Marketing Channels for Small Businesses

marketing

Oct 7

The blog is for creative business owners who want to grow their businesses online. I’ll be sharing blog posts that cover an aspect of digital marketing for creatives, whether you sell products or services. It’s a marketing pep talk, if you will.

I’ll be talking about all things SEO, marketing funnels, advertising, email marketing, or mindset around marketing. Each post will encourage and inspire you with actionable tips: sans marketing jargon.

As marketers in 2022, we’re obviously going to use social media for marketing our businesses.

But what if that all went away one day? What if you no longer had access to your Instagram or TikTok account? Would you still be able to reach your audience?

If the answer is no, then you’re in the right place.

In this post, we’ll be covering…

Owning our marketing channels
Short-term vs long-term marketing
Digital Marketing
Traditional Marketing

Do You Own Your Marketing Channels?

When you identify the channels you do your marketing through, how many of them do you own?

If the answer is zero… Then Houston, we have a problem.

Let me give you an example.

For Marketing with Menekse, I primarily focus on Instagram and email marketing. I also have my website, which gets visitors from organic search, and a podcast. These are four different channels that I use to voice my brand’s opinion.

Instagram belongs to Facebook, not to me. So if the algorithm changed or I got banned from the platform, I would lose that marketing channel. This channel exists at the whim of someone else.

My email list belongs to me. If someone signs up for it, that is data my business owns. It’s my responsibility, and I can contact them. They might unsubscribe, but even if my email service provider broke down, I could get a new one and still email all those people.

My website also belongs to me. I own my website. I get traffic to it from Google’s organic search.

If you are selling only through marketplaces or promoting only through social media, your business exists at the whim of another business - and it’s risky.

In October 2020, Facebook suspended my business’s advertising account and later deleted me from the platform. They said that, due to Covid, they would potentially never be able to give me my account access back. I couldn’t get through to anyone in customer service. I hadn’t done anything wrong, and they have since reinstated both my advertising and personal accounts.

But for eight weeks during the busiest quarter of the year, I couldn’t do any paid advertising.

Thankfully, we have a good amount of brand awareness, a mailing list, and a strong presence on search engines, so we still saw growth despite this challenge.

The experience highlighted to me how fragile many businesses are. Focusing on one platform has been the recommendation of many a marketing guru speaking to small businesses, but it’s a risky strategy.

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Short Term vs Long Term Marketing

While thinking about our marketing strategies, let’s look at channel strategies - for instance, social media, SEO, and email marketing.

We’ve already seen that marketing strategy is what connects our present situation to our future vision.

That bit in between is made up of regular, consistent action. Strategy feels like quite an intangible concept, but it’s a highly practical action plan.

There are two types of marketing we need to do:

Short-term: This brings cash into our businesses and helps us stay connected with our audience daily.
Long-term: This ensures our businesses can grow beyond our capacity to respond to Instagram DMs!

Close up of a white womans hands writing in a notebook.

Short-term activities include:

Social media
PPC
Media buying advertising
Influencer marketing
Discounts and sales
Certain types of events.

They will typically bring in money 0-48 hours after implementing them (e.g. posting on your Instagram account and getting sales).

Long-term activities include:

SEO and email marketing (both of which I do a lot of and teach on!)
PR
Overall brand-focused marketing.

There is some crossover between these because you can create SEO content that you share on social media and see an immediate benefit, or you can build an email marketing strategy and send an email to your list tomorrow and make sales. Equally, short-term strategies like paid advertising can increase brand awareness and speed up your marketing efforts significantly.

Both are needed to grow your business.

Chances are you didn’t start your business to become a full-time marketer. So we want to be mindful that our activities need to change as we grow.

Focusing on short-term marketing will always tie you to having to do short-term marketing, which is resource intensive (for finances or time).

Focusing solely on long-term marketing means you won’t generate enough revenue to be sustainable in the short term, and your business will take much longer to grow.

Short-term marketing will help you get cash in so your business can continue to grow and be financially sustainable.

Long-term marketing will help you build marketing systems that generate sales and grow beyond your personal capacity, and have a higher and longer-lasting return on investment.

Let’s plan your short and long term marketing goals together

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Traditional vs Digital Marketing Channels

Let’s look at channels, which can each have their strategy applied, and briefly outline the difference between traditional and digital channels.

Traditional marketing includes:

TV adverts
Radio
Print advertising in magazines and newspapers
Direct mail
Outdoor advertising, including billboards and vehicles
Maybe even telemarketing. Think Don Draper in Mad Men.

The barriers to entry for this kind of marketing are fairly substantial. Financially and creatively, they are resource-heavy, plus it’s really hard to understand the exact return on investment you’re getting.

Digital marketing includes:

Social media
Email marketing
Pay Per Click advertising
Search engine marketing

Digital marketing has a much lower barrier to entry for businesses because of the amount of organic visibility that has been possible.

There are some marketing disciplines that crossover between print and digital, for example, PR, which can get you print and television placements but is also hugely valuable for your brand’s digital presence (which I’ll talk about more next week).

Each of these channels is its own marketing specialism, so if you’re overwhelmed by marketing? Don’t worry! That’s normal.

People build entire careers within ONE marketing channel. Just because the barrier to entry on a channel is low doesn’t mean it’s easy! So as you’re marketing your business online, be nice to yourself about it.

Main Takeaways

Moving forward, I’ve got some tips and thinking points for you.

Try to focus on at least two platforms: one you own (like email marketing) and one that’s low-hanging fruit (like social media). Think about what marketing channels you use and which of them belong to you.

Ask yourself these questions: