As a small business owner or marketer, you are continuously searching for great small business marketing ideas to grow your business with. It’s because online marketing is so important for your success. If you want your business to be successful online, you must focus on marketing it by advertising, promoting, and selling your products and services. Why? Because if people don’t know your company exists, how can you expect them to visit your website, sign up for your email list or buy something from your eCommerce shop? Online small business marketing is crucial for your brand awareness, any increase in your sales and beating out your competition. We have put together some great online marketing ideas for your small businesses to try for yourself.

Create a Google My Business Account

Google Business Profiles have become one of the most effective free marketing strategies available. This must-have piece of marketing collateral allows your business to show up on Google Maps, the local section of Google Search, and the right-side Knowledge Panel for branded searches. But in order for your Business Profile to show up higher on Google Maps or local results, you need to optimize your Business Profile, and in order to optimize it, you need to have verified ownership of it, which is done through your Google My Business account. It’s a great asset to have so it highly recommended your small business has one.

Post and Engage on Social Media

Increasing social media engagement and building a community online is a great way to grow your small business while expressing your brand’s personality and building trust with your audience. Create business accounts and participate in the big social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and more. Your posts are a great way to:

• Promote your blog posts, which drive traffic to your website.
• Communicate with followers to express your brand voice and garner more engagement.
• Take excerpts from longer forms of content and create quick and informational posts that are easier to digest.

Whatever your motivation, make sure you are regularly active and proactive on the social media accounts you create. Think: consistency, community, collaboration, and commitment.

Use Hashtags

Another marketing tactic that can broaden your reach is to incorporate hashtags into your social media posts. Broad or trending hashtags can help you reinforce your brand identity, but they should not be the only hashtags you use. More specific hashtags, sort of like long-tail keywords, are good for when you’re providing resources or advice. Location-based hashtags are a must if you’re a local business. And don’t forget custom hashtags. Apply a mix of hashtag types in your posts so they can reach the people for whom they are meant.

Publish Testimonials

Take a moment and think back to the last thing you purchased online. Did you check to see how previous buyers reviewed that item? 85% of people trust online reviews written by other consumers as much as they trust recommendations from personal contacts. So, by adding reviews to your website, you not only add an extra element of social proof to your site endorsing your product that is for sale, but you also help potential buyers make better decisions since they’re likely to trust what your previous satisfied customers have had to say. Display these reviews on your website, like many popular eCommerce sites do.

Post Valuable Blog Content

It may seem obvious, but one of the best ways to market your brand is to consistently publish valuable, informative, and entertaining content on your website. In fact, if your content is good, your blog can become the very foundation of all your marketing efforts. But understand that it’s does take time to do. 51% of marketers that say they simply don’t have enough time to regularly publish blog content. But know that it can be hugely worth it in the long run for the success of your small business. Nobody said it would be easy, right? If and when you publish a new post, like all your other marketing efforts, don’t forget to promote it. You’ll want to repeatedly market that content for maximum views.

Run a Contest

Running a contest is one of the best ways to build consumer awareness and get your company’s name out there. And on top of that, they’re lots of fun! You can give away some of your products and services in exchange for getting people to:

• Submit videos or photos for a chance to win
• Leave a review in exchange for entry
• Refer others for more contest entries
• Provide an email address in exchange for an entry
• Run an Instagram hashtag or photo caption contest

The options are endless and can be as simple or complex as you want them to be. All you have to do is take the time to manage the contest and put up a prize. From there, you’ll let others market your business for you.

Network With Others

A little friendly networking never hurt anyone! It can pay greatly to network and build relationships. This could be something as simple as asking to guest post on an influential website that you know has a lot of traffic and a similar audience. You’ll be allowed to link back to your website which will drive traffic to your site, and you might even be able to squeeze in a product of yours right into the blog post itself. And, in an effort to keep the relationship going, you can always extend the same favor to other small businesses. Private Facebook groups are another fantastic way to find and connect with a community of other small business marketing leaders and experts.

Automate, Automate, Automate

There is no question that your time is valuable, so if you’re not doing it already, it’s time to automate. This will save you a ton of time and inconvenience. Marketing automation lets you implement a digital marketing strategy without having to manually press “send” on each and every email, message, campaign, or post you create. Good automation tools help you identify your audience, design the right content, and automatically trigger actions based on schedules and customer behavior. Once your campaign rolls out, you can focus on other tasks, then analyze and tweak your marketing plan as results start coming in. An automated marketing strategy can save time and resources, driving revenue and ROI while you focus on growing your business.

Use Lead Magnets

A lead magnet is something free you offer to your website visitors in exchange for their email address, and you should definitely be using them. They’re not only easy to make, they can be fun to create as well. You can easily repurpose your most successful blog posts into a lead magnet that convinces people to sign up for your email list. Some examples of lead magnets can include:

• Helpful ebooks
• Coupons
• Promo codes
• Informational PDFs
• Checklists
• Templates
• Case studies

Just make sure your lead magnet is highly valuable to the user and worth them giving up their email address.

Get on a Podcast

Business owners who used to work hard to get guest post spots on popular blogs are now using their time to try and get something else too, interviewed on podcasts. With their continuously growing popularity, podcasts provide a great opportunity to talk about your website and yourself. It’s also a fantastic way to reach out to a larger audience. But don’t think you’re just limited to joining in on someone else’s. Consider starting your own podcast and creating your own direct following.

This should provide you a solid start and plenty of inspiration to create innovative and engaging marketing campaigns your audience will love. But before you get started you must do your research to establish what marketing methods your customers will engage with the best. There’s no point in creating a heavy campaign for Facebook if your target audience is young people who prefer TikTok. By figuring out your target market and audience, you’ll be able to create valuable marketing campaigns that attract the right people instead of wasting your time and money advertising to people who will never be interested. It also ensures you can find the perfect platform and channel for your campaigns. So, what are you waiting for? Get started gathering customer data and discover some new perfect marketing strategies.