Wondering how to grow your small business with marketing? You’re not alone. Marketing is one of the many tasks small business owners have to do in order to succeed.

Starting a small business is never easy, especially when it comes to marketing your business. As a small business owner you’re expected to:

• Manage your start-up costs
• Refining your products or service options 
• Understanding your audience to cultivating a loyal customer base
• and much more

It’s easy to get overwhelmed from day one. And if you’re in a competitive business niche, you must learn how to market your business to dominate and win.

If you want to increase your business influence, impact, and income, you must figure out how to thrive in today’s competitive business market. That is a core strength for any small business owner.

In order to succeed in marketing, you need to develop a marketing plan from scratch. Ready to get started?

Here’s what you should do:

Have Deep Knowledge of Your Target Audience

Before you start planning your marketing campaign, you need to be clear about who you’re marketing to.

The deeper your understanding of the people in your business market, the easier it becomes to serve them the right product or offer quality services.

For small businesses, success in entering new markets and dominating only comes when you spend your time, money and resources to know your product or service target audience.

That is critical so that you provide solutions that suit them based on the customer information you have. You must have the edge over your competitors in customer information.

Remember that not everyone is your target customer. Use available tools for identifying the ideal target audience to help you build a strong brand.

Develop a Strong Brand

It doesn’t matter how your small business is – professional branding matters. That is especially important when you’re doing business in a niche market.

Let your potential customers know exactly who you are, what you do and what solutions you have for their needs or problems.

Think of those unique things that make your brand stand out as soon as they hear your business name.

Ask yourself these questions:

• What makes your brand special?
• Do you have the best customer service? If not, how can you improve that?
• What about service options and pricing?
• What is your unique selling point?

Maybe you have the best prices or customer service. Capitalize on what makes you stand out from the rest in your marketing strategies.

Make a point of comparing the value of your brand against that of your competitors with consistent messaging.

Find a Gap and Fill It

If you want to know how to grow your small business with marketing, you need to know what to market.

There’s always a gap in your industry. Therefore, your job is to find it and fill it.

The gap may be a:

• Marketing niche that your industry has ignored
• Pricing gap
• Gap in the level of service provided.

How to Find a Gap in Your Industry

If you’re wondering how to find a gap in your industry, you can:

• Monitor trends in your business industry
• Evaluate what your competitors are offering and differentiate yourself
• Elicit feedback from your customers and take action
• Think beyond local and look for opportunities to expand
• Adapt an existing service or product to capture new customers
• Hire outside resources to perform market research and identify potential opportunities

Identifying a market gap could be the difference between an impressive launch or a great flop. Just look for the existing vacuum in your business industry and fill it. Then market your brand widely.

Become an Influencer in Your Industry

More businesses are reaching out to influencers to help them draw more traffic to their business. But have you thought of becoming an influencer yourself?

Influencers get all kinds of exclusive opportunities and free exposure.

Imagine what that would do for your business. It’s simpler than you think. The secret lies in putting out consistent marketing content in your business expertise area, where you share your best advice.

For instance, Shanté R. Roddy, the women digital marketing coach behind She Boss Talk, offers a platform that promotes women in business. Her goal is to help women increase their influence, impact, and income. She shares business insights and hosts a weekly podcast that focuses on matters of women entrepreneurship. Taking such an approach works great.

As you become an influencer for your business, you must be wondering what to share. You can share what you’ve learned in your business.

You can also share expert insights. In addition to that, you can even invite other influencers to speak. Host Facebook Lives, YouTube Lives or utilize other social media platforms.

Hosting podcasts and webinars is another excellent way to effectively make yourself an industry authority. Of course, this is all content you can create yourself.

Create an Experience That Gets People Talking

Paying for ads is one thing but you can grow your small business with marketing by tapping into earned media.

Earned media refers to the publicity that you don’t pay for. Your customer could be a great unofficial member of your marketing team.

Think of this – when you watch a good movie, you certainly don’t go telling everyone about it. But if it was great, you don’t hesitate to recommend it to friends.

This marketing principle applies to all businesses in an industry. Don’t make the mistake of trying to meet your market’s expectations – it makes you forgettable.

Focus on exceeding the expectations of your market so customers can keep talking about you.

Think of how you can create a unique story for your business.

Is there anything you can do to generate excitement for your customers or clients?

What can you give your clients to take home to ensure they remember your business?

What will get them talking about their great experience with your business?

Find out what gets people talking, and you’ll have the solution to dominate and win.

Collaborate With Other Businesses to Thrive and Win

In today’s competitive business market, collaborating with other businesses may be your best bet.

If collaborating gives you a better chance to thrive and win, reach a broader target market, or get better opportunities, then embrace it. What matters most is that the collaborating brands don’t affect each other’s core business.

You’ll want to create alliances that develop a competitive advantage over other players in the market.

Business partnerships are fantastic tools to venture into new business markets and achieve far more than the capacity you would reach on your own. They help you get deeper market penetrations that end up making profits for both businesses.

Get Analytical With Your Practices

Experimentation is one thing, and a necessary step when marketing your small business, but how will you measure progress and success?

The solution lies in business analytics. Even for small businesses, using business analytics tools gives you an unbeatable edge over the competition. You can easily see your progress and change strategies.

Getting analytical with your business and marketing practices is key to reinventing yourself when business is not performing well.

It helps you identify your strengths and weaknesses and learn about problems before becoming a hindrance to business operations. Thanks to digital advancements, big data analytics for small businesses is now an option.

Time to Focus on Growing Your Business

In order to grow your small business with marketing, you have to be strategic. Small businesses need great marketing strategies and competitive advantages to thrive and grow continuously.

• Think of one or two things you can do to increase your brand’s visibility right away. Social media is a great way to do that.
• Identify new opportunities for generating more revenue
• Leverage technology and make use of smart tools for accounting, Point-of-Sale, email marketing or other repetitive tasks to increase efficiency.
• Facilitate customer feedback sessions to validate and invalidate market place perceptions
• Ensure that your brand messaging is consistent across all platforms
• Outsource tasks where possible to save time and ensure efficiency – tools like Fiverr make it easy to find professional remote workers

If you follow these tips, chances are your business will become successful.

Get Help With Digital Marketing

By now, you have an idea about how to grow your small business with marketing.

But that doesn’t mean you won’t need help to improve your efforts.

If you need help with your digital marketing strategy, talk to She Boss Talk today. We manage a team of experts who help women market themselves and their brands boldly and fiercely to achieve greater reach, impact, results and make more money with a success team and access to the She Boss Network.

We lead an online community of over 25,000 women in business, facilitating several initiatives and events to bring us together, break barriers and create opportunities for collaboration and success. Ready to market your business to dominate and win? Contact us today.