Building Online Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

Building marketing strategies for small businesses is one of my favorite things. In my first marketing role, I worked in the marketing department for a small company before moving on to Distilled, where I've been lucky enough to continue working with small businesses that have enormous potential. Despite the various industries, locales, and personalities, one of the prevailing similarities between them is that small businesses often don't position their company or use the web as effectively as they could. While this is partially due to the time and resource crunch small business owners feel, it's also because, beyond building a website, they don't know where to begin. 

It doesn't have to be so overwhelming though. I'll walk you through the preliminary steps I take my small business clients through.

1. Define the brand

A number of the small companies I've worked with didn't have a brand. That's not to say that they didn't have a name, a website, and a logo. It's that they didn't stand for something. 

For example, what comes to mind when you think of Apple? Innovative and well-designed products? Exactly. So many small businesses are built from an individual wanting to work for themselves or because they see an opportunity to improve on an existing product. They figure, build the website and they will come. 

But it's not that way. You need a brand. As we've seen throughout history, the companies that have staying power have a brand, something that differentiates them from their competitors, something that people connect with and, coupled with good products and customer service, something that keeps people coming back.

I'm sure you're thinking, "Well that's all fine and good, Morgan, but I don't know how you go about building a brand." That's fine. There are people who make careers out of building brands you could contact, market research surveys you could pass out, and focus groups you could run, but, realistically, small businesses don't usually have the financial resources to invest in these strategies. This doesn't mean you can't have a brand though; you'll just have to run a lightweight brand building exercise which goes something like this: Read More...