What type of marketing does your small business need?
Maybe the most common question when starting or growing a small business is this: what type of marketing do I need?
Right off the bat, the average person - or a marketer trying to sell you something - will start spouting things like “social media,” “search ads,” “SEO,” etc.
This type of thinking is backward, and often causes companies to waste time on activities that make almost no difference. These are tools in the toolbox, but you first need to identify what job you’re trying to do before you start picking your tools.
A better answer stems from defining a few basic characteristics about your business:
Demand: Are people already looking for the product or service you’re selling, or is it something new they need to be made aware of? This informs whether you need to capture existing demand, or create new demand.
Trust: What’s the level of risk someone is taking to buy what you’re selling, in terms of time, money, safety, reputation, or emotion? This informs how much you need to invest in gaining someone’s trust to make a sale.
Relationship: Is this something someone buys once, occasionally, or repeatedly? This informs how much you focus on gaining new customers vs. keeping existing ones.
Competition: How many other options do people have and how aggressive are competitors? This informs the scope and differentiation needed in your marketing.
Source: Where could you reliably find good customers? This informs where to focus your efforts - and whether the traditional list of marketing tactics even makes sense for your business, or if there are better sources of customers for growth.
If you can clearly answer these questions first, then you can figure out which efforts and investments to make, based on their ability to accomplish what your business actually needs.
You might not know the answers at first, but that’s OK - it highlights areas where you need to do more thinking and research, which will inherently improve your business strategy.
An experienced marketer can also help steer you in the right direction toward the things that will actually work for your business. They can identify proven and creative ways to address all these factors, from helping form the look and voice of your company, to setting up the right technology and systems, and to executing it all effectively.
AI can be useful as well, but keep in mind that it’s garbage in, garbage out. If it’s trained on thousands of blog posts from SEO agencies (there could easily be millions of them), it’s going to have a natural bias to favor SEO as a tactic. There’s a lot of bad, misleading, or severely outdated advice on the internet, so just keep that in mind when reviewing the output of an LLM.
To help explain how to think about answering these questions and what they mean, here’s an example applied to a real business.
An example of how this works in practice
Let’s say you’re a mobile IV therapy service. Some people are aware this is a thing and will be searching for it. Other people aren’t aware or wouldn’t think of it, and therefore need to be made aware of what it is and that it’s available in their area. You’ll want to capture existing demand, but if you want to grow further there’s an opportunity to generate new demand.
Some potential customers will have objections. Is it worth the time and money? How do I know it’s safe? Who am I letting into my house? You have to present clear evidence in your communications to earn this trust, e.g. details on who you are and your credentials, customer testimonials, explanations of the science and the process, etc.
Someone might decide to get this service once - say, the day after their wedding - but others could be interested in getting it regularly, especially if they have a great experience the first time. That means it’s worth more to acquire a new customer if you can form an ongoing relationship with them, focusing on providing great service, and following up with them consistently in the future.
Competition could be other mobile services, physical IV therapy facilities, or even doctor’s offices. If there aren’t a lot of other options, just making people aware and making it easy for them to find you may be enough to get customers. If there are a lot of other competitors, you’ll have to find ways to differentiate yourself. In some cases, competition can be so intense that you have to totally rule out certain marketing tactics, like Google search ads with extremely high costs-per-click due to auction pressure, i.e. lots of businesses bidding on the same searches increases the costs.
Meanwhile, there may be a myriad of ways to find customers for your particular business that aren’t the standard approaches marketers try to sell you. You could partner with hotels or wedding planners, pitch to companies as a perk on corporate retreats, offer mutual referrals with other medical or aesthetic practices, etc. Customers could come from a lot of different sources, and it’s important to map out the pros and cons of as many as possible before you decide where to invest. (And note that these could all be channels for customers that competitors don’t utilize.)
How to apply this to your business
We’re not the first to propose a method like this for planning how to promote a business. I’ve read plenty of them in books, blogs, magazine articles, whitepapers, academic journals, etc. The problems I’ve found are:
Almost all of them are either intended for large corporations or only specific types of businesses, e.g. consumer tech startups.
Often, the authors don’t explicitly mention that this is either their bias or focus - they may even be unaware if they only work with certain types of businesses - which causes confusion for business owners who try to apply those lessons to their own company, even though their own situation may be completely different.
Even ones that could be applied to any business often require extensive research or analysis - something that someone starting a new small business usually doesn’t have the skills, tools, or even the base data to perform.
This framework’s intended to be something that any small business owners could answer pretty thoroughly in an hour. You should always be modifying it, of course, but this is an easy baseline to set immediately that will save you a lot of time, money and frustration down the road.
Of course, you might not have all the right answers right off the bat, and that’s OK. What’s important is documenting what you can, then continue to think about them and refine them as you learn more, or as the situation changes.
So, here’s how to approach each question, and then what to do about it.
Demand
Are people already looking for the product or service you’re selling, or is it something new they need to be made aware of? This will be obvious for some businesses, but nuanced for others. Locksmiths, for instance, are need-right-away services people might only search for in emergencies, while people might not even be aware of some new and unique consumer product.
In the IV therapy example, though, some customers are searching for it, others are aware its a service but might not have known there’s one near them, while still others have never heard of it but might try it. In these cases, it helps to do further research to understand how much existing search behavior is out there - such as using the free keyword research tools in Google Ads. If there’s not enough search traffic to meet your goals, then you’ll know you need to try to generate additional awareness and demand.
Once you have a rough idea, then you can zone in on the right sources of customers, described more below.
Trust
What’s the level of risk someone is taking to buy what you’re selling, in terms of time, money, safety, reputation, or emotion?
This is often one of the most commonly overlooked factors in small business marketing. For a business owner who’s intimately familiar with their own product or service, it’s hard to imagine not understanding it or seeing the value in it. It’s easy to take trust for granted, which is why so many small business marketing communications don’t address the key factors that are keeping people from becoming customers.
People can be unsure about buying for many different reasons. If you’re a plumber or an auto repair shop, people want to be comfortable that you’re doing good work and not overcharging. If you’re a fitness studio, people might be nervous about being embarrassed if they’re out of shape and can’t keep up in a class. If you’re a therapist, people might be self-conscious and uncomfortable about telling all their problems to a stranger.
Business owners often think that price is the deciding factor, but it’s often more a question about value. Is it clear that this amount of money is worth it?
To figure this out for your own business, make a list of all the reasons someone wouldn’t buy from you, then rank them as best you can. It would be smart to ask friends, neighbors and acquaintances for a less-biased opinion. Then make sure you’re addressing those potential risks someone might perceive throughout your website, advertising, social media, and other communications.
Relationship
Is this something someone buys once, occasionally, or repeatedly? This can be a relatively easy question to answer for some businesses, but others might have multiple lines of revenue, some being one-offs, others being more of a subscription model, that may require different types of marketing.
For instance, let’s say you offer handyman services. Someone might need an extra hand to get something done quickly when they don’t have time. You do the job and ask for a positive Google review so that it’s easy for new customers to find you and trust you. The focus there is capturing demand - people are only calling if something’s broken.
But other people might need help on a consistent basis, say someone in an older home that needs consistent upkeep, who just wants someone to proactively identify things in need of repair. In those cases, you could offer an ongoing maintenance service, or just make sure you have a way to consistently follow up with these past customers so they call you for any nagging tasks they have on their list.
This is a piece many businesses miss, focusing on finding news customers vs. maintaining relationships with their existing customers. Identifying whether there’s potential for someone to buy repeatedly from you will help guide to answer whether you need solutions like email/SMS marketing to stay in touch with people who’ve already bought from you in the past.
Or, if it’s very unlikely someone will buy from you more than once, this can help clarify whether those types of activities are a good use of your time and budget.
Competition
How many other options do people have and how aggressive are competitors? Most business owners intuitively understand this one, and if anything they’re hyper-focused on their competitors. But it can help lead to some better solutions that aren’t entirely intuitive.
For instance, if you’re in a niche business, people might come from farther away to find you. That can inform how broadly you advertise your business,. Some hard-to-find businesses can attract customers from 50+ miles away, while more common businesses - like gyms and auto repair shops - typically get customers who are much closer to their location.
If all your competitors are saying the same thing, then it behooves you to be different to stand out. Many business owners just copy their largest competitors, thinking they must’ve done something right to get where they are today. But if your category is a sea of sameness, it’s smarter to position yourself differently so it’s easier for potential customers to remember you.
And if competition is intense in your business category or geographic area, then you might need to rule out certain marketing decisions entirely. For instance, in some business categories, it might be prohibitively expensive to run certain types of ads. While some businesses might only pay $3-4 a click using Google search ads, competitive industries like personal injury law might be at least $70 a click, and could be hundreds of dollars in major cities.
Again, create a list of all your main competitors and identify how they’re marketing themselves. In some cases you might find opportunities, but in other cases you might want to do the opposite to stand out in a crowded market.
Source
Where could you reliably find good customers? This is usually the piece of the puzzle that so many marketers start and end with, often because they only specialize in helping getting customers from a particular source.
It’s the classic problem - if you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And this is why so many small business owners feel burned by marketers. Even if the marketer did a good job, they might’ve been hired do the wrong job in the first place.
For this dimension, I encourage you to get very creative in creating a list of potential ways to source customers. There are likely to be lots of great sources that aren’t initially intuitive. Rather than just jumping to a certain channel, like social media, that feels familiar and that a lot of other businesses are apparently using, there may be much better methods out there for finding customers.
Let’s say you’re a cleaning service interested in getting more commercial jobs. The obvious answer might be cold emailing large businesses nearby, loading your website with keywords, or running search ads for “commercial cleaners near me.” Here are some other sources that aren’t immediately obvious:
Commercial real estate brokers: they place tenants in new spaces and could refer your business.
Property management companies: one relationship here could service lots of buildings.
Office furniture dealers: they know exactly when someone new is moving into a space who could use help.
General contractors working on commercial buildings: at the very least there’s post-construction cleaning necessary.
This is the case in lots of different business categories, and it can’t hurt to try a number of different sources before deciding where to invest your time and effort.
We hope this was helpful in planning for your own business! If you have questions, drop us a comment below, or book a meeting to discuss!