Small businesses tend to have smaller marketing budgets. If you run a small business, you probably don’t have a huge amount to spend on promotion, and this is often doubly true if you’re a solopreneur.

However, even though you might not have a huge budget, it’s still essential to invest in marketing. You need to promote your business if you want to get anywhere with it.

There are multiple marketing methods you can choose to concentrate on and choosing which ones might be right for your business can be hard. But when you know what your goals are, you can prioritize the marketing methods that work for you.

1. Website Design for a Professional Online Presence

If you’re just getting started with marketing your business, the first thing that you need is a great website.

You might already have a website of your own, particularly if your business is online and needs to be based around a site. However, even some people with online businesses often rely on social media pages or online stores hosted on third-party sites at first, instead of building their own website. While this might work for a little while, you will find that you need your own site before long so that you have more control.

There are multiple ways to design a website. You could hire a developer to do all of the coding from scratch, but this is generally only needed for more complicated website needs.

Some website services like Squarespace are easy to use or you might decide to build a WordPress website.

WordPress gives you control over your site and allows you to choose from lots of different themes and tools to help you build your site. You can also get someone else to build your site using one of these tools. Of course, you should also consider your site’s visuals and content.

Read also: How to Start a Blog That Makes $1000/Month: Free Guide for Beginner Bloggers

2. SEO for Long-term Results

Search engine optimization helps you to grow the visibility of your site. One thing to keep in mind is that it’s a long-term strategy, so it’s not something that’s going to get you results right away.

It’s typically going to take you a few months to start to see real results from your SEO strategy, although you can start to see the effects earlier. The good news is that SEO helps to deliver long-term results too. It’s still important to keep up your SEO efforts though, to ensure your site continues to perform well.

SEO is pretty time-consuming, so you may not want to do it all yourself. There are many different elements of SEO to consider.

An agency like Clickthrough Limited can help you to take care of all of your SEO needs. Although you can learn some of the SEO basics yourself, it makes much more sense to have some experts on your side. They will be able to come up with an effective strategy to help you boost the visibility of your site.

3. Paid Search and PPC for Immediate Results

If you’re looking for faster results, there’s also the option of paid search marketing and PPC advertising. Both of these options can increase the traffic to your website pretty much immediately.

As soon as your ads are live, you could start getting clicks through to your site. Of course, that doesn’t mean you will necessarily have a successful campaign right away. However, paid search and PPC ads are usually fairly cost-effective, so you can try them out in small numbers.

Once you’ve spent a small amount and worked out what works for you, you can scale up your campaign for bigger and better results.

If you’re hoping to get more traffic more quickly, this type of marketing could work for you. However, it’s not a good idea to use it in place of SEO. Instead, combine the two to reach your goals.

4. Social Media to Build Community

Social media can be used to market your business in several ways. One way you can use it is to build a community and get people engaged with your brand.

You can use social media to have conversations with people, provide them with useful content, and join in with or create community groups. With various social media platforms available, you can choose those that are most useful for your brand.

Create groups on LinkedIn or share with your followers on Instagram to build a community that works for your audience and helps you to attract the right people to your brand.

5. Email Marketing for Engagement

Another effective way of engaging people is through email marketing.

Email marketing is an excellent method of connecting not just with prospects and leads but also with existing customers. It allows you to stay in touch with people, reminding them to come back to your site.

You can use email marketing to send people newsletters, remind them of their abandoned cart, give them special offers, or send valuable content. You can collect people’s email addresses in multiple ways, through signups and account creations, lead forms, and more.

6. Content Marketing for Everything

Behind many of these marketing methods, you need to have a solid content strategy. Content is the backbone of digital marketing.

You need it for SEO, social media, PPC ads, lead generation, email marketing, and much more. Without good content, you won’t have anything valuable to offer to your audience.

You need to be prepared to give them information, entertaining and useful content. While it should get people interested in your brand, it shouldn’t be all about self-promotion. It should be relevant to your business and your audience, without being pure sales material.

No matter which of the above marketing methods you choose, you will likely need to have content to back it up. It’s worth spending time on developing a content strategy so that you have content in different formats that you can use with different marketing channels.

You can use technology such as poshmark sharing application to post content to multiple channels to improve your overall marketing strategy and the delivery of content.

If you’re not sure where to start with marketing, decide what your main goals are. This can help you to choose the right marketing methods.