The Perfect Marketing Strategy Template for Small Businesses

While 28% of small businesses want to increase their sales through marketing, there are 13% of small businesses market to stand out from the competitors. Whatever your marketing goals may be, this perfect marketing strategy template for small businesses will help you begin your marketing effectively.

Here’s the marketing strategy template for small businesses:

Step 1: Perform a Brand Audit:

A brand audit is the only way to begin your ideal marketing strategy. You need to understand the following elements of your brand:

• Your content: The first and foremost element is to know the kind of content your business produces or can produce. Are you making product videos, or is your main focus on creating blogs for your business?
• Ideal social media platforms: Not all social media sites are meant for all businesses. Some small businesses focus on Instagram to grow, while some may use Youtube to promote their business. Likewise, small businesses may thrive using Facebook ads or growing their Twitter. What are the ideal social media platforms for you?

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Step 2: Analyze your Competitors:

Do not go forward with your marketing before you have analyzed your competitors. Analyze the following elements of your brand’s competition:

• Competitor’s advertising: What kind of advertising are your competitors performing? Are they focusing on PPC ads or is the major focus on social media? Is there any similarity between all your competitors’ advertising methods?
• Competitor statistics: You can use various free sites like SimilarWeb to understand how your competitors are gaining traffic. With SimilarWeb, you can check the percentage of organic traffic, social traffic, and referral traffic of any site. This helps you understand the main source of their site traffic.

Image Source: SimilarWeb

Step 3: Know Thy Customers:

Now that you know better about your brand and your competitors, the third most important thing is to understand your customers. This is what you need to know about your customers:

• Your Target Audience: No marketing tactic would ever work if you do not know your target audience. Whether you want to create Twitter ads or Facebook ads, you need to know your target audience. For example, if you’re selling maternity clothes, you know your main target audience is pregnant women, but you also have to know the age and geography you wish to target.

• Your Audience Media Habits: It’s important to know your customer’s media habits to create the right marketing strategy. As small businesses have limited marketing budget, if they can understand their customers’ media habits, they can spend wisely.

Image Source: Facebook

Step 4: Plan your Content:

The last and most important step is to plan your content. Here are the most important elements of planning your content:

• Content Creation: The foremost part is to create your content or find people who can create awesome content for you. You might need photographers, video editors, and bloggers to create your content if you find it hard to create quality content on your own.
• Scheduling your Content: Once your content has been prepared, the next step is to post it. If you’re using social media to post your content, you can try one of these free social media schedulers to plan your content.
• Analyze your Content Performance: Whether you’ve done a radio ad or an Instagram ad, measuring the effectiveness of your ads will help you learn how to go forward. See which media platform is performing best for you and focus on it.

Image Source: Circleboom

Final Words:

Based on my experience on managing multiple brands and social media accounts, this is the ideal marketing strategy template for small businesses. If you have any questions or comments, please post them in the comments below.