Even with rising consumer spending, many small businesses are waiting with no movement on the sales front. Businesses – digital or offline – are facing the same scenario. It’s either a storefront with empty open doors or carts abandoned on a small eCommerce platform. Observe 5 BIGGEST Marketing Challenges for Small Businesses.
Small business owners with a fundamental skill to make and sell good products often make marketing their middle child. The result? They face multiple marketing challenges for small businesses. Some of these challenges are hard to put a finger on, even when they are right in front of them.
Is your small business facing some marketing challenges that seem hard to solve?
5 Marketing Challenges for Small Businesses
In this article, we rounded up the simplest yet important aspects of small business marketing that end up becoming challenges. Feeling curious what those might be?
Read on.
1. Budget Constraints
Let’s address the biggest elephant in the room – budget constraints for small business marketing. Businesses across the USA spend less than $10000 in marketing budgets per year basis.
Small businesses spend most of their budget on inventory, equipment, and payroll. While most amount of their budget is spent, they are left with only a little for marketing. It’s understandable for startups that are yet to grow and strengthen their wings. But, as the business starts to scale, it’s important to grow the marketing budget.
Here’s an easy solution:
Invest in social media marketing. When we say INVEST, we are breaking the myth that social media marketing is free; it’s not. But you can balance between time and budget by assigning that task to people working for you.
As per Forbes, 51% of SMBs find content creation as the most time-consuming activity for marketing. So, you need someone creative on your side to manage and create content for your business’s social media. Remember, even if the budget is strict, marketing deserves regular spending. It boils down to allocating resources, time, and money – consistently.
2. Targeting the Right Audience
Small businesses often struggle to identify who to please. One of the most important marketing challenges for small businesses is identifying who to target.
A food truck that opens early in the morning should start noticing who comes for the early morning hot dogs. A cleaning service keeps a list of repeat clients who call back once a month for cleaning duty.
It’s not easy to sit down and analyze the pain points, buying behaviors, and interests of regular customers. Or is it? Even if you aren’t reaching the deepest root of customer psychographics, it helps to know something about your costumes.
Here are some simple ways to know them –
- Find out who’s tagging your business on social media or liking your posts and commenting on them.
- Small businesses that accept online payments can check payment history to identify customers’ spending habits. They can identify similarities among customers who are paying online.
- Got a little more budget? Then, try out geo-targeting advertisements through Google ads and engage with local events and communities.
- One of your target audiences can help you reach other segments that your business can target. Once they turn into your business advocates, their word-of-mouth will do the job.
Finally, identify the ideal customer profiles and tailor-make content for them to publish on social media. How to go about it? Remember John, who visits your cafe before heading to work every day? That’s a good profile to start with.
3. Content Creation
First, identify how important content creation is for your business. This is a day in and day out kind of work for businesses that are solely into content creation industry.
But what about a moving company that’s handling boxes and shipments? How would a home bakery owner start be creating content?
Forbes also said that 40% of small businesses find marketing strategy creation as time-consuming work. On top of that, 34% of small businesses see posting on social media as a time-consuming thing. As for content creation, we have already shared the statistics in the first point.
So, it’s true that content creation is one of the marketing challenges for small businesses.
Here’s how to overcome it:
- First, let’s solve the problem of time. If your business can afford the monthly budget of a social media manager, then that’s a good way forward. The budget can go up if you go for more experienced ones. So, take note of that when you invest.
- Have someone on the team who’s savvy with words, can click good photos, and shoot videos for your business. There’s no need for pro-bono work while starting out.
- Go live on social media. If it’s a hassle creating and editing content and posting later on, stick to social media lives. Show your audience how your customers are interacting and having fun at your location. Got some behind-the-scenes work you can showcase? That can also turn into good video content if you go live.
- Furthermore, you can use AI to edit videos and write Instagram captions for your business page.
However, it’s best to raise the bar on your marketing investment as you start to see a little momentum.
4. Keeping up with Marketing Trends
So, when to hire a marketing specialist for your small business? Start thinking of your problems first. Hire a professional if your marketing is lacking any of the three following aspects –
- Lack of time
- Lack of a strong marketing strategy
- Falling behind to adapt to the latest marketing trends and technology changes.
Businesses operating with less than ten members lack time to run proper marketing campaigns.
Also, if you are a chef turned food truck owner, you may not know the best marketing strategies to grow your revenue.
Digital channels make it easy and convenient to run campaigns. It’s easier and more convenient compared to traditional marketing platforms like TV, Newspapers, etc. However, there are other challenges.
For example, you’ll face a Google Algorithm update within almost every six-month interval. The same thing happens with social media. The private Sharing feature on Instagram seems to be working well for social media marketers now.
Likewise, it’s uncommon for a business owner to know the best practices for mailers or have many ideas about event sponsorship costs.
As a small business owner, it’s difficult to time-track marketing initiatives, have strong marketing knowledge, and stay on top of ever-evolving marketing channels.
So, if your business is struggling to keep up with changing marketing trends, hire someone who can.
5. Consistently Seeing Results
You had that strategy made, tailor-made content for the right target audience. So, why isn’t it going viral? While starting out, it’s common to lose patience and use a lack of results as a sign to optimize your strategy.
The way digital gives your business an open channel of communication. But it takes time for your marketing channels to catch the virality fever. It’s disappointing to see your content collecting a handful of impressions when you have spent a lot on tools and talents.
Give your campaigns some time before you are ready to analyze your ROI. Also, it’s common for businesses to fail to tie their marketing actions back to sales. After all, that spending should bring some money in.
A good approach would be to know when to expect your ROI. Marketing investments work in quick, medium, and long-term investments.
Quick Term Marketing
PPC: The best quick-term results come from PPC. Your marketing team will need skilled copywriters and PPC experts to write and run captivating ads.
Email Marketing: Another quick marketing initiative is email marketing. It drives response, converts leads, and drives more customers to your landing page.
Medium Term Investment
Search Engine Optimization: your small business can do well with a higher search ranking for a targeted keyword. When selling to a wider customer demographic, the medium-term investment in SEO helps immensely. However, it takes a lot of effort and time to push your website up the SERP ladder. As the organic traffic increases, so does the conversion rate.
Social Media Marketing: social media is again another medium-term investment. It takes time to build audience engagement. But, with consistency and helpful content, social media starts to give you some response.
Long Term Investment
The hardest marketing challenges small businesses face are branding and messaging. It often takes years or decades to craft a communication strategy for a brand. The investment almost never stops, and so does the impact.
Think of the big names in your niche and consciously think about how they are communicating with customers. There’s a sense of consistency in their marketing communication, product placement, and even reputation management tactics.
So, when investing in marketing, stop to think about which type of investment you are making. This should help you build your expectations as to when you’ll see the cash flowing.
Here’s the Catch!
The biggest marketing challenge for small businesses is losing patience with marketing. It’s often the problem of expecting the ROI too soon or getting tired of efforts. Budget constraints seem like a daily hassle. But it’s important to understand that the start is always small. The successful campaigns are also often the results of the ones that failed.
It’s important to scale your marketing budget as your business starts to gain momentum. When looking at growth, you’ll need a steady and careful look at the marketing.
The five problems discussed in this article should be well within your areas of marketing problems. You can use the solutions suggested in this article to solve them. Like this article? Do share it with people who’d be interested in reading. Thanks for the time.
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