You’re small so everything you do needs to have an impact. The key to small business marketing strategy is maximising your resources to get the best effects. But what exactly does this mean for your business? 

When setting up a startup or small business, or even when expanding, the temptation is to cover all channels in one go to maximise your visibility and stop others from taking your space, but this isn't best for you or your customer. Whatever you do, as a small business it’s important to do well. In other words, diversification is not your friend here. The key thing here is to identify the best channels for your customer and maximise your use. Ask yourself some simple questions such as: 

• Who are my customers?

• Where are my customers?

• What technology are they using?

• Do they use social media?

• Which social media channels do they use?

• What publications do they read?

• What brands are they using?

The key here is to create a persona of your target customer. This doesn’t mean to say you won’t be expanding who you’re targeting in the future, but it’s a good idea to specify your core audience from the start and the best way to reach them with your marketing message. Remember, large companies can target everyone and anyone as they have the budget, resource and time; as a small business, you need to be smarter with your marketing.  

Knowing that your target customers are teachers age 45-70 can help you identify the right channels, and test accordingly, it allows you to research their buying habits and find innovative and smart ways to target them. Identifying other brands and products they use helps you to find potential partners or brands you can cannibalise for more visibility. But all of this can only be done when you really think through who your core customers are. 

It’s not as simple as just finding your core customer group, your marketing strategy should be firmly based on a strong accurate foundation, so it’s key that you test these groups to see how receptive they are to your offerings before you continue to build your business upon them.

Once you’re sure you have the right customer base, you can move on to the next step of your marketing strategy, this is to entrench yourself in their daily lives, this isn’t to be a pest but to clearly display to them that you’re small brand/business is for them. If your core customer frequents meet-up groups in Lithuania every summer, guess where you’ll be next summer; Lithuania. Marketing doesn’t need to be complicated, build genuine connections with people by providing them what they want and truly making the effort to listen to what they want and you’ll find not only are they receptive, but they are loyal, and building this loyalty which comes along with trust, can make or break a small business or startup. 

The final step of any small businesses marketing strategy should be continuous improvement. This is your competitive advantage, you can make quick changes where your larger counterparts will be bogged down with red-tape, don’t squander this! Continuously test and ask for feedback, fix the little issues before they become big ones, and find new opportunities (be it new target markets or customer bases) consistently, you benefit from a lack of bureaucracy and this should benefit your marketing strategy.