Small business marketing is one of the biggest challenges you’ll face as a business owner. Business owners often try a marketing strategy, but it doesn’t work, so they give up. That’s likely why so many small businesses fail.

Wise Coatings business owner Brandon Vaughn was in a similar position during his second month. They made $50K in the first month, but a job that was only supposed to take three or four days turned into two weeks. He was down to $50 in his bank account and worried that he wouldn’t be able to pay his people.

His marketing strategy saved the day, and he booked a job that helped them get back on track. Now, they have over 27 franchises, and the Wise Coatings corporate office makes more than $500K monthly.

We’ll share marketing best practices from Brandon and other business owners, including how much you should spend. We’ll also discuss different types of marketing and explain how to market your small business.

You can either read straight through or click on any of the links below to jump to the section that interests you:

What is small business marketing?

Small business marketing involves using a marketing strategy, analytics software, and marketing efforts to help your small business increase market share. As you scale, you’ll also see increases in revenue and profit.

A small business marketing strategy will typically include a combination of digital marketing and traditional marketing. There are four core stages of marketing:

• Raising awareness: In this stage, small businesses focus on raising awareness with customers.
• Creating interest: Once potential customers know about your company, you’ll want to use marketing to make them interested in your products or services.
• Building desire: The next step is to make your products and services desirable to potential customers.
• Taking action: The last marketing goal is to get potential customers to take an action like buying your product or providing their contact information.

You can also use these same goals for a marketing strategy to increase customer loyalty or satisfaction.

How much should a small business spend on marketing?

The U.S. Small Business Administration recommends spending between 6.3% and 11.8% of desired revenue on marketing. Your exact budget will depend on whether you sell services or products and whether you’re targeting consumers or other businesses.

According to a recent survey about marketing for small businesses, 63.4% of small business owners spend less than $1,000 annually on marketing. Meanwhile, it only takes $14,575 to spend more than the average business.

Just make sure that you’re monitoring your results to get the most out of your marketing budget.

Local Marketing Case Study: Bumble Bee Cleaning Services

Bumble Bee Cleaning Services, formerly called Queen Bee Cleaning Services, is a multimillion-dollar local cleaning company. Cristobal Mondragon and his wife started the business as a side gig, and it quickly grew because of their unique small business marketing strategies.

Some of the strategies they use to market their cleaning business include:

• Personalized quotes on their website
• Customer service center from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m.
• Social media marketing
• Paid advertising using Google Local Services Ads
• Direct mailers and door hangers
• Word-of-mouth marketing

Learn more in our interview with Cristobal below:

Want more information about starting a cleaning company? Check out our cleaning business course in the UpFlip Academy.

Types of Marketing

There are two main types of small business marketing you should familiarize yourself with: digital marketing and traditional marketing.

When you have cohesive small business marketing strategies, it’s easier to effectively manage an omnichannel marketing strategy. It takes time, money, and energy to break into multiple channels.

Keep reading to learn about the different types of small business marketing efforts.

Digital Marketing

Brands use digital marketing to connect with potential customers online through digital communication strategies. Digital marketing includes:

• Email marketing
• Text message marketing
• Social media marketing
• Content marketing
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Paid advertisements
• Loyalty programs

One of the primary differences between online and traditional marketing is the ability to measure marketing results with analytics software, which we’ll discuss later.

Email Marketing and Text Message Marketing

Email marketing is considered a form of retargeting because you’ve already interacted with the customer to collect their email. You’ll get in big trouble if email providers catch you sending thousands of unsolicited emails to random people. That’s just spam.

An effective email marketing strategy offers valuable information to potential customers in exchange for their email addresses. You can then provide additional information or offers to subscribers to build a deeper relationship.

Email marketing typically has higher open and click-through rates than other marketing strategies. However, you’ll need more than an email marketing platform to successfully spread the word about your small business. After all, you need to collect the emails to use this strategy.

You’ll use similar techniques with text or SMS marketing, but you’ll send the communications to customers’ phones instead of an email address.

Next, let’s look at social media marketing.

Social Media Marketing

Besides a website, using social media platforms is the most common way small businesses market their products and services. Social media can help you build a community around your business, share content about your company, and track customer feedback.

The type of marketing efforts you put into social media depends on the platform. For example, Instagram and TikTok are mainly used for quick updates and engaging with followers. Meanwhile, platforms like YouTube are better for sharing information in detail.

Social media is a great marketing channel because you can use organic marketing, paid advertising, and retargeting strategies. Social media also allows you to have instant two-way communication that you won’t get with marketing channels like emails and search engines.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a highly effective marketing strategy to find new customers and enhance your relationships with existing ones. Your content marketing should be focused on helping your target audience understand how you’ll solve their problems. This can be done through pictures, videos, graphic designs, and writing.

Once you’ve created the content, you’ll want to share it with your followers through social media and email. You’ll also want to make it easy for search engines to identify what it’s about. This allows the engine to index your content and share it when people search for relevant terms.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization makes it easier for people to discover your website while using search engines. Paying attention to SEO will help you attract more organic traffic.

You can check key elements such as title tags and meta descriptions to see if your site is optimized for SEO. These components should include relevant keywords to improve your site’s ranking.

While most think SEO caters to search engines, it’s also about meeting users’ needs. With SEO, your primary target is unpaid traffic rather than direct or paid traffic.

Google Lighthouse is a free SEO tool you may want to consider using. This browser extension will give you detailed SEO performance reports and actionable suggestions to improve your website. If you’d rather take a class, HubSpot Academy and Semrush Academy both offer free courses.

Paid Advertisements

Small businesses also use paid advertising to reach their target audience. The most common types of paid advertisements include Google Ads and paid advertisements on social media. However, there are many additional digital platforms that allow you to run paid advertisements.

Loyalty Programs

Loyalty programs are used both online and in store to gather information and reward customer loyalty. This form of inbound marketing encourages customers to keep coming back.

As your business grows, you can also use the data gathered to make better business decisions.

Traditional Marketing

Traditional marketing is any form of marketing that uses offline media to reach an audience. Examples of traditional marketing include:

• Newspaper ads
• Billboards
• TV and radio
• Direct sales
• Direct mail (e.g., postcards, brochures, letters, fliers)
• Trade shows
• Referrals (also known as word-of-mouth marketing)
• Telemarketing

Traditional marketing is still popular, especially for local service businesses and larger businesses with more resources.

However, it can be expensive. Businesses must pay for advertising in newspapers or cover the costs of distributing physical materials like brochures. You may also have to pay to develop ads and purchase TV spots.

One advantage of traditional marketing is that it’s harder to ignore some types of traditional marketing than it is to cast aside digital advertisements. With the creation of smart TVs and streaming platforms, TV and radio can also use online marketing techniques that weren’t previously available.

Newspaper Ads

Once upon a time, newspaper ads were the best way to reach customers on a daily basis. Today, they’ve fallen out of favor because so much of the business world has moved online.

Billboards

Billboards are still a phenomenal way for a small business to get in front of potential customers. This works especially well for food and gas companies that want to appeal to travelers near the interstate.

Many billboards have become a form of online marketing for small businesses. You can create digital ads and pay for them to be run on a digital billboard during specific times of day.

Anyone who watched the Super Bowl hosted in Las Vegas was likely to see The Sphere running advertisements. They also displayed the Super Bowl score for people driving by and showed the American flag while the military was flying by.

Direct Mail Advertisements

Mailers can be a successful form of traditional marketing for many small businesses. They are particularly successful for service businesses, restaurants, and financial institutions.

Almost every service business we talk to uses a form of marketing called three rounds or five rounds. This type of strategy uses direct mailers to target three to five neighbors on either side of a current customer’s house.

TV and Radio Advertisements

While mobile devices and streaming services have taken away market share from TV and radio, they can still be successful marketing opportunities. For instance, Brown’s Pressure Washing uses television ads on the local news to help reach new customers.

Check out our interview with owner Joshua Brown below:

Trade Shows

Going to trade shows is a great way to network with other companies in your industry. You can meet suppliers, connect with other tradespeople, or develop new skills. This form of marketing can lead to partnerships, better deals, and referrals.

Paul Akers, a lean expert and business owner who has released thousands of products, discusses the pros and cons of trade shows in our interview with him below:

Referrals (or Word-of-Mouth Marketing)

Getting referrals is one of the best ways to market your business. There are many ways to get referrals, including business cards, social media, and asking customers to leave reviews. Most small business owners agree that referrals tend to have the highest conversion rates.

Telemarketing

Telemarketing is still used today, but it has a bad name because of scammers, politicians, and others who exploit people through it.

You can successfully use it to help people make decisions faster, but I suggest using it only for hot leads because they’re more likely to be open to your approach.

Business Associations

Consider joining national and local business groups like your local chamber of commerce, the Better Business Bureau, and other industry organizations. These groups provide valuable resources about industry trends, marketing, and ways to meet like-minded small business owners.

Home Service Business Marketing: Wise Coatings

Brandon Vaughn started Wise Coatings with the understanding that floor coatings aren’t consistent repeat customers. As a result, marketing is the most important part of running his business. He told us:

The Wise Coating marketing strategy includes:

• Branding elements, including uniforms and truck wraps
• $5,000 in Facebook ads during the first month
• “Adopt a baby elephant” initiative to match their logo
• Dunzo marketing software
• Email and text marketing
• $100 gift card and brownies sent via mail
• Yard signs
• Postcards to neighbors

Brown’s Pressure Washing also tries to connect with the customer to discover what they need. From there, they show the customer how they can solve the problem. Check out our interview with Joshua below:

We were so impressed with Brandon’s business strategies that we partnered with him to create our Business Startup & Growth Blueprint.

How to Market Your Small Business

Small businesses should define their marketing strategy by following the process below:

1. Identify your target audience.
2. Put together buyer personas.
3. Create a marketing plan.
4. Estimate your marketing budget.
5. Create a website.
6. Set up your online tools.
7. Start blogging.
8. Choose external marketing channels.
9. Start advertising.
10. Measure the results of your marketing campaigns.
11. Refine your marketing dollars to increase business profits.

Step #1. Identify Your Target Audience

Step #2. Put Together Buyer Personas

Every small business owner should actively track at least four market segments:

• Leads: People in your target market who have yet to become customers
• New customers: People who have purchased products or services from your business for the first time
• Repeat customers: Existing customers have bought your services and products more than once
• Revenue buddies: Existing customers who believe in your product and service and refer people to it

All your marketing goals should be focused on turning people who are unaware of your business into leads, then from leads into customers. Once they’re existing customers, search for ways to gain referrals by convincing them to recommend your small business.

Step #3. Document Your Small Business Marketing Strategy

An effective small business marketing plan should include the following sections:

• Executive summary
• Mission statement
• Market analysis
• SWOT analysis
• Competitor analysis
• Target market and buyer personas
• Marketing goals and metrics
• Pricing strategy
• Marketing channels
• Marketing strategies
• Marketing budget
• Marketing tools for small business

To learn more about the first five elements, check out our blog about writing a business plan. This blog discusses the other aspects.

Step #4. Estimate the Costs of Your Marketing Efforts

You’ll need a marketing budget to keep your company on track. Your budget should include the total you’re willing to spend, the amount for each marketing channel, and a way to track your spending. Read our article on creating a marketing budget to learn more.

In addition to creating your small business budget for marketing, you’ll want to consider your overall business budget. Brandon explained:

Step #5. Create a Business Website

A professional-looking website is the cornerstone of your online marketing. It’s where your customer base will go to get definitive answers about your business. It’s also the only form of digital marketing where small business owners own the data they collect.

Learn about creating a website.

Step #6. Set Up Your Online Tools

In addition to your business website, you’ll use other software as a service provider or product business. Some of the software you’ll need includes:

• Social media accounts
• Google Business Profile
• Analytics tools
• Google Ads
• Customer relationship management (CRM) platform
• Workflow automation software

Next, we’ll discuss some of the software you’ll need while marketing a small business in more detail.

Social Media Accounts

Up to 60% of small business owners prefer social media for their marketing initiatives. That’s unsurprising because you can run a video marketing campaign and benefit from the extensive market research these platforms use to help you attract customers.

To begin, you’ll need to create a business profile using the business name. Having a business account offers additional small business social media marketing features that aren’t available for personal accounts.

Social media marketing for small business owners can be complicated. In our pressure washing business course, Joshua mentions:

Google Business Profile

A Google Business Profile is crucial for a new business. When a potential customer searches for your business name on Google, the search engine results page will show your profile. You’ll also show up in Google Maps.

The business account is most useful for service businesses and businesses with a brick-and-mortar location. However, anyone can create a profile as long as you own a business.

You should include your website, logos, pictures, business hours, phone number, address, and services or products.

Analytics Tools

Marketing strategies for small business operations rely on analytics software to measure website traffic, assess demographics, and provide insights about the customer journey.

The most common website analytics tool is Google Analytics, which is free for anyone to use. You can learn how to use it in Google Skillshop or hire a freelancer. Setup will depend on your needs and website provider.

You’ll also want Google Search Console, which can provide insights into your keyword and search engine results. This is necessary to raise brand awareness when using an SEO strategy.

When you’re running social media ads, most social media channels will have pixels that track when your customer base comes to your website through paid social media posts. Adding these pixels to your website will allow you to use retargeting. This marketing strategy involves running special ads to paying customers or people who abandoned carts.

Google Ads

Google Ads is one of the most sophisticated small business marketing ideas available. You’ll need to do keyword research, select marketing goals, and create your ad copy.

Once you’re ready, specify the time to run ads and set your bid amounts. You can also use these ads on Google partner sites.

Shopping campaigns show people your products at the top of Google product searches. If you have the right price and product, you can catch people at the beginning of their search. Meanwhile, service business owners say:

If you’re interested in learning more about Google Ads, check out our Google Ads for Beginners course in the UpFlip Academy.

Customer Relationship Management Platforms

A CRM will help you manage all the customer relationships and data you build across marketing channels. Your CRM can store customer information, send invoices, automate workflows, and communicate with customers.

You’ll want to research the best CRM for your small business. We recommend HubSpot and ServiceTitan.

Workflow Automation Software

Workflow automation is used to simplify your business management by automating routine tasks like emailing or requesting reviews. These systems can be particularly challenging.

You’ll need to define both your customer journey and your workflows. Then you’ll want to automate every step you possibly can.

A workflow might include something like the following process:

1. Get a lead via phone, text, email, website, or social media.
2. Add it to your CRM and include the source of the lead.
3. Call the lead. Did they answer? If yes, send a confirmation email for their appointment. If no, use a drip campaign.
4. Send a notification when you’re on the way.
5. Provide an estimate in person and by email.
6. Send a bonus offer.
7. Try to get them to say yes for another year of services.
8. Schedule the next appointment.
9. Send a text message when the technician is on the way. Include the technician’s photo and background check information.
10. Perform the service.
11. Distribute door hangers to the neighbors.
12. Add a yard sign.
13. Ask for a review and provide a care sheet.
14. Send postcards to neighbors.

This software may be part of your CRM, or you might use separate workflow automation software. You may want to hire small business marketing services to help you manage your automation or take marketing courses to learn how to use the software.

Step #7. Start Creating Content

Creating content and writing standard operating procedures can all be done as a single process:

1. Write down your process.
2. Have a trainee record you on your phone as you teach them how to do each step.
3. Add each how-to video to YouTube or Google Docs in sequential order.
4. Improve the videos as you go.
5. Use keyword research software to understand the terms people are searching for and make all the content appear better in search engines.

You can also pull smaller clips out of the videos, turn the audio into podcasts, and use the transcripts for emails or blogs. All this content will make it easier for your ideal customer to find you. It’ll also increase your expertise within your industry.

Step #8. Choose External Marketing Channels

Whether you use print advertising or digital marketing for small business lead generation, you need to decide what marketing channels or platforms to use. People give all kinds of marketing tips for small businesses, but one of the best is:

It’s also helpful to create a marketing calendar to help you decide what content is most important.

Step #9. Start Advertising

At this point, you should be ready to start implementing some paid advertisements. Brandon Vaughn explained:

As long as it’s paying for itself, you can afford to keep using the advertising channel and optimizing it to get better returns on your investment.

Step #10. Measure the Results of Your Marketing Campaigns

You’ll want to measure the results of each marketing campaign. This means you’ll need to track financial metrics and digital marketing metrics such as:

• Revenue: Amount earned from a campaign
• Expenses: Total spending on campaign
• Customers: Number of customers the campaign creates
• Leads: Number of potential customers
• Conversion rate: Customers versus leads
• Impressions: Number of people who saw a campaign
• Page views: Times the landing page was seen
• Click-through rate: Page views divided by impressions

You’ll want to compare these to industry benchmarks to see where you need to improve the most.

Step #11. Refine Your Marketing to Improve Business Profits

Once you observe what is and isn’t working, you should consider how to improve each metric. Every scenario has multiple variables that could impact it.

For instance, a low click-through rate can be caused by a variety of things. Narrowing your target audience may improve your click-through rate. You should also have a call to action where you’re asking people to do something like sign up for a newsletter.

Small Business Marketing FAQ

How to grow your small business with marketing

You should use digital and legacy marketing strategies to grow your small business. Hiring a small business marketing agency to help you get started may be beneficial.

Small business marketing companies have more experience in marketing than new business owners. Plus, these agencies often cost less than hiring a full-time marketer. A small business marketing company could complete tasks like:

• Writing a marketing plan
• Helping you with business advice when you get stuck
• Setting up the marketing and optimizing it, then handing it off to someone on your team
• Providing long-term digital marketing support

One of the easiest ways to grow a business with marketing is to increase spending on high-performing campaigns. You’ll want to keep ramping up spending until the return on investment decreases. Once the return on investment decreases, you’ll know the ideal spending limit.

How can a small business use a marketing concept to its advantage over a larger business?

Small business marketing teams face challenges that larger companies don’t, including less money and time to keep up with technology. That doesn’t mean that you can’t turn those disadvantages into competitive advantages by:

• Responding quicker to market trends
• Testing new ideas
• Taking advantage of lower operating costs to grow faster

How to do marketing for a small business

Marketing is a small portion of business operations but can dramatically impact your overall success. You’ll want to start small. Your first priorities should include:

• Creating a business website
• Setting up a Google Business Profile
• Getting CRM software
• Creating social media business accounts on the sites you use most
• Starting to create content

As you master these tasks, add more complex marketing strategies and additional social media platforms to your plan.

Why digital marketing is important for small business

Did you know that 87% of purchasing decisions start online? You should make it easy for customers to find you regardless of whether you’re a local restaurant trying to bring in new customers, a local service business, or an eCommerce store.

The customer is online, so you should be as well.

What is the average marketing budget for a small business?

Based on dividing total spending by the number of businesses in the United States, businesses spend an average of $14,575 on their marketing efforts annually.

How much does marketing cost for a small business?

You should expect to spend $1,000 to $2,000 monthly to effectively market your small business. This amount should help your business grow to between $150K and $300K in annual revenue.

Once you’ve reached the desired revenue, you may be able to decrease your spending while maintaining it. Alternatively, you may want to spend even more while trying to grow your business.

The marketing costs for a small business will vary depending on your marketing strategy, industry, location, and competition.

Additional Resources

At UpFlip, we believe in providing small business owners with the information they need to master their fields. That’s why we create free content in addition to our members-only resources in the UpFlip Academy.

• Marketing blogs: Check out our marketing blogs to learn more about creating an effective small business marketing strategy.
• Management blogs: We also have a range of business management blogs to help you learn more about topics such as trademarking, hiring, and business insurance.
• Business name generator: If you’re still in the process of choosing a name, try our free business name generator.

Conclusion

This is just the tip of the iceberg for mastering small business marketing. We’ve helped you understand all the different options and when they’re useful. We’ve also provided you with marketing examples, explained how to start marketing a business, and answered some frequently asked questions.

We strongly recommend checking out our additional resources. We talk about marketing in almost every YouTube episode, podcast, and blog.

What marketing have you done, and how can we help you succeed? Let us know in the comments below.