Marketing can be challenging on a small business budget. Thankfully, small business owners still have several affordable and effective marketing strategies to choose from. Social media, email, content production, and influencer collaborations are all great options. But how do you know which strategies are best for your business? To answer this question, you need to know your audience as well as the unique value they get from your business. Here are a few tips to help you get clear on these important marketing considerations for your Greater Hewitt small business.

Consult a Professional

A professional consulting agency can shed light on your marketing situation and help you devise a strategy that will work best for your business. If you could use some help connecting with your audience, don’t hesitate to hire a consultant. A consultant will save you time and money in the long run, so this move is always a worthwhile investment. 

Create a Visual Marketing Plan

Once you’re ready to devise a new marketing strategy, sit down and sketch out your plan visually. This will make it easier to build an effective marketing funnel. You can do this on a piece of paper or make use of digital tools to visualize all the stages it takes to convert a potential shopper into a loyal customer. 

For example, Excel is great for creating marketing plans. To make things even easier, you can find numerous marketing plan templates online to download and fill with your own information in Excel. If you have PDF images to include in your marketing plan, you can even embed them into your Excel file for easy reference. If you have multiple PDF images you want to join before adding them to a cell, you can find a free PDF merger to put these files together so they can easily be added into your Excel marketing plan so you’ll have everything all in one place.

Develop Your Brand Voice

Have you defined your brand voice? You can think of your brand voice as the persona of your business. Your brand’s personality, values, morals, and tone of voice all play into this. Creating a distinct brand voice for your business will help personify your business in the eyes of your customers. As a result, your customers will be able to relate to your brand and engage with your business on a personal level. 

Once you’ve developed a brand voice, try to keep it consistent across all platforms. As your business grows and more people get involved in your branding efforts, it will become more difficult to keep your brand voice consistent. This is why it’s important to create a brand style guide. Your brand style guide might include directions for preferred terms, sentence length, use of punctuation, and words or phrases to avoid.

Focus on Your Value Proposition

Your value proposition is the unique value your business promises to deliver to your customers. The Five Echelon Group explains that this message tells customers what your brand stands for and how your business will fulfill an unmet need or want. Focusing on your value proposition will help you keep your marketing on track. For inspiration, you can find plenty of great value proposition examples from popular brands. Pay attention to how other brands incorporate their value propositions into their website and marketing materials.

Establish Your Marketing Goals

Like a good value proposition, strong marketing goals can help you make impactful marketing decisions. Why do goals help? When you compare your results with your goals, you can see what’s working and what isn’t. As a result, you can continually adjust your marketing strategies to make them even better.

If you want to increase sales and grow your Greater Hewitt business, creating a great marketing strategy is key. Talk to a professional, visualize your marketing plan in Excel, define your brand voice and value proposition, and establish goals that will help you measure your success. By doing all this and taking advantage of all the resources and opportunities available through your Greater Hewitt Chamber of Commerce membership, you’ll be on track to creating a rock-solid marketing strategy that will drive the growth of your business.