This simple small business marketing plan will get you started on generating more leads, and growing your small business into something you’ll be proud of.
Marketing a small business, especially for an owner-operator, can feel overwhelming. You’re expected to wear all the hats: worker, CEO, accountant, human resources, sales, marketing, etc. However, if you’ve been in business for even a few days, that sinking sensation sets in: how am I going to get leads?
Without a steady supply of potential clients, you’ll be out of business in short order! Well, put your mind at ease. Today we’re here to show you how to build a powerful and nimble small business marketing plan that generates a good, steady income, using simple, effective, and affordable marketing strategies and tactics.
Step #1: Set Smart Sales Goals
While this article is primarily about small business marketing strategies, we do want to point out that, if you haven’t taken some time to establish how much money the business needs each month to pay its expenses and generate some profit, you should do that now. If you don’t have a well-defined target to aim at, you’re unlikely to hit it. Know your numbers. How much MUST you make each month? How much do you need to enable you to bring on more help? How about retirement? A vacation? Our best advice here would be to have a sold grasp on the numbers, and push yourself to accomplish a little bit more than you think you can each month.
"Set goals that seem just out of reach. Make yourself work a little harder. Create that slight twinge of desperation."
Setting smart sales goals should also include knowing who you’re marketing to. This is called a target demographic, and if you don’t know about target demographics, you should read our article.
Step #2: Set Up Back-Office Systems
For our purposes (marketing and generating leads) we want to make sure we can track the right data, as easily as possible. You want to get this right the first time, because it can save you a lot of time, money, and headaches later. You can use a customer relationship management (CRM) system like Bitrix 24, Zoho, or HubSpot, or even a simple spreadsheet. What matters is that you collect the right data, consistently. Here’s what you need to keep track of:
- Leads Generated
- Lead Source
- Leads Converted to Clients
- Average Transaction Amount
- Est. Lifetime Customer Value
With data like this, over time, you’ll be able to pivot, grow smarter, and grow faster. This kind of data makes your small business marketing plan able to grow with you, and keep pace with changes in the market and your demographics.
Step #3: Lead Generation Strategies & Tactics
Now we get to the good stuff: how to get leads. You’ll need lots of them, and we’ll show you a mix of analog and digital, short term and long term, that will get you started quick, and keep you rolling long term. Whether you’re business to business, or direct to consumer, selling products or services, this small business marketing plan will work to generate the leads you need to grow your business from the ground up.
Inbound and Outbound Marketing Strategies
All of the marketing strategies and tactics we’ll share with you here fall into two main categories: inbound, and outbound.
Inbound Marketing
Outbound Marketing
Both of these “pipelines” can provide a steady flow of good leads, and we’ll need to take efforts to fill them both. We’ll deal with outbound first, and place all strategies in order of priority and budget considerations.
Strategy Group #1: Outbound
Outbound marketing and direct sales strategies are perfect for the new small business because they provide the fastest results. If you have no marketing budget, or a very small one, this is the place to start with your small business marketing plan. This strategy also has the most potential to get you “face to face” with potential clients. All you need is a little planning, some snappy sales scripts, and a willing attitude. Direct outbound sales can be done by phone, email, direct messages, or using your feet! They can be done by the owner or by a first hire. Let’s take a look at some of the best, tried and true outbound sales tactics.
Outbound Tactic #1: Phone Calls
A direct connection by phone is somewhat of a lost art, but there’s nothing quite like that human touch. Direct phone calls are still one of the best tactics to generate quick business for your firm. Whether calling people you know (warm) or people you don’t (cold), that personal interaction can make all the difference. Your small business marketing plan should start here.
Warm Calls
Warm phone calls are the easiest, and are where you should start. Call friends, family, and church members, or even your 3rd grade teacher. Let them know about your business, and ask for their support. And not just them, anyone they know.
Next, contact every single one of your past clients. If it’s been awhile since their last purchase, ask if they need anything. If not, just chat, and ask if the product or service is working well. Past clients have often interrupted our friendly chat to tell me, “You know what? My buddy Joe was just telling me that he needs your service.” This is a gold mine of leads.
Cold Calls
Next, you can cold call. B2B? Get a list of small businesses from Google, business organizations, or purchase a list. You’ll need a snappy sales script for this, but they’re easy to find online. A note of caution: do not run afoul of the National Do Not Call registry. That’s big trouble you do not want. Get a scrubbed list, or scrub your own. There are free ways to do this. Just do a Google search for these.
Explore More
- An awesome cold call script that made us thousands.
Outbound Tactic #2: Emails & DMs
The next step for your small business marketing plan is email. Email is the second-best way to communicate directly with potential clients. It’s not quite a personal as a phone call, but we need to cover all our bases, and it’s likely that some of your potential contacts simply prefer email over a phone call. So, that’s our first order of business: send a nice email to anyone you were not able to connect with by phone.
Your Contact Database
These warm emails to your contact list don’t need to be formal or fancy. Just send out a quick note to anyone you know, who you were not able to get ahold of by phone. In fact, it’s a fantastic idea to send an email to everyone you DID get ahold of by phone, about 3-4 days later, to say thanks for connecting with you. This subtle reminder will keep you top-of-mind.
Cold Emails
After this, you can move to cold emails. This would be through two methods, targeted prospecting, and bulk emails. First, targeted prospecting. For a service business, consider what types of businesses you’d like to work with? Find them on social media. Who are the key players in this organization that you need to target? Reach out to them directly and introduce yourself. Don’t take a hard sales approach with these prospects. Simply let them know you’re local, and you’d love to connect. Form relationships. This takes time, but pays off in the end. Write a great piece of content for you blog that you think would be helpful to you market, and send them a link to it. This is touching around the edges of “account-based marketing,” and for B2B firms, this is a great idea.
Bulk Email
Finally, you can use bulk emailing, through a newsletter, for example. Start small. One a month, send out a really great newsletter to both past clients, and potential clients, with articles from your blog that are helpful, informative, and useful. Nobody wants fluff in their in-box. What would you like to receive? Let that be your guide. If you sell products, send a special offer, a coupon code, or introduce a new product. Know your clients. What do they need? What would they find most useful? Give it to them.
Explore More
- An awesome cold call script that made us thousands.
Outbound Tactic #3: In-Person
No small business marketing plan would be complete without a health dose of the human touch. In-person communication is the best way to do business with others in your area. For the B2B salesperson, putting on your walking shoes and going to meet local business owners is a great strategy. We’ve lost a lot of that human interaction in our fast-paced digital world, and I’m a big advocate of slowing things down a bit, and making those connections. Ready to get back into the stream of humanity? Here are some tried and true methods.
Door-To-Door
Going door to door seems totally old-school, but lots of people do it, and it makes them a lot of money. For medium to larger businesses, this is not a great strategy, but for smaller shops, it’s still viable. Get to know the people who work there, find out who the owner is, and talk shop, owner to owner. You have a lot in common. Explore, and make connections. You don’t need to sell right away. Just get to know the people in your city who own small businesses. Discover what challenges they’re facing, and if you have a solution, offer it. Even if they don’t have a problem you can solve, they might know other business owners who do.
Small Business Organizations
Second, join small business organizations. This could be the local chamber, rotary club, or other networking opportunity. Again, don’t try to sell everyone you talk to. In fact, don’t try to sell to anyone. Just get to know people. You need to become a known commodity in your local market. People do business with people they like, so don’t be “salesy.” Ask about them. What do they do? What challenges are they facing? Once they get to know you, and discover that you solve one of the problems they face, you’ve got yourself in position to fill that need.
Explore More
- An awesome cold call script that made us thousands.
Strategy Group #2: Inbound
Inbound marketing is a marketing strategy that seeks to draw customers to you, instead of you seeking them out and contacting them. It’s “pull,” instead of “push,” so to speak. How do you do this? By creating content, and lots of it. Inbound marketing is a long term strategy, as it takes time to create the content, and get it ranked in search. The goal with inbound marketing is to generate content that your user base would find helpful and informative, during each stage of their buying journey. By providing quality content, the company gains trust, builds good-will, and becomes the “go-to” company of choice when it’s time to make a purchase decision. So, how do we effectively do inbound marketing (also known as content marketing), to build a strong future pipeline full of quality leads? There are several ways, and your small business marketing plan should do a little bit of all of them, if you have the budget or personnel to make it happen. Let’s take a look at each of them.
Inbound Tactic #1: Your Business Website
Having a business website is the first step in your digital marketing efforts, and is a cornerstone of your small business marketing plan. So far, our suggestions have cost little or no money. This one is going to cost your, but it doesn’t have to be much. Shameless plug: our single-page power sites are terribly affordable!
Your website is your one piece of digital real estate that you control completely, and is both essential to your marketing efforts, and is fairly inexpensive. So what benefits does your website provide, and what kind of website will best provide those benefits? Let’s take a closer look.
Establish Credibility
The most tangible and immediate benefit of your business website is that it establishes credibility in the mind of prospects. If all you did was build a simple, one-page website, and never published any content to it ever again, it would at least provide this one benefit. However, this is only true if the website is modern-looking, and provides a simple, easy to use interface. Word of mouth prospects will often look up your company to get a sense of who you are, what kind of services you offer, and whether you can be trusted. Your website helps with all of these by establishing credibility.
A Foundation For Growth
The second (and most powerful) benefit of your business website is that, if you can get it to rank higher on search engines, the potential revenue generation is tremendous. There’s a lot that goes into ranking a website, and we’ll save that for the next section on SEO, but keep in mind: ranking your website is incredibly valuable, but takes more time, and is a larger investment. If you can publish a minimum of one piece of valuable content on your website per month, in the long-term, you’ll gain excellent benefits. This is building a strong foundation for future growth.
Explore More
Inbound Tactic #2: SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) strategies are incredibly valuable when trying to grow your business. Once you have a modern, fast, easy to use website, it’s time to rank it higher, so you become more visible to prospects. However, there are some pitfalls to look out for, as well as some tactics you can use to increase your local presence, without making a big budgetary commitment.
SEO Pitfalls To Watch For
The first thing to watch out for with SEO is shady operators. They’ll promise to get you to the top of page #1 on Google, but how will they do it, and is it really valuable? They might use unethical tactics to get you there, and if you get caught, the damage is very costly to repair and recover from. They may also rank your site for keywords that sound good, but are only tangentially related to your business, or are of no practical value. Bottom line: there’s only one way to ethically and organically grow your authority and ranking, and that’s with information. Lots of quality information.
How To Succeed At SEO: Helpful Content
A simple thought experiment will clearly demonstrate the value of content. When you’re looking to solve a problem (“I need more leads for my business!”), what do you do? You Google it! You’re not ready to buy something. You’re in learning mode. Google’s job is to get you to the best source of information, and they want to get you to a local provider of that information, if they can. Your primary task, in regards to SEO, should be to have a website that is HELPFUL to potential clients. That means information, and lots of it. Not salesy information. Actual, real, helpful content that is client-centered. This builds brand trust and authority. If you can publish one piece of quality content per month, in the long term, you’ll do great.
Low Budget, Jump-Start SEO: GBP
For our clients who have a website, but don’t have the budget yet to engage in SEO services, we recommend that they establish a really nice Google Business Profile (GBP), linked to their website, with lots of information, photos, reviews, and questions. Having an optimized GBP can rapidly get you listed in the coveted “map pack” for your local area. Better to be a big fish in a small pond, than to be a fish out of water, right?
Explore More
- An awesome cold call script that made us thousands.
Inbound Tactic #3: Social Media
Social media plays a big part in a lot of people’s lives, and it should be a part of your small business marketing plan. Most of your clients are on one platform or another, and this is a great way to communicate with them, keeping them up to date on your business, offerings, specials, promotions, and content. You can also get great pricing on social media ads, but that’s for the next section!
Social Content
Your first priority on social media should always be to publish content regularly, but not too often. The best research suggests that you publish content to your social channels about 2-3 times per week. And what should you publish? Again, useful content. While it’s fine to post something on big, national holidays, cluttering your feed with useless drivel is helping no one. In this context, it pays to remember what grandma used to say: “if you don’t have something nice [insert useful] to say, keep your mouth shut.” Here’s a best practice: create helpful, informative content, post it on your website, and publish a shortened version on your social sites, with a link to read more on your website. Goodness all around.
Social Communication
Another great way to use social media is to stay connected with your user-base, either through messenger services, or perhaps through paid ads (which we’ll cover momentarily). Overall, social media communication can be a gold mine, especially if your personal account is linked to your business account, and you have a lot of friends on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn. Keeping those connections alive, posting content, commenting on others’ content, and generally being part of a “community” is really helpful.
Explore More
- An awesome cold call script that made us thousands.
Inbound Tactic #4: PPC
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is another tactic in your toolbox to get more leads. There are lots of different ways to get your message to potential customers, whether doing search ads or display ads. Some platforms cost more, but this is almost entirely dependent on your industry. If there’s fierce competition for leads, you’ll pay more, bottom line. Let’s look at the two PPC categories, what they’re used for, and how you can get more leads using them.
Search Ads
Search ads are primarily used on Google, as they control a massive amount of the market. A search ad works like this: say someone is looking for a roofer to fix a leak. They go to Google and type “roofing repair near me.” Now, you have a website, but it isn’t ranked very high, so you’re not going to get that business, right? This is where paid search ads come in. You can pay Google to show up right at the top of the search results. The amount you pay is directly related to how many other roofing companies are doing the same thing. An important thing to remember is that for both search and display ads, every time someone clicks on it, you are charged.
Display Ads
Display ads are essentially advertisements that come up in people’s social feeds, or on the headers or side bars of websites. YouTube pre-roll ads also fall into this category. These ads are much less expensive than search ads, primarily because they’re not quite as effective, frankly. Can you get business from them? Absolutely. Selling products that look fantastic and attract attention? Again, great. While you may not have a great experience selling services with display ads, they can be great for branding.
Local Service Ads
One of the newer offerings from Google is local services ads. These ads (for select industries, usually home services) show up at the very top of search results, and say “Google Guaranteed” right under them. They’re less expensive than search ads, and are not payable by click, directly, so they’re more valuable and tangible. In order to get a local service ad, you’ll need to be vetted by Google with licensing, insurance, and background checks on anyone in the company who interacts directly with customers, but they’re a great option to look into for your small business marketing plan, if you can make it happen
Explore More
- An awesome cold call script that made us thousands.
Inbound Tactic #5: Print Collateral
Print collateral encompasses a lot of different options. This could be vehicle wraps or magnets, billboard ads, flyers, magazine ads, business cards, swag, and a host of other physical, tangible printed collateral. Do these methods still work in a digital age? You bet they do. We won’t cover these in any depth in this article, but they are important enough to mention for your small business marketing plan.
Cost And Efficacy of Print Collateral
All of the print display collateral mentioned above can indeed be useful for marketing and branding. Again, like any advertising, it’s either going to be a really enticing offer, or it’s going to be branding. For example, if you have a fleet of vehicles driving around town all day, having your vehicles wrapped with company colors, logos, websites, phone #s, etc., is a great idea. It’s like free advertising. However, those wraps aren’t cheap! But are they cost effective advertising? Absolutely. Same thing with all the other print collateral. The more eyes you can get on your branding and messaging, for the lowest cost, is a winner.
Step #4: Assess Results and Modify
Going back to step #1 of this process, you’ll remember that we discussed gathering data for every marketing effort you made. If you’ve kept good records, after a few months (you should review this data a minimum of monthly, at first, then quarterly after the first year) you should have some clear ideas forming about what’s working, and what isn’t. Doing this analysis regularly will save you time and money on all your marketing efforts. However, remember that some of your efforts are for branding, and are not quite as trackable as others, so don’t neglect branding, if you have the budget for it.
Where To Cut, Where To Invest
As time progresses, you’ll get really clear on where you can re-allocate your marketing funds. Some strategies will just not work as well in your niche, industry, or with your target audience. Move those resources into areas that ARE producing quality leads. Note that I said quality leads. Some tactics may produce a decent amount of leads, but they often don’t convert into paying customers. Watch out for this!
In Conclusion
I hope that this small business marketing plan has been useful for you. I know it’s long and a little complicated, but hopefully, it helped you begin to visualize how you can grow your leads and grow your small business. Remember, this list is ranked by both price and efficacy, so start at the top, and pour in some effort. As always, if you have questions about one of these strategies or tactics, give us a call, or send us an email. We love talking small business, and there’s no charge for initial consultation. Blessings!
