8 Steps to Effective Small Business Marketing Strategy (and why you need us to do it!)

Take your business to the next level with marketing solutions tailored specifically for you—and do it from anywhere! We’re here to help make that happen, acting as an extension of your team without any of those pesky overhead costs like salary or benefits. Let us bring our expertise to your small business and together we can position your company for success.

At EVH Marketing, our goal is to help small businesses get business. We do this not only as a service provider but literally as an extension of your team, helping to set branding strategy, focusing on target markets, and attracting and engaging these markets to bring in new business more efficiently. We have a flexible pricing structure that meets the marketing needs of all types of established small to medium-sized businesses and innovative startups. Our amazing clients range from small manufacturers, fabricators, retail shops, health and wellness clinics, non-profit organizations, and service providers of all kinds like interior designers, attorneys, travel agents, builders, electrical contractors, landscaping or paving contractors, HVAC, and roofing contractors, and more! We offer world-class digital marketing services for local, regional, and national small businesses at an affordable price point.

Once your branding strategies, goals, and campaigns are set, there is no need to find additional agencies or a dedicated team to execute. We do that too. Small business branding can incorporate logo design, brochures, print/online ads, writing articles and corporate literature, honing your messaging, and more. Whether design work for branding, print, electronic media, or even products, web design, online marketing, and direct marketing, EVH Marketing takes care of it all.

We offer the creative thinking and services you can get from a digital marketing agency, but with the strategic focus and commitment to brand (and budget) of your own marketing department. In short, our business is to help small businesses like yours get more business.

• Marketing management
• Brand development
• Content strategy
• Advertising including Google ads
• Business development
• Demand and lead generation
• Market development
• Interactive communications
• Direct marketing
• Product marketing
• Social media marketing

So now you may be wondering how exactly this all happens. There are 8 major components to developing an effective marketing strategy. Let’s take a look at what goes into effective digital marketing and why you need an experienced small business branding agency like EVH Marketing to walk with you each step of the way.

1. Define Your Brand – What Is Your Message?

Having a successful business hinges heavily on its brand. Your logo and visual identity are just the start—from digital marketing campaigns and web design to your social media presence, all aspects of how you are perceived should be united in conveying who you are as a small business. Thoughtful consideration must go into every online or offline interaction with customers, new leads, and competitors to positively impact your company’s continuing reputation. Our small business branding services will also work with you to protect your brand once an effective brand identity is established.

2. Define and Research Your Target Audience

Knowing who you’re trying to serve is key to setting your business up for success. Rather than wasting resources on an audience that is unlikely to purchase from you, focus instead on identifying people with needs that your small business can meet. Be sure to get as specific as possible in this process, researching factors such as age, gender, and location alongside values, income levels, and interests—all of which contribute to creating a message that resonates well with them. To ensure thoroughness when forming an effective branding strategy geared toward serving your target market’s needs most effectively, regularly research business trends in your industry including customer polls and surveys.

Check out our blog post: It’s Not All About You which explains why it really isn’t about your preferences when creating a marketing campaign. Your customers reign supreme.

3. Develop a Brand Strategy That Resonates With Your Targeted Customers

A comprehensive branding strategy can be a powerful tool for small businesses to increase customer engagement and build brand loyalty. By defining business objectives, mission, values, and vision at its core, small businesses gain direction in their brand guidelines. Connecting with customers on an emotional level can make all the difference in building long-term relationships, which lead to ongoing business growth. A good small business branding agency recognizes that aligning a small business’s brand messaging with the needs of its target audience will set them up for success. This is another reason why it’s so important to get to know your ideal customer and cater your advertising methods to their values.

4. Analyze the Competition

To give your company the best chance to rise to the top, you must understand what you’re up against. You need to conduct thorough competitor research and take a deep dive into the competitive landscape. It’s critical to identify each of your competitor’s unique selling points. This way, you’ll discover how they differentiate themselves from other players, which allows you to see where your company can carve out its place by providing customers with something unique that only you can offer. Using your competition to create your own effective marketing strategy means that you can find your niche and rise above larger companies in your industry.

5. Create Content: Develop Unique High-Quality Content That Will Engage and Entertain Customers

Strong content development is a crucial part of any marketing strategy. It’s not only about writing blog posts and creating infographics—it encompasses everything from the research process to promotion on social media, search engine optimization, tracking performance results, and more. By establishing an effective plan of action that meets your customers’ needs with appealing digital content, you can build trust with your audience and eventual customer relationships.

Content marketing is not for the faint of heart. An effective content development strategy will save time (which is money), save effort (which also boils down to money), and ultimately save money (which is definitely money).

Effective content development goes beyond producing high-quality materials; it’s also about having an efficient and organized execution method that delivers positive results. To keep your strategy on track, planning is essential. Research into target audiences should be thorough in order to create targeted pieces tailored towards achieving business goals while optimizing every piece of content for keywords and phrases that will rank your content well on Google and other search engines.

Check out our blog post: Sometimes Less is More in Marketing Content

6. Measure Success: Analyze Data From Different Platforms to Track Progress and Adjust Strategy as Needed

Maximizing marketing efforts to meet business goals is key for any organization that wishes to succeed. However, success depends not only on having a great digital marketing strategy but also on accurately measuring the performance of digital campaigns—something many organizations fail at today. To secure steady growth and profits, it’s essential that businesses make use of tools that help them determine their campaign effectiveness and track milestones effectively.

We can help you track the effectiveness of your digital marketing strategies and maximize impact by gathering data from various sources. Our partners use Google Analytics and other professional digital marketing tools to gather information such as unique visitors, page views, search engine traffic, inbound links, and bounce rates. This data can provide a valuable overview of digital performance. These are key metrics that analytics use for measurement objectives.

7. Monitor Trends: Stay Up-To-Date With the Latest Digital Marketing Trends, Tools, and Strategies for Small Businesses

Digital marketing for small businesses is continuously evolving, and it takes a professional touch to stay ahead of the game. With algorithms constantly changing and ranking factors never staying still for long, navigating through this complex landscape often presents an overwhelming challenge even for seasoned marketers let alone small business owners. But there’s hope—enlisting our expert advice on the latest trends can be your saving grace when competing in the digital market. Keeping up with these strategies will help ensure that your content rises above the rest and propels your small business toward success.

Marketing Insider Group highlighted 21 digital marketing trends that are critical for successful companies in 2023. Some of these include story-driven content, conversational marketing, responsible consumerism, and hyper-local marketing. Digital marketing agencies of tomorrow may see an entirely new set of trends. This may seem overwhelming when you need to focus on running your business. Let our marketing services take this burden off your shoulders. It’s what we do!

8. Utilize Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tactics For Increased Visibility

To enhance your business’s online presence, successful search engine optimization is key. According to Forbes, the best digital marketing agencies will help a small business gain SEO by focusing on a few key points:

Website prominence: This is composed of a website’s age, amount of backlinks (references by other websites), and amount and type of content.

User experience: This is how users interact with the small business’s website, especially on mobile devices.

Strategic use of keywords: It’s not just about making a list of keywords but how you use them. Are you answering your customers’ questions quickly and effectively?

When it comes to optimizing your website for online searches, aim to use relevant and meaningful keywords. This will help customers find what they’re looking for with ease—bonus points if you can also work them into the content creatively! However, make sure not to go overboard, or else the text’s purpose may be distorted and no one likes an annoying read. Ultimately, ensuring that your web pages are clear and readable should take precedence over other optimizations. EVH Marketing consultants and partners are excellent at finding the most effective keywords and using them strategically in content marketing to get your website ranking as highly as possible.

Here are some questions that WE often hear from small business owners looking for the right digital marketing agency:

Do small businesses need branding services?

The short answer—YES! Creating a strong brand is essential for small businesses. From building trust and recognition to fostering loyalty, your company’s branding directly influences how customers perceive you. Statistics from Accenture reveal the importance of strong branding: 66% of people said they were attracted to certain brands because “the brand has a great culture—it does what it says it will do and delivers on its promises,” and 62% desired a brand that “has ethical values and demonstrates authenticity in everything it does.” Having robust branding helps define your products or services, customer relations strategies, employee relationships standards, etc., as well as showcase values that align with societal goals which add immense value in today’s marketplace. Our small business branding services will make sure your brand portrays the right message to the right audience that aligns with both of your values.

What does a branding agency do?

LinkedIn defines a branding agency as a company that “communicates your uniqueness, your voice, and your values in a way that is visually appealing. They create your presence in the marketplace by developing a brand that showcases your identity and influences consumers.”

Small business branding services are a great way to give your company’s branding an extra boost. We offer the services of marketers, copywriters, graphic designers, and strategists all in one place! Importantly, we tailor these services according to the needs of your business. With marketing services that specialize in website development, SEO, ads, social media engagement, video marketing,  and print, you’ll get better value for money than hiring staff in-house!

What do branding services include?

We will team with you to develop a brand identity that reflects who you are as a business. After we establish what your brand stands for, we will work together to identify your branding needs, which could include:

• Designing and developing logos, business cards, letterhead, brochures, newsletters, presentations, and other corporate identity pieces
• Providing a creative strategy and project management as well as copywriting, editing, and overseeing brand consistency
• Graphic design and layout for promotional and other communications and sales print material

What type of marketing is best for small businesses?

While small business marketing trends are always changing, there are some tried and true marketing strategies that aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Entrepreneur Magazine named 10 small business marketing strategies that are hot among the best branding companies:

1. Get to know your target audience
2. E-mail marketing
3. Social media advertising
4. Influencer marketing to build brand awareness
5. Connecting with local businesses
6. Offering customer incentives
7. Building a list of email addresses using social media or website forms
8. Automated marketing (used for social media marketing, email marketing, and sms marketing)
9. Investing in search engine optimization
10. Blogging about the latest trends in your industry

EVH Marketing services can help you with any and all of these marketing strategies to get your small business where it needs to go!

What digital marketing services do you provide?

As a small business branding agency, We can offer you customized advertising services that are perfect for your situation and advertising budget. Some examples include:

• Custom web design for your business or a fresh update to your current website.
• Review and analysis of the competition, your web design, and your current online communications strategy.
• Development of a comprehensive plan to maximize success, with interactive communications playing a vital role. This often includes a social media marketing strategy to generate new leads.
• Strategic implementation of our digital marketing plan, including functional development, content generation, and copywriting for your new or current website.

Is it worth it to hire a marketing agency?

Most of the top digital marketing agencies are outside the price range for a typical small business. That’s what makes our digital marketing solutions different: we are a one-stop shop for marketing services for all kinds of small businesses without the price tag of a large branding agency that has lots of overhead. We will get to know you and provide you with the specific services that your small business needs. We can work together to determine how to maximize your advertising dollars to achieve your business goals, taking into account your ideal timeline, budget, and our internal and external resources. Then we will determine how to implement your marketing services and measure the results to know where we achieve the best ROI.

How will you help me develop leads and increase sales?

• We will design a plan to identify new sales opportunities and create more demand for your products or services
• We will identify tactics to reach your target customers and incentivize them with the power of cross-selling
• We will develop strategy, campaign, and project management services to execute direct communications with potential leads and customers through mail, email marketing, and more

So what can you do for me? The bottom line:

Maximize your marketing potential without the commitment of full-time staff—let us be your virtual solution. With our expertise, you can harness the power of marketing regardless of location: we offer options to work from wherever is most convenient for you—whether it’s our office or yours, down the street or across the country! Get all the advantages of an in-house team but no extra obligations, just professional results tailored specifically to meet your needs.

With decades of experience under our belt, We know a thing or two about marketing—and more importantly, how to help you get the best for your business. Our specialty is promoting your small business with professional skill and expertise so that it can reach its highest potential; from reaching prospective customers and maintaining relationships with current customers to promoting services and products tailored specifically to them. Put simply: We’ll give you an edge over the everyday competition by optimizing growth opportunities while reaping maximum rewards!

At EVH Marketing, we understand that marketing strategies are not one-size-fits-all. We take the time to get an in-depth understanding of your business’s unique needs and goals so that together we can develop a tailored plan for success—no off-the-shelf solutions here! From past successes (and failures) to current challenges, let’s chat about what it will take for you to reach more customers than ever before.

Contact us for a free consultation!