How to overcome marketing challenges as small business

Your small business may benefit from marketing what you do to reach more customers. But before you start, you should know the obstacles you might need to face. 

This guide outlines how to overcome marketing challenges by covering these popular techniques:

• Increasing your visibility
• Choosing the right platforms
• Creating your content
• Budget your marketing

It is likely that in the earliest stages of your marketing, your priority will be increasing awareness of your brand. This is where a lot of businesses struggle to get themselves noticed. Fortunately, you can ensure that you are in the best position to get noticed. Make sure that you have considered three key elements even before you begin.

The first thing that your business should pay attention to is your unique selling point (USP). Depending on what product or service you offer, this will be the main reason or few reasons that customers should want it. Having something unique to provide is key to starting a business, so you should make sure you keep that point at the forefront of your marketing.

The second point to consider is your brand. Your name, logo, slogan, colour scheme and overall identity need to match your product or service. A poor sense of branding can give customers the wrong impression of what you offer and even put off people if it looks unprofessional.

Successful campaigns need a clear direction. This is especially true for launching your business and getting yourself across. To decide on a creative approach, you must find a problem your target audience has and can relate to. Then choose how to communicate that your product or service is the answer using your USP. 

With your direction, ensure all of your marketing follows that same message, and you will find it easier to build a reputation. Having a strategy will make having ideas for your content easier (detailed later in the article).

Another challenge that businesses often face is struggling to choose the right platforms for their marketing. If you select the wrong media, you can risk targeting customers who are less likely to respond to your brand. If you choose appropriate platforms early, you can spend the proper time learning how best to use them.

To find the best platforms for your business, you have to start with market research. This process is crucial for your marketing because it requires you to find out who you should market to. Then, investigate the appropriate audience for your brand and find out which platforms they are likely to see. 

You can carry out first-hand research to ask potential customers. For example, by putting together surveys, you can determine what people think and ask them to give details about their lives. Then, with the results of your questionnaires, look for similarities between people interested in what you offer and determine what social media platforms they use.

To take your findings further from your market research, you can put together customer profiles (sometimes called customer avatars). To do this, you can create a hypothetical person, choose some characteristics, and create a summary of their lifestyle.

Customer profiles can include:

• Name
• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Occupation
• Interests

Putting together this profile will help you think about when your marketing could reach these people in their daily lives. For example, they could drive to work every morning, so having a radio advert play at 9 am could get people like them.

Another challenge businesses have for their marketing is creating content. Even with a campaign direction and understanding of your target audience, putting those ideas into practice could still be challenging. Although, there are some ways to make content production easier.

Unless you have a background in design and a familiarity with software like Adobe Illustrator or Adobe Photoshop, it’s unlikely you could have ever heard of them. To overcome this, many business owners hire designers, though this could also be a costly expense. 

Luckily, tools like Canva make it easy to create simple designs for your marketing. It has a free version, and it simplifies the process of designing images or short videos so that anyone can do it. As a result, this has become the most popular way to create content for social media advertising.

Now that you can create visuals, the other key content element is the writing that goes with it. How you communicate in written form is called copywriting. Again, there is the option of hiring writers. Still, for many businesses, this is something that you may want to do yourself to save money.  

If you have content like blog posts with a lot of writing, you can use Grammarly to help you proofread it. They offer both free and paid plans. To help you know how to write, decide on a tone of voice based on speaking to your consumer profile. If you ensure that all of your content is written in the same way, you ensure that your marketing stays consistent for your brand.

Another issue that many businesses face is making sure that they stick to their budget. You should keep track of how much you are spending on each activity. The best way to do this is to set up a separate business account and use a tool that provides regular updates on your finances. 

Countingup is the business current account with built-in accounting software that allows you to manage all your financial data in one place. With features like automatic expense categorisation which lets you keep to your budgets by separating your marketing costs. Cash flow insights give you the ability to decide which activities you can continue to use in your campaigns. Confidently keep on top of your business finances wherever you are. 

You can also share your bookkeeping with your accountant instantly without worrying about duplication errors, data lags or inaccuracies. Seamless, simple, and straightforward! 

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