Some marketing tips for small online businesses

Italy is a country that stands out for the presence of countless small and medium-sized enterprises and in the last period small online businesses have also increased as a result.

Operating online offers small businesses the opportunity to achieve results and objectives that can hardly be achieved with a simple craft or professional activity only physical. 

But to achieve these results it is necessary to follow a marketing strategy for small online businesses that allows you to build a path dotted with good habits that support the organization of a successful business and allow you to achieve excellent results in a short time.

Here are some marketing tips for small online businesses that want to grow and get better results!

Features and benefits of small businesses

What is meant by the term small business? Small business is defined as all those small craft and non-craft activities dedicated to the sale of products or services that are managed employing less than 50 employees and that have a budget that does not exceed 10 million euros.

In small businesses we can also include micro-enterprises that in this case employ less than 10 employees and have an annual turnover that does not exceed 2 million euros.

Who has a small or micro enterprise and manages his business not only physically but also online, or exclusively on the web through an e-commerce, owns a small business.

But what are the advantages of having a small business? Small businesses are certainly more easily manageable than a large company, they are generally managed by a person or at most by partners, you can focus better on customers (because every customer is really important for their business).

Managing a small business also allows you to acquire a lot of fame over time and to obtain interesting growth prospects as a small brand can work better on its identity and at the same time retain customers more easily by making them feel part of their own small  "world".

To be able to achieve optimal results, especially if you are at the beginning of your business, I have prepared for you some tips that will help you better manage your online business.

Small online businesses with their e-commerce, whether they are dedicated to selling products or services, need much more attention and care in their marketing plan.

Especially when it comes to a new brand and you have neither the economic potential nor the visibility that the brands of multinationals have been on the market for decades.

So a small business needs much more attention and care because it has to carve out its target, its audience and take care of the relationship with customers, since even a small mistake could undermine its revenue and the reputation of its brand.

Be consistent

Initially, it's easier to start your own marketing tactics and social channels that can support your brand in growing online.  

But it is very difficult to work consistently and consistently. The key to the success of your business, however, lies precisely in the development of a marketing path that is consistent.

The results of your strategies come over time, but the most important marketing habit for a small business owner is to be consistent with your marketing strategy.

Therefore, it is necessary to: constantly publish content, promote it and interact with the public with a tone of voice that best represents the brand.

For some small e-commerce it also means working consistently in activities such as: the creation of the newsletter, push notifications, active presence on social media.

Remember that marketing is an investment that must be studied over the long term and only if you are consistent will you see results in the long term .

At first, maintaining the right consistency may be complex but don't worry, there are methods to pursue these goals consistently.

In detail, it is possible to create processes that help you to have the right consistency such as: making checklists to distribute activities during the day or weeks, distributing content optimally by creating an editorial calendar, collecting data on the tactics used and the results obtained.

I, for example, use PotsPickr to manage the editorial calendar for the distribution of content for our customers.  

Keep testing your strategies

A small business cannot linger on pursuing a marketing project that never changes over time and cannot even be focused on pursuing all the existing strategies in the world because it would lack time and even investments.

So how do you manage a good marketing strategy for a small online business?

Of course, testing the strategies that have been adopted, changing them over time and choosing those on which to focus more and to which to dedicate more time and also a greater investment depending on the results obtained.

At the beginning, identifying which are the best channels and strategies to use for your business may take time and a larger investment at least in the early days.

But thanks to the study of the results obtained with the various marketing channels, studying those that are most used by your customers, you will have the opportunity to better manage investments and also get better conversions.

Also, never forget to check the activity of the competition as well, because they could give you a hint on new strategies and marketing channels that are well successful among the audience.

Collect customer feedback

For a small business it is important to involve the public and get answers and advice from them to better conduct marketing and loyalty.

Engaging and effective marketing must be based on an essential pillar: the needs of the target customer.

To understand if you are really meeting these needs, you need to ask for feedback directly from your target customers.

You can get feedback in many different ways, for example: asking for comments on social media and direct advice to improve the service, providing a discount coupon to those who leave a review, etc.

The collection of feedback is essential to be able to identify what to improve and to optimize your marketing strategy, moreover, with this focus on the customer, consumers will feel appreciated and listened to and more inclined to make new purchases

Data analysis

A marketing habit that can be considered optimal even for small businesses is data analysis.

Today online you have the opportunity to have access to a large amount of information, statistics, results that at first could even be overwhelming.

Of course it would be better to have a professional able to process the data in the best possible way and analyze them to obtain very solid and truthful statistics.

However, if you are at the beginning, cataloging the various data to carry out analytical analysis by sections can help to get a picture of what works and what is not going well and needs intervention.

Data, especially those focused on the user and his habits and behaviors, are the most important information that can be used to take care of your business and be able to meet customer needs.

Take care of your contacts

As we have pointed out in this small guide it is necessary especially for small businesses to focus on "people" or on their target that is what is most valuable about a small online business.

But how to be able to nourish your contacts over time, to take care of them in the best way, without becoming too intrusive?

Carefully following leads is one of the best marketing activities that can lead a potential customer to become such, and a customer to become a fan of their small business.

Having customer contacts can certainly help to nourish and cultivate your contacts, for example through the right e-mail marketing activities or SMS marketing (which in the last period is returning to be an important tool).

Simply put, you need to focus on building the relationship with your leads, not necessarily pushing them to buy right away, but you have to continue to nurture them in such a way that they make purchases from you whenever they are ready to do so.

Continue to study your target audience and market

When a small business fails it is possible that the entrepreneur has based all his activities only on the diversifiing idea and not at all on the public and the target market.

If you do not have the right information on the type of audience and consumers to turn to, it means driving your business to bankruptcy.

By constantly studying, however, the reference market and the target, it is possible to focus your efforts on the people who have the widest possibility of buying a product or choosing one of the services offered by your business.

Knowing your audience in depth answers all marketing questions and allows you to:

• Choosing the right marketing channels to deliver content
• Understand which are the characteristics that the product must maintain and which must be perfected
• Identify the content format and focus on creating an optimal message
• Talk regularly to your target audience and figure out what words to use to describe your product or service.

Take time to reflect

For every entrepreneur, even if of a small online business, it is very important to take a few moments to be able to reflect.

Every business owner has a specific marketing goal in mind. Sometimes a moment of reflection is important as it allows you to keep track of development and determine what to do to be able to improve.

Reflecting on data and results helps the entrepreneur to make the right decisions. You can spend this time measuring website traffic, observing how social network campaigns are going, doing small check-in sessions that allow you to catch any errors before they can turn into a disaster.

Of course, in this phase of reflection it is not enough to check the metrics or returns, but you have to exploit them to be able to reason more clearly and calmly, thus helping you to better market your business.

Effective planning

Effectively planning your actions is really essential in marketing strategies for a small business.

Planning can be among the most productive habits for a small business owner who wants to come up with an effective strategy.

The components of planning are the key to being able to measure ROI and maximize long-term profits and make any "adjustments" in the short term. 

Thanks to careful planning it is possible to:

• Determine which marketing efforts attract or retain your consumers
• You can save on strategies that are not effective, minimizing costs
• Publish optimally on social networks without risking decreasing the quality and results that content can achieve
• Ensure quality control and always search for relevant content with the right tone of voice.

Understanding marketing metrics

Metrics in marketing are important and you need to know how to evaluate them carefully.

Vanity metrics such as followers, likes etc ... They attract a lot of attention from a small business owner. But you need to understand if these metrics are really driving results and if you are getting value for the time and investments made.

It's easy to focus on the number of shares and likes, however the main focus is sales.

Therefore, the attention that must be given to marketing metrics must be focused primarily on ROI.

Understand the costs and effort for each ad or promotional activity while applying the number of sales it generates even when they are most successful.

Content creation

Whether you're marketing a small online business dedicated to selling products or services, you need to build a personal brand with content that helps you achieve optimal results every step of the way.

Communication is the basis of a good marketing strategy.

You need to focus on building content that is able to increase your brand awareness and allow you to increase audience retention.

Since for small businesses knowing the customer is a continuous and fundamental journey, it is also essential to create content that allows you to support them in the best way both to solve a problem or a need and to better present your business and products. 

Thanks to copywriting and the right content it is possible: to sensitize the target audience, involve it and educate it by exploiting the right stylistic and tone of voice consistency for all types of media.

In addition, if you have a small online business, blog content that can be a real resource for marketing, is also useful for SEO.

SEO is a very important marketing habit that also includes consistently producing high-value content for the blog and website.

In conclusion, the creation of content allows to support the strength and validity of the brand in the eyes of the potential customer by providing value in a constant and consistent way.

Expand your network of contacts

One of the most important marketing habits for those who run a small business is the ability to build a network of knowledge and relationships with the right people.

The creation of a network of contacts must be done both in the real world and in the digital one.

Building the right connections will open up more opportunities for your brand and you will see faster brand growth.

It should be emphasized that following all the strategies we have illustrated, it will be much easier to earn contacts and generate the right sense of trust and value in them to push them to become your admirers and maybe future collaborators.

One of the most important KPIs revolves around how many people you can meet each month by networking to create meetings that foster your brand. Do you want to grow your network too?

To do this you can take advantage of social networks, blogs, but also real-world knowledge, which for example you can find in coworking spaces or in city places where you can establish valid connections for your brand.

Conduct a competitor analysis 

Another marketing habit that you need to work on when you have a small business is to carry out a continuous analysis of competitors over time.

Regularly studying the competition will help you both differentiate yourself and stay one step ahead of your target market.

By studying the features offered by competing brands and how they retain customers, you can better understand what are the best marketing strategies that they are using and that you have not yet considered.

Simply put: by paying attention to their marketing efforts you can devise a way to overcome them with your quality.

Always learn new things

Finally, when you have a small business you need to never stop and always learn new things.

Learn new marketing strategies, study what are the future opportunities for your brand, understand and anticipate habits that can make your business grow quickly.

Always study what happens in the world of online marketing, follow the main professionals in the sector both Italian and international, to be able to capture exactly what are the new things you have learned and how you can exploit them to grow your small online business.