles, content pieces, and landing pages on the site, plus caring about the site’s mobile compatibility, page load speed, and making the content rich with written and visual elements.

For companies with a physical store on the ground that want to attract visitors to it, there’s a marketing strategy that’s essential to follow, known as Local SEO. Among the practices it includes:

• Using keywords and phrases relevant to the location, such as (barber shop in Jeddah, or bakery in Cairo).
• Listing the company’s name in online directories such as Arabiantalks in the Middle East and the well-known Yelp in the United States.
• Creating a Google My Business account and including all the details about the store, along with a short overview and high-quality photos.
• Maintaining consistency and accuracy when mentioning the store’s details (name, address, phone number) everywhere.

Among the tools that help with SEO are Google Analytics and Google Search Console — both free tools that provide plenty of analytics about the audience and how they find the website and interact with it, the number of times it appears in search results, the search phrases responsible for that, and the number of clicks on those results. We also have Semrush, which offers a free subscription tier with limited features that’s very suitable for small businesses new to SEO.

5: Paid Ads

If the budget allows, a portion of it can be allocated to running paid ads on search engines and social media platforms. The advantage of these ads is the substantial ability to target audiences by their interests, behavior patterns, and geographic location — guaranteeing they reach the right user segments.

These ads follow a payment model called Pay Per Click — meaning the company pays these platforms an amount for each click on these ads by users, until the paid amount reaches a certain limit selected in advance.

There are other forms of ads, such as: working with influencers to promote the products on their platforms, official sponsorship of events, and others.