7 Small Business Marketing Tips for 2024

Staying up to date with the latest marketing best practices can seem daunting, especially when you’re a small business with limited staff, time, and resources. That’s why we’re sharing actionable and practical marketing tips that you can use this year. From leveraging social media to optimizing your content for SEO and everything in between, these tips will help you set your small business up for marketing success in 2024.

1. Create a Marketing Plan

This tip may seem simple but it’s worth including because it’s so important. Creating a marketing plan that includes your goals, target audience, key messages, and the best channels for reaching your audience gives you and your team a marketing roadmap. This roadmap can help you determine where to focus your energy and resources to make strategic decisions and maximize your ROI.

2. Utilize Social Media

Social media marketing continues to be a great way to grow brand awareness, engage with customers and prospects, and drive sales. When utilizing social media, be sure to choose platforms that your target audience uses, and only use as many platforms as you can realistically manage. Post high-quality content that’s engaging, informative, or inspiring (with just a pinch of promotional content in the mix) and set a posting schedule to help you stay on track. Stay social by responding to comments and messages and building a community around your brand.

3. Work with Influencers

Collaborating with influencers whose followers are your target audience can be an effective way to reach new potential customers. Find influencers who align with your brand values and whose followers are engaged and trusting of their recommendations. Micro-influencers (100,000 followers or less) and nano-influencers (10,000 followers or less) can be great options for small businesses that don’t have the budget to work with celebrities.

4. Create Email Marketing Campaigns

Email can be a cost-effective way to reach your audience and drive sales. By using an email marketing platform, you can even create email marketing campaigns with emails that are automatically sent when someone takes a specific action, such as a welcome series being sent when someone signs up for your newsletter. Be sure to choose a platform that offers analytics so you can review the data (such as open rates, conversion rates, and more) and adjust your email strategy as needed.

5. Use AI Tools

AI tools can assist with a wide variety of tasks, such as brainstorming product names, creating content, chatting with customers, and much more. These tools can help you save time and resources, too. However, people still want human interaction. If you use AI to write your social media captions, for example, be sure to review them and edit them as necessary to keep them in your brand voice and make sure they don’t sound like a robot wrote them.

6. Optimize Your Content for SEO
Writing content with search engine optimization (SEO) in mind can make that content more easily discoverable by Google and other search engines, helping your content rank higher on search engine results pages. Take time to research keywords to find what terms your target customers are searching, then use those keywords in your content, meta descriptions, images, and other SEO-optimizable places. Make sure your content still provides value and isn’t focused on “keyword stuffing.”

7. Review Your Analytics Every Month

Reviewing analytics on your website, social media, and emails can help you make data-driven decisions going forward. Analytics give you a look at what’s working and what’s not, so you can determine which channels, topics, and strategies to continue using or to revise in the month ahead. Review metrics like social media engagement rates, email click-through rates, website traffic, and other helpful data.

Bonus: Work with a Digital Marketing Agency

Managing your company’s marketing efforts can be a lot of work, especially if you have a small team. Working with a digital marketing agency allows experienced marketing professionals to assist with strategy, content creation, community management, and more so you can focus on other business tasks. Want to see how Healthy Dash of Social can help your small business? Schedule a free call today.