The affordability of digital marketing is opening new roads for small businesses and allowing them to compete both locally and globally with businesses that are far larger.

Yet small businesses can still learn quite a bit from businesses with entire marketing firms at their disposal. Here are a few small business marketing tips that don’t require a massive marketing budget to pull them off

Create Visually Compelling Content

Thanks to creative tools like Canva and SnapSeed capturing and creating quality, attention-getting content is easy. This content is your ticket to improving brand recognition, increasing brand advocacy and improving sales in your business. Use pictures of your employees, customers and products that help tell a story about your business and inspire action.

customer sharing his experience with small business owner

Encourage Customers to Share Their Experience

While incentivizing customers to provide reviews is often seen as a black hat tactic, the average customer isn’t going to look for ways to review your business unless they have a negative experience to share. Big businesses like McDonald’s know this, which is why they offer incentives at the bottom of their receipts for customers who complete their surveys.

According to a recent Zendesk survey, 88% of customers have been influenced by an online customer service review when making a buying decision. Is your business reflected on review sites like Yelp? Need more reviews on Facebook? Just ask! As long as you aren’t skewing the results by only offering incentives for good reviews, there’s nothing wrong with a little positive reinforcement.

small business location

Think Beyond Your Four Walls

Do you have a unique product or clothing line? Look for opportunities to sell these items outside of your brick and mortar location. Increase brand awareness by partnering with local businesses and non-profits to sell your items at a discounted price and seek out strategic opportunities to showcase your inventory at local fairs, festivals, pop-up shops, farmers markets and other community events

Ignore Your Gut

With all the analytical tools available to small businesses today, there’s no reason to fly blind on a continuous basis. By scrutinizing your marketing initiatives, you can analyze what’s working and what’s not. Maybe it’s not real creative to study these graphs, but it’s still a great way to gauge whether or not your creative efforts are working.

By incorporating these small business strategies into your marketing campaign, you might just be able to go toe to toe with major competitors in your industry. When you discover how well these small business marketing tips work, you’ll want to hit the repeat button on them time and time again.

Yamarie Grullon

Yamarie Grullon has years of experience creating helpful & engaging content for small business owners. As Director of Content Strategy at ShopKeep, a leading iPad Point of Sale System, Yamarie provides merchants with practical advice on all things related to business or point of sale.