Small Business Marketing Tips For 2022

Small businesses are the backbone of our economy and their success depends on effective marketing. Here are some small business marketing tips for 2022 that will help you create a strong brand and attract new customers in the coming year.

 In this article, we will look at some of the most important marketing tips for small businesses in the year 2022. To start we are going to help you understand the difference between a marketing tactic and a strategy. We have found that many businesses are great at generating tactics but not so much at creating a marketing strategy for their small business.

Marketing Strategy vs. Tactics

A marketing strategy is an overall plan for selling your business product or services. It starts with  

• Your goals and objectives for your business
• Who your target audience(s) are. You can have more than one.
• How you want to talk to them in your marketing.
• Identify your customer’s problems and how your product or service solves them

The marketing tactics are the individual campaigns you are going to create in order to find, talk to and get new customers in your target audience. These are where you will find the small business marketing tips for 2022. They include everything from attracting buyers, to finding out their needs and wants, to get them to look at your product or services so they can decide if you are the right fit for them.

How to create a marketing strategy

Many people think marketing is a skill that can only be learned in school. However, the truth is that anyone with enough determination and creativity can learn how to create an effective marketing strategy.

The first step is defining your business goals and objects. These are your growth goals. 

Start-Ups

Years 1-5 – If you have built some awareness and gained customers then you are looking to duplicate what you have started. Are you looking to double or maybe add a new product or service line? 

Established Businesses – Often the growth goals for an established business are pulled from previous years. Look at how you can optimize what you have already done on your most lucrative products and services and consider deleting offerings that aren’t money makers or just are to costly to maintain. Also, some offers and services become obsolete given the current socioeconomic climate in the word

The second step to marketing your business is deciding what kind of market or target audience you want to reach. Do you need a lot of customers who are already familiar with you, or do you want people who have never heard of your business before? Ideally, you want a mix of both.

Creating a customer or buyer persona based on one of your favorite customers is a great place to start. If you haven’t landed that perfect customer yet but you have someone in mind, consider asking them if you can interview them. You want to know everything you can about your target audience. Check out this one customer persona sheet you can fill out for your business. Create one for each product or service you sell. You may find that the person you are trying to attract is different depending on what you are selling.

Lastly, you have to figure out how you are going to talk to your customers at a high level. The best way to speak to any audience is to figure out their internal and external wants and needs and then decide how you solve them.

A great resource on how to figure this out is Donald Millers Story Brand. The book walks you through step by step how to create a brand script to talk to your customers to get them to choose you.

So your strategy is simple. How to find, attract and talk to your target audience to meet your goals. Then decide how many of them you need to meet your goals and objectives if you have a financial goal for the year. Just remember it’s not always necessary to have a financial goal. For a newer business, this is stressful and hard to figure out. Focus more on the right type of customer and then the following year you can look at adding growth numbers based on this year’s results.

How you will achieve these goals is where tactics come in. Deciding where and how often you are going to try to reach this target market will be the basis of your tactics. Now let’s talk about some tactics that every business needs and the tools you can use to manage them.

Small Business Marketing Tips For 2022

In this next section, we are going to go over the most popular small business marketing tips for 2022 and how to customize them to meet your marketing strategy.

Tips for Website Design 

Small business marketing tips for 2022 starts with what to put on your website and how to build it. In 2022 every business needs a website.

It shows credibility and kicks off the trust process with people who have recently become aware of your brand. Most businesses don’t exactly know what to put on their website but there are 5 top website mistakes you should be aware of and how to avoid them. Take a listen to the podcast to understand and how to avoid these type 5 website design mistakes.

Avoiding the top 5 mistakes will make people want to work with you but the site still has to be fast and mobile-friendly. You also need great search engine optimization for your content. For that, you need to have the right website tools for website design, SEO and hosting. Here is what we recommend to make the best website for your business.

Elementor Pro A custom website creator tool built for WordPress. Easy to use and best of all so many developers know and love this tool. This offers so many flexible options so that you can put pictures, copy, and calls to action anywhere you want on a page and every page can be different from the last. No more having to conform to a prebuilt template. No coding is required to build a stunning custom website.

Rank Math Pro Get your website indexed fast, ranked in google search and keyword your content to attract your target marketing. This user-friendly tool does all of that for you and you don’t have to know any code or where to put an H2 tag.

Flywheel hosting A hosting platform designed for non-developers and they only host WordPress websites. You don’t have to worry about software incompatibility or overload on a server and the support is outstanding. They also offer plugin update services so your site stays up to date and secure. We use Flywheel to host all of our client’s websites.

Content Marketing – Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most effective forms of generating awareness and sales for your business. A single email can contain articles, offers, discounts, and other valuable information. To help you improve your email marketing campaigns, here are some different types of email campaigns to create for your business

Sales Funnels 

This is for when someone is interested in your services but may not be ready to buy. It creates those valuable 6 – 10 touch points that get a potential buyer to know like and trust so that when they speak to you they are more receptive to your offer. 

Newsletters

A great way to keep an audience of existing and potential clients warm every month so that you stay top of mind with them. The importance of staying top of mind is so they can easily recall your business and find you in their email system When they are ready to buy from you. For information on how oftent to send read our article on how often to send emails for your business.

Share great video content in your email newsletter to stand out from other newsletters too.

Welcome series

When they sign up for your email marketing campaigns always welcome them. Just one or two emails after they have initially signed up will get them to immediately engage with your content to start building the habit of opening your emails.  If you are going to send more than one welcome email space them a few days apart and remind them to add you to their contact list so you don’t end up in spam.

Abandon cart series

If you run an e-commerce website you should have an abandoned cart series to try to get them to finish the sale. We recommend that you have at least 3 that you send within a 48hr period to get your best chance at getting them to finish the sale. Make sure you include the images and links of what they had in the cart along with a button that takes them right back to checkout. You can also include a discount code to incentivize them to order.

Here are the top two email marketing systems that we use with our clients. These platforms can do all of the above and so much more to help you grow and market your business

Click on the image to get a sign-up link for the platform.

Content Marketing – Social Media

Social media marketing is the process of using social media websites to promote a brand or product. The goal of this type of marketing is to create an online community that shares one’s message, creates buzz, and builds trust with potential customers.

However, you can’t use social media as your only marketing tactic as it has limitations.

You don’t own the platform and you have to adhere to the platform rules and when they change. Sometimes these changes can negatively impact your business on the platform. This may cause you to rethink using the platform for business.

Reach is always less on a social media platform than in email. Not everyone is going to see all of your posts. So if you have something important that everyone needs to see, email is the better choice.

You don’t have to be on every platform. Based on your target audience only post to the platforms where you know they will engage with your brand. For example, if you are selling to senior citizens then the majority of that audience is on Facebook, not so much on TikTok.

Once you have decided on the social media platforms you are going to have a presence on then you need a way to create and publish content easily. For that our go-to platform is

Social Pilot They are extremely user-friendly and you can write and publish your content including images and video across all of your platforms at the same time. Leaving you more time to do other things. The more you post the more people will see your content so using a tool like Social Pilot will help you create more content faster and easily schedule it to go out. Inside the tool, you can even source content from different places on the web to share with your audience.

Don’t forget to interact with people who have engaged you on social media. This is the magic of social media people want to have a conversation so don’t ignore them.

Digital Advertising – When to use it

In today’s digital marketing landscape, there are many options for advertisers to choose from. However, it is important that an ad is chosen correctly to maximize its effectiveness and reach the correct audience. Otherwise, you are just wasting your ad spend.

First, decide if you can afford digital advertising and if it’s a good fit for your audience. Generally speaking if your B2C (business to consumer) digital advertising will work. If you are B2B there are many instances where digital advertising will not be useful.

Service-based businesses are harder to advertise through Digital Ads. Products will do very well if optimized correctly. 

While many of the social media platforms offer advertising, we recommend you start with the Google Ad Network if you have a limited budget and are just starting out with Digital Advertising.

In the Google Ad Network, you can create multiple ad types like

• Display Ad
• Youtube Videos
• Gmail ads
• Shopping Ads
• Search Ads

Allowing you to create a surround sound effect with your ads for less spend. Just make sure you learn how to use the platform correctly in order to set up the ads. We don’t recommend you start with search ads. This is the oldest and most competitive area (i.e. expensive) of the ads network. Start with Youtube video ads instead. 

Take Action On These Small Business Marketing Tips For 2022

There is a lot to digest here so follow these next steps to take some action on what you just learned so you can have a better marketing plan for 2022

1. Start with creating your goals and marketing strategy. Everything will be easier to create once you have this firmly in place. It doesn’t have to be formal. One page of notes, an outline, or the good old back of a napkin will work. Just make sure you can remember it when you are adding tactics throughout the year.

2. Create tactics to support your goals and strategy. This may be updating or redoing your website. Or it could be doing less social media posting but more email marketing.

3. Implement your small business marketing tips for 2022 tactics with the right tools. The right tools for the job are the most important thing you can do to stay consistent with your marketing tactics. With marketing, everything requires a system or a process that can easily be used and updated. So once you have decided on your tactics evaluate and choose the tools you will need to make the process simple for you to do.

Marketing is about consistency over time. Pick the right tools for the job.

I hope you found this article helpful in growing your business. Feel free to reach out via chat if you have any questions. We are always happy to answer questions. If you want our content delivered to your inbox Sign up for our newsletter. You get great content and exclusive offers by being a member.

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