What Do Small Business Owners Need To Know About Marketing?

Marketing can be challenging for small to mid size organizations, who are often working with limited time, money, attention-spans and resources.

In 2023–2024 I started engaging with LinkedIn Collaborative Articles. A place for unlocking community knowledge in an all new way.

It starts with an article on a professional topic or skill, written with the help of AI — but it’s not complete without insights and advice from people with real-life experiences. They invited experts to contribute and here are my insights and advice:

What do you do if your small business struggles to grab customers’ attention with its products or services?

👉My experiences tells me, if your small business struggles to grab customers’ attention with its products or services then you need to revisit your strategy.

You’ve got about five seconds to get and keep someone’s attention and you can’t waste that precious time with a message that doesn’t connect.

A message that connects is one that clearly talks about what your ideal client wants more than anything else in the world — and what is that?

They want to solve their problems.

People don’t want what you sell — they want what they believe they will get, achieve, relieve, dodge, or acquire based on buying what you sell.

Your job is to understand the problems they are trying to solve and match your offering to those very specific problems.

What do you do if you want to gain an edge as a small business owner?

🚀 From my experience consulting over 100 CEOs and owners as a small business marketing consultant, if you want to gain an edge you must do two things:

1. 🤔stop trying to be better than the competition and start figuring out how you can be different
2. 👀create a true differentiation that an segment of your target market values or might care about

Creating your own special way to treat customers, creating an experience that’s unique, or creating a totally new and frictionless way for people to get a result is how you gain an edge, it’s how you create a difference that is valued and wanted and can’t be easily copied.

What do you do if you want to uncover your strengths and weaknesses in a small business using feedback?

👏To uncover your small business’s strengths and weaknesses effectively, start by interviewing your top customers. 👏

This process is essential for gaining valuable insights. It’s one of the most effective methods available.

Begin by creating a structured feedback form and regularly survey a selection of customers every quarter or six months. The insights gained will be invaluable, and you’ll find that customers appreciate being consulted.

However, be wary of vague responses such as “you provide good service.” While positive, this feedback isn’t actionable. Dig deeper by asking what excellent service means to them and if they can share specific instances of when they experienced outstanding service.

Here’s how you can revolutionize marketing for your small business.

🔄In my experience, revolutionizing marketing for a small business involves shifting focus to a comprehensive, integrated, and systematic approach. 🔄

By approaching marketing as a structured process rather than a collection of isolated tactics, owners and CEOs can address marketing frustrations head-on.

This method requires developing a cohesive marketing strategy aligned with business objectives and systematically implementing and refining it over time.

Embracing a process-oriented mindset promotes accountability, clarity, and efficiency in marketing activities, empowering businesses to navigate complexities with confidence and purpose.

What do you do if your B2B marketing strategy needs tailored solutions for clients?

🤔My experience has shown that many businesses have more than one type of ideal client. 🤔

Therefore, if your B2B marketing strategy requires tailored solutions for clients, that’s where the concept of buyer personas comes in.

Buyer personas can help you define each type of customer you hope to target, allowing you to create marketing that speaks specifically to their needs.

When you combine great, meaningful messaging, visuals, content, differentiators, promises, guarantees, and terminology with the right audience, you can generate hot leads and expedite them through the buying process.

What do you do if your company needs a content marketing strategy?

👀 From my experience if your company needs a content marketing strategy you must consider content as your voice of strategy and because of that, you must take a strategic and systematic approach to how your content is developed. 👀

And the best way to do this is to produce content that focuses on education and building trust — all based on your core business objectives, your ideal customer, and message.

For example, if one of your objectives for the year is to significantly increase your subscriber list, you would focus on producing, delivering and sharing content that attracts email capture, links and strategic partnering.

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