In order to get your small business of the ground, you need to make sure that you have a stellar marketing strategy in place. The difference between a small business that thrives and the ones that barely survive can be down to the marketing plan. At the end of the day, that is how you generate sales and get your brand name out there.

But many small business owners can just get a little caught up in the day to day process. They might be posting regularly on their website’s blog, looking at SEO and getting on their social media and sending tweets or Facebook updates. While all of those things are great for the brand’s marketing, there are much more heavy hitting strategies that you could be looking at. Here are some examples of the things that you could be doing.

Know Your Customers

You can’t market your brand or business effectively unless you know exactly who your customers are. Knowing the age range and demographic of your customers is so important. It also allows you to dismiss the people that wouldn’t be relevant. If an influencer gets in touch, for example, you might just think that you need to work with them as they have a large reach. But if they aren’t the specific demographic that you want, then you need to say no to them. This can obviously be a hard thing to do as a small business. But effective marketing won’t have mixed messages about who the end user is.

Who is Your Competition?

As well as your customers, you need to know clearly who your competitors are. Your customers might be looking for a solution to something. And these days they can be picky about who they choose. They will look for reviews and who provides the best solution for them in their situation. So you need to be on top of what your competitors are doing. So spend time thinking about who your competition is and be quite specific. When you have a clear outline of your competitors, it makes your marketing strategy much more effective.

Why Are You Different?

When you know your competitors, you need to think about the things that you do better, as well as what they do better. Do you offer promotional merchandise with every purchase or with each event organised, for example? Then you just need to think about how important the things that you are better at are for your customers. Then you can see what you really need to focus and improve on compared to the businesses that are your competitors.
So now can you see why it makes no sense to be building an email list or tweeting out when you don’t have a clear marketing focus? Without a clear plan, they won’t reach the right people and won’t be particularly helpful. You need to think about what small companies do to grow, rather than look at what big companies do when they are already successful.