30 Creative Marketing Ideas for Small Business Success

Every business reflects an entrepreneur’s vision and passion, and with so much time, effort, and resources put into it, you surely want to find every avenue to help it take off.

To help with this, we’ve compiled a list of 30 creative marketing ideas for small business success. Drawing from incredibly varied promotional arenas – from content marketing to automation and everything else in between – you are sure to find something that helps you take your marketing strategy to the next level.

Let’s get started!

Video Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses

Put simply; video content gives you one of the best mediums to implement innovative marketing ideas and convey your message to an audience. Here are but a few examples of what video can help you to accomplish.

Educate your audience

People usually resort to the Internet whenever they want to know how to do something or learn more about a given topic. You can take advantage of this practice by making content that gives them the relevant information they might be looking for. Here are a few styles that can help you with that:

• Educative: Widely used to provide general information about a topic. In marketing, they are mainly related to your business, your product or service, and adjacent areas of interest your audience might share.
• Product videos: Videos that focus on demonstrating how a product or service works while showcasing its main features. They excel at assuaging customer doubts and presenting your offerings in the best possible light.
• Tutorials: These are videos intended to teach people how to do something following a very detailed and specific sequence of steps. Tutorials can be great to show your audience how to use your product or service.

Create a video-powered conversion funnel

One of the best aspects of video content is that it can fulfill wildly varied marketing objectives thanks to its flexibility and versatility. Making it possible for you to develop an entirely self-sufficient, video-powered conversion funnel. For example, here are three different styles that each perfectly suits a different stage of a customer funnel (awareness, consideration, and decision):

• Commercials: Also known as video ads, they let you introduce your business or products to new audiences in unique and memorable ways, prompting those dealing with relevant pain points to find out more about you!
• Explainers: Explainers harness the power of storytelling to describe a product, service, business, or convey complex messages through attractive animations that can encourage people to move to the next stage of the funnel.
• Testimonials: Showcasing happy and satisfied customers, testimonials are great at giving customers the little extra nudge they need to make a purchase decision.

Entertain your audience

Customer delight is a big part of marketing today, and it’ll only get bigger! Give your viewers something they enjoy, and they’ll keep coming back for more after the first purchase. Here are a couple of styles that can help you do just that

• Interactive videos: These are videos that allow the audience to interact with the content in a variety of ways, by clicking, dragging, scrolling, and even responding to quizzes in order to enhance their experience and make them active participants in the viewing experience.
• Video series: These videos cover a specific topic throughout a series of very short episodes, which you can use to establish longer-lasting client-business relationships.
• Social media videos: Videos created with the sole purpose of being posted on social platforms while following the specific guidelines of each channel. Do them right, and you’ll have content your audience will be delighted to engage with through likes, comments, and shares, improving not only your online presence but your brand’s potential scope and reach.

Establish a YouTube presence

Being the second-largest search engine after Google, YouTube can deliver your video content to a massive audience that actually prefers watching video over reading text. If you already have some pieces ready, start posting them on YouTube and watch your viewer numbers grow while solidifying your online presence and having more people find your brand. Definitively one of the marketing ideas for small businesses you can’t afford to ignore!

Email Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses

Sending emails remains one of the best marketing campaign ideas for new businesses. In no small manner because it can help you draw in new customers, build your fledgling brand’s reputation, get new visitors to engage with your products or store, and nurture relationships with your existing customers. Here are a couple of ways to use email to do so:

Implement lead magnets

The first step of any email marketing campaign is growing your email list, and there’s no better way to do it than by using lead magnets. The idea is to offer prospects a free item or service in exchange for their contact details.

You can entice them with an e-book, a service trial, a free course or webinar, or even a discount. However, the best lead magnets tend to meet at least some of these criteria to be effective:

• Solve a real problem for your audience.
• Instantly accessible and can be delivered right away.
• Easily consumed.
• Simple and easy to understand.
• Demonstrate your expertise in the field.

Once you have that down, you can place your lead magnet in your blog, product page, or anywhere else that will feel authentic and logical for the consumer to find and engage with.

Send newsletters

Once your lead magnets have been successful, you’ll have a number of prospects that have signed up to your email list. They’ve shown interest in you and your business, and they are primed to receive messages, updates, and news from you.

Newsletters offer subscribers all the information they need in a reliable and convenient way. The problem is that people already receive hundreds of emails each week, so you have to stand out.

Start with a great subject line that raises your prospects’ curiosity and compels them to open your email while being mindful and avoiding words and phrases that can trigger spam filters.

An effective business marketing idea here is to promote sales, deals, and coupons via newsletter to boost your conversion rates. However, using expressions like “click here” or “exclusive deal” in your subject line will most likely get your email flagged by filters!

Segment your email list

Segmenting your email list involves “tagging” your subscribers into different categories, or “segments”, based on certain conditions. The goal of segmentation is to nurture your leads and convert them into customers by sending them more personalized and relevant emails tailored to the stage of the funnel they find themselves in.

If you don’t know how to start the segmentation, here are some email marketing ideas for small businesses that can give you a great place to start:

• New subscribers: welcome your new subscribers with a targeted email.
• Location: if you’re launching an event, notify those subscribers who live in the area.
• Inactivity: remind subscribers that they haven’t engaged with your emails for a while (and give them a good reason to!).
• Shopping cart abandonment: remind subscribers who’ve added items to their cart that they have yet to check out. Maybe throw in a coupon to incentivize them to do so.

Send customer satisfaction surveys

Growing a new company hinges on customers being happy enough with your product or service to come back. Sending customer satisfaction surveys is a unique marketing idea for small businesses to request feedback from their customers while learning more about them to provide an even better service in the future.

The key lies in choosing the right questions so that your customers are more willing to respond. Some of the basic questions you’ll want to include are:

• Did we meet your expectations? How?
• Is there anything you think we can improve?
• How would you rate the service you received?
• Would you recommend us to your friends?

If the response rate doesn’t satisfy you, you may want to consider offering an incentive for completing the survey, like a coupon or other discounts for their next purchase.

Content Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses

Spending some time thinking up great marketing campaign ideas is an essential part of content marketing! It can be overwhelming to decide where to start a content campaign and figuring out the avenues that best suit your company in terms of time and resources can save you a lot of headaches along the road. Here are some you should consider:

Create a blog

Posting regularly on a blog has many benefits. It can attract more organic traffic to your website, increase your business’ exposure, and help you establish yourself as an industry expert. You can write about anything you want, as long as it ties into your business or products, or even have guest-bloggers contribute from time to time to introduce new perspectives your audience can benefit from.

Host a webinar

Through webinars, you can offer potential customers a way to get to know you and your brand better. Focus on topics that will be valuable for them, and provide just the right amount of useful and relevant information to pique their interest and lead them to your business.

Launch a podcast

Text and video aren’t the only mediums through which people consume content. Podcasts are becoming increasingly popular because you can reach prospects when they’re going about their daily lives, in the car, or even exercising, so it’s a type of content that usually doesn’t compete with your other promotional avenues.

Build a content calendar

With so many types of content playing a role in your strategy, it can be challenging to keep them straight. A content calendar can help you keep organized on what to post when to do so, and where. It can also provide consistent engagement and encourage your customers to trust and become familiar with your brand when they know what to expect.

Repurpose old content

Once you have some dead posts deep in your blog’s history, or old videos that have seen better days, you should repurpose them and save time on content creation! You can simply update your content to post it again with some new data or use their info to transform them into another medium (like video or podcast).

Make infographics

Infographics are powerful yet often underestimated marketing tools you can harness to drive up referral traffic and links to your website.

The key to great infographics is to make them very easy to understand at first glance and fill them with data that your audience will be interested in. The best part is that you can make them yourself, as there are plenty of free tools available online to do so!

SEO Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses

Search Engine Optimization is an obligatory inclusion in this list of marketing ideas for small businesses because it can help you get noticed and strengthen your foothold in your niche as you are starting out! Here are some areas of SEO you should focus on to start:

Create a Google My Business account

Starting your SEO marketing strategy by creating an account on Google My Business is probably one of the best marketing campaign ideas you’ll read about today. Why? Because it will allow you to show up on Google Maps and the local section of Google Search!

GMB accounts are free and very easy to set up as you need only to follow the instructions on the page. That said, you’ll also have to properly optimize your business listing in the search results, so here are some things to keep in mind while doing so:

• Write your complete business name and address so that you show up on Google Maps.
• Make sure to include your business in the correct category.
• Add current business contact details, like phone number and website.
• Ask customers to leave reviews on your business page to rank closer to the top.
• Check that your business information remains accurate, consistent, and up-to-date as time goes on.

Master keyword research

To optimize your content, you have to research which keywords will help it rank higher. They’re the words that your buyer persona is already searching for online, so you’ll surely find that there are many of them.

While it might be tempting to include them all to improve your ranking, overstuffing keywords can actually have a negative impact on your rankings. So, we recommend focusing on industry and locally relevant keywords, to begin with.

Brainstorm and make a list of keyword ideas you’d like to use. Then, you can research your competition to find out which keywords they’re using or use a keyword research tool to select the best options. Use these words to inform and improve your content strategy.

Optimize on-page SEO

On-page SEO is a digital marketing idea that goes hand in hand with keyword research. In fact, keywords alone won’t deliver the desired results unless you implement them on your website’s content, page titles, headlines, URL, meta tags, and so on.

The specific elements you’ll want to optimize will vary depending on the content of the page you are working on, but here are three of the most common ones:

• Titles and headers: Keep them clear, descriptive, and concise (about 55 or 60 characters). Include your primary keyword at the beginning of the title.
• URL: Reflect the hierarchy of the information on the page to help the search engine understand what it’s about.
• Meta Description: Give people more information about the page. Make it enticing enough to serve as a call to action, but try to keep it under 150 characters or so.

There are plenty of free website audit tools out there that can help you identify on-page optimizations.

Make your site mobile-friendly

Being mobile-friendly has recently become a primary ranking factor for the top search engines due to the staggering amount of users who use their cellphones or tablets to browse online. So, when websites and their content are optimized to display properly on mobile devices, they’ll rank higher in the search results; it’s as simple as that.

Some of the best practices for Mobile SEO include using text that’s readable without having to zoom in on it, placing links far apart from each other so that the correct one can be tapped, and having a responsive design that will adjust to the size of the device’s screen. So, make sure your site meets those minimum requirements.

Social Media Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses

In a world where so much customer engagement happens on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, unique marketing ideas for social media are essential to build brand awareness, foster relationships with your customers, and understand your audience better. Here are a few that can be particularly helpful for small businesses looking to grow their online presence:

Establish a social media presence

Social media presence refers to your business’s visibility on the different popular social channels and how it engages with its audience there. Building your social media profile and growing your presence is hard work, so you need to make sure you’re doing it right from the get-go.

There are several ways you can do this, and while individual elements will be slightly different depending on the platform you are focusing on, but here are some things that can help you establish your social presence:

• Include hashtags in your social media posts to expand your reach and reinforce your brand identity.
• Advertise on Facebook to target a specific audience based on location, age, and interests.
• Interact with your followers to discover and address their questions or concerns.
• Create CTAs around your content that invites them to follow and subscribe to your social accounts.

Showcase User-Generated Content (UGC)

Social media users usually expect you to provide a constant stream of content, which can certainly be time-consuming and resource-intensive.

Sprinkling some user-generated content into your social feed is one of the most innovative marketing ideas for small businesses you can implement in a social setup because you can devote some extra time to growing your company’s presence while delighting your users with a bit of spotlight. You can share photos or stories you’ve been tagged in to increase engagement and offer social proof in an organic way.

Run a contest or giveaway

Contests and giveaways are incredible engagement boosters because the chance of winning something encourages people to interact. They’re also fairly easy to run; you just need a combination of the following elements:

1. A prize: It should be related to your business, and it can be anything from a product to a free membership or tickets to an event. Large prizes that are unrelated to your brand tend to attract people who aren’t actually interested in your business, so make it things that would appeal to your audience specifically.
2. A way to enter: The possibilities are endless here. You can start with a basic “like and comment to enter” and then gradually move onto more complex and creative contests such as asking followers to come up with a mascot for your brand.

Depending on the prize and the type of contest, you might want to include some terms and conditions as well to cover yourself legally.

Partner with influencers

Teaming up with influencers is a great opportunity to reach their large audiences and grow your social presence. There are influencers on every social media platform you can think of, so you can easily find one whose audience lines up with yours or even reach new customers you wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.

Reach out to them and see if they’d be interested in featuring and tagging you in a post or on their story to advertise your business in exchange for a free product. We can assure you they’ll say yes!

Marketing Automation Ideas for Small Businesses

Running your own company is quite demanding, we know. So, one of the best ways to implement and keep up with some of the marketing ideas for small businesses we’ve talked about today is to automatize repetitive processes so that you can devote your time and resources to other aspects of your strategy. Here are a couple of good automation examples you can look into:

Use a chat box or chatbot

Chat boxes and bots can help you cultivate leads by helping them solve questions and doubts about your offerings in real-time. The difference between these two tools is that chat boxes require a human to handle inquiries, while chatbots use artificial intelligence.

Both might require some effort to deploy at first, but they can save you valuable time as you won’t have to respond to hundreds of daily queries asking about the same thing.

Implement autoresponders

Another way of nurturing leads through automation is by implementing autoresponders, a time-based email or message that you send out automatically after someone subscribes to your email list or fills out a contact form.

By welcoming or thanking new subscribers, you can make a good first impression, and the best part is that you can do so passively because the autoresponder will take care of it for you. Another option is to use this tool to let your customers know that you’ve received their contact request and that someone will be in touch soon.

The Takeaway

And there you have it! A list of creative marketing ideas for small businesses success.

While not comprehensive – the world of digital marketing is expansive! – it should give you plenty of strategies and inspiration to get you started. Hopefully, you’ve found some options in different areas that you liked and can start implementing them now to see your brand skyrocket.

So, what are you waiting for? Pick a few of the ones that caught your eye, and see how you can use them to improve your company’s marketing strategy! We promise the results won’t disappoint 😀