100 + Marketing Ideas to Help You Grow Your Business

100 Marketing Ideas to Focus on for Your Small Business

What if you have a list of 100 marketing ideas that will help you prepare and implement your small business marketing strategy? Don’t worry. I have put more than 100 essential marketing ideas you can use today.

Your small business lacks the resources to promote your products and services. However, if you want to succeed, you need as many marketing ideas as possible. You need to be creative and flexible. Creativity and flexibility will allow you to attract many potential customers.

There are so many different marketing ideas and tactics available for small business owners. Something you can implement will depend on your creativity and knowledge as an entrepreneur.

In this post, I will try to put more than 100 marketing ideas in one place that you can start implementing immediately. Indeed, the list is not final, and if you think something is missing, feel free to submit suggestions.

Also, at the end of this article, you can download a simple to-do list with the possibility for you to develop specific action steps and start implementing these more than 100 marketing ideas.

1. Prepare Yourself Before You Start With Marketing Ideas

  1. Analyze your industry. Use these 40 questions you can answer to analyze your industry.
  2. Develop your marketing strategy. You want a strategic approach when it comes to your marketing tactics. Marketing is something that could make or break your small business.
  3. Develop an effective marketing plan. Now you need to translate your strategy into a marketing plan. Your marketing plan is not something you can set and forget it. You must continuously update your plan regarding changes in the market and customer preferences.
  4. Define your target market. If you already have identified your target market, spend some time checking if it is the target market with potential customers with the right purchase intent. Answer what your target market wants the most from you. This is important for the implementation of your next ideas here.

✋ Warning

Follow this step-by-step guide to identifying a target market for your company.

  1. Conduct market research. You can use this complete guide to market research and these six marketing research methods. Learning as much as possible about your target customers would be best.
  2. Answer how you can satisfy the customer’s needs in your target market. When you know what your target market wants, you can consider how to satisfy their needs.
  3. Create buyer personas for each segment. You can follow these 11 steps to create a buyer persona to target the right customers with your marketing tactics.
  4. Define your core competitive advantage. Ensure that your competitive advantage is strong enough to achieve market success.

RelatedSmart Skills You Will Need Now as an Entrepreneur

2. Improve Your Offer

  1. Analyze your offer and improve it. Connect your target customer’s needs from your market research with your current offerings and make a list of possible improvements. Think about the product’s features, your total offer, customer services, etc.
  2. Extend your offer with additional value for your customers. Use everything you have discovered from preparation to extend your offer with what customers want.
  3. Track changes and improve wherever you find an opportunity and need for improvement. Without monitoring the progress of your changes in the offer, you can not know what brings you the results you want to achieve and if there is something more you can do.

3. Develop Your Basic Marketing Weapons

  1. Create a marketing budget. Ensure that you will have enough budget for your marketing weapons. You can not implement any of the ideas explained here without the budget. Think about how much percentage оф тхе ревенуе you will use for the marketing budget.
  2. Ensure you have a representative logo. Ensure that your logo will communicate your brand most efficiently with your potential customers. Here are six reasons you need a good logo and important design tips and mistakes you will need to escape.
  3. Create and use a marketing calendar for all your marketing ideas and tactics you use or plan to use. You can start with this marketing calendar template to plan your marketing activities.
  4. Start developing business cards, or if you already have, improve their design. Follow this guide to learn about different types of business cards and what they need to contain. Create business cards for all your employees and encourage them to share them with potential customers.
  5. Fully redesign all your communications, like mail letters, invoices, and receipts, to communicate information about your business’s offer value.
100 marketing ideas
  1. Analyze and redesign all of your calls to action in all your marketing tactics. Don’t forget to test the content and its effectiveness. You need to try different calls to action (CTA) to discover what type of CTA brings the best results for your company.

4. Leads Database

  1. Start building a list of current and potential customers. Ensure your list is updated and ready for your next marketing ideas and tactics.
  2. Develop a lead generation form for offline leads. Ensure you have all the necessary forms for offline lead generation. For example, you can use your sales team to ask for contact details after each sale they make and collect offline leads.
  3. Make a phone call to your existing customers. You can contact your existing customers and offer discounts when you have all the necessary contact details.
  4. Make a phone call to reliable potential customers. Also, if you collect contact details for potential customers, you can call them and arrange a meeting to discuss and show the value they will get if they decide to do business with you.

✋ Warning

Follow these eight ideas to start building your sales leads database. You can also use this leads database template to help your start with the process.

5. Marketing Messages Ideas

  1. Understandable messages. Ensure all your marketing weapons are understandable to your potential customers.
  2. Superior value proposition. Improve your superior value proposition. Your superior value proposition must send the message to your audiences to recognize you as a business with more value than your competitors.
  3. Credibility, reputation, and a sense of urgency in marketing messages. Be sure that the messages in your marketing weapons include your credibility, reputation, and sense of urgency.
superior value proposition

6. Business Website

  1. Create or redesign your website. If you don’t have a website, make one. If you have a website, redesign it if you haven’t changed it for over a year.
  2. Set up analytics on your small business website. You can start with Google Analytics and Google Search Console. You want to collect and measure your website’s and blog’s performance.
  3. Implement a process to optimize your website and all blog posts. You want to ensure that your website and blog articles appear in organic search results. So, carefully choose the primary and secondary keywords you will use and optimize the content on the site. You must do keyword research, copywriting, meta-tag optimization, and internal and external linking.
  4. Analyze your website regarding the most popular pages. You want to learn what brings the best results and what pages must be improved and updated.
  5. Continuously follow your online reputation. You need to follow your online reputation. So, set up listening tools for social media and review sites. Also, you can use Google Alerts to be informed when someone mentions your brand somewhere online.
  6. Start advertising with a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign. You can easily start with Google Ads and Facebook Ads.
  7. Buy some advertising space on websites in your niche. You can expand your online reach quickly if you purchase advertising space on a well-known website with high traffic.

RelatedTop 5 Marketing Strategies to Promote Your Business

7. Content Marketing

  1. Design a business blog and start blogging. If you write useful articles for your potential customers, they can easily find you and learn about your offers.
  2. Update your business blog regularly. You want to update your business blog regularly. Not only because search engines like new, fresh content but also because your potential customers want new, fresh information.
  3. Use webinars. Create a webinar about how to use your products and services.
  4. Use podcasts. Make a series of podcasts about how to use your products and services.
NP digital podcasts
NP Digital Podcast
  1. Use storytelling inside all your content. Ensure that you are using storytelling in each of your content. People like stories and want to identify with real people and events.
  2. Repurpose your old content. Develop infographics, short and longer videos, podcasts, and other content types that will be ready to be shared on other platforms and social media sites. For example, you can publish your podcast on Apple Podcasts. You can share your videos on YouTube and TikTok or Instagram Reels.
  3. Include videos in your marketing campaigns. You can create a video presentation and put it on YouTube. Then you can embed that video in your new blog post. Also, you can make short videos from this one and share them on TikTok and Instagram Reels.
  4. Guest blogging. If you want your voice to be recognized by more people, you must build partnerships with other experts. You will be exposed to their audiences when they publish and share your article.

8. Email Marketing

  1. Ensure that you have an email opt-in box on your website and blog. Ensure all your website’s pages and blog articles have an opt-in box to collect emails. You never know where someone can stop by. You don’t want to lose this opportunity.
  2. Create a lead magnet. Offer the lead magnet, like a gift, to motivate people to subscribe to your email list.
  3. Regularly send emails to your email list. Regularly contact subscribers on your list. For example, newsletters, blog articles, promotional emails, etc. If you do not contact them regularly, they will forget you and opt out of the list.
  4. Use a professional email service provider. For managing your email marketing campaigns, select and use professional email services like Aweber, ConvertKit, or Mailchimp.
  5. Segment your audience. Create different segments to your email list related to where they are inside your sales funnel.
  6. Create monthly, quarterly, or annual newsletters. This will help you regularly send emails to potential customers on your email list.
  7. A/B testing. Use A/B testing to measure the performance of the subject line, content, CTA, and buttons in your emails.
  8. Improve your email signature. Remember that your email signature will have all the necessary contact details. So potential customers can easily contact your business.
  9. Add sharing buttons to the emails you send to your list. Add sharing buttons on your emails and ask subscribers to share the information on their profiles.

✋ Warning

Follow these seven steps to improve your email marketing campaigns and grow your sales.

9. Social Media Marketing Ideas

  1. Decide what you will share on social media. You need to brainstorm daily content for social media.
  2. Facebook page. Create a Facebook page for your business and start sharing useful content.
  3. Start inviting people. Invite your personal friends and your current customers to like your Facebook page.
  4. Regular updates. Ensure you have regular daily updates on your Facebook page with interesting content.
  5. Facebook Vanity URL. Change the default URL for your Facebook page with a vanity URL. Instead of having this: https://www.facebook.com/pages/entrepreneurshipinabox/5478569871236. Change to this: facebook.com/entrepreneurshipinabox.

RelatedHow to Use Facebook for Business: Facebook Marketing Tips and Tricks

Facebook vanity URL
  1. Go live on Facebook. If you have some interesting “behind the scene” activity, go live on Facebook. Create curiosity.
  2. Create a Twitter profile. Focus on your Twitter @username, bio, website, profile picture, and cover photo. All they need to represent your small business brand.
  3. Be active on Twitter. Be active, share your blog articles, answer and ask questions, and retweet other people’s tweets. Share your opinions on other people’s useful blog posts, links, images, and videos.
  4. LinkedIn. Create or update your LinkedIn profile. Start networking by searching and connecting with people and organizations through LinkedIn.
  5. Business location. Ensure you have your business location and contacts on all your social media profiles.
  6. Social media influencers. Connect with as much as possible social media influencers and ask them to share your promotional posts.
  7. Advertising on Social Media. Start advertising on social media platforms to expand the current reach of potential customers.

10. Increase Sales With Referral Marketing and Reward Programs

  1. Sharing initiatives. You need to design initiatives and encourage satisfied customers to share their experiences with your company with their friends and relatives.
  2. Build a powerful recommendation and referral system. You must build a recommendation and referral system to grow your business exponentially. For example, you can give gifts to every person who brings five new leads to your sales funnel. You want to motivate your current customers to become your best promoters.
  3. Develop an affiliate program. You can also consider offering an affiliate program where you will give part of your profitability to everyone who sends you customers for your product and services.
  4. Discount coupons. Create discount coupons and give them to the most important customers for your business.
  5. Reward program. Design and implement a reward program for the biggest customers. Also, reward the customers who come and purchase most frequently.
  6. Develop a contest program. A contest is a marketing tactic where you give a prize to someone who does something you ask them to do. For example, you can offer free products to users who share the best image or video of how they use your product or services on Instagram.
contests and rewards as one of more than 100 marketing ideas

11. Improve Customer Relationships

  1. Improve your customer service with more personalized approaches to customers. When your customers need help or any support, you must ensure that your business is there to support them.
  2. After-sale follow-up. You can contact your customers at some specific time after the sale to ask them how they are satisfied with your product or services.
  3. Send holiday gifts to the most important customers. Show that you think about your customers.
  4. Send birthday greetings to all your current customers. You can also send personalized birthday cards and mention your customers on social media.
  5. Regularly survey your customers to analyze your customer satisfaction. Analyze the answers and improve everything that needs to be improved. Also, notify all participants in the survey and especially those who gave you ideas for improvement implemented because of their recommendations.
WP-engine feedback

12. Build a Community Around Your Small Business

  1. Forums. Find a popular forum in your industry and start with a helpful conversation for the community there.
  2. Joint marketing ventures. Find potential businesses with which you could make a joint marketing venture.
  3. Entertainment events. Organize entertainment events for anniversaries, big deals, movements, etc.
  4. Meetup events. Create and manage regular meetup events in person and online.
  5. Blog comments. Respond to comments on your blog, but also help with commenting on other blogs if there are your potential customers.
  6. Quora. Find some questions where your expertise is at the highest possible level and give an extensive response. Give priority to questions that will be related to your industry.
Quora Marketing
Answers to the question “What are the best pipes in plumbing?” on Quora

13. Network Marketing Ideas

  1. Elevator pitch. Ensure you have your elevator pitch ready for different networking events.
  2. Great first impression. Make everything you can to create a great first impression.
  3. Attend conferences in your or other related industries. You need to communicate with other visitors to the conference and exchange business cards with them.
  4. Community events. Ensure you will be active at different community events.
  5. Attend all fairs in your industry. You can opt-in to present your products and services on thematic fairs related to your products and services. Also, you can attend fairs related to other industries to build new connections.
  6. Guest lecturer. Collaborate with the university to share your entrepreneurial experience as a guest lecturer.
  7. Chamber of commerce. Become a part of a chamber of commerce and use their networking platforms.
  8. Organize a party. You can select a popular nightclub to organize a party where potential customers can try and test your products and services for free.
  9. Donations. Donate something branded with your company to some popular events.
  10. Sponsorships. Become a sponsor of the local sports event.
  11. Build relationships with other companies to use co-marketing. If there is a company on the market that is not your direct competitor but a company that provides products or services in a similar target market, you can use co-marketing. In such a way, you will promote each other with the cobranded campaigns.
Co-marketing Partnership - Louis Vuitton and BMW
Co-marketing Partnership Between Louis Vuitton and BMW

14. Offline Marketing Ideas

  1. Launch the campaign with personalized direct mail. Here are 12 steps to launch your direct mail campaign.
  2. Think about possible guerilla marketing campaigns. These low-cost campaigns will use creative ways to get exposure for your brand in different high-traffic locations.
  3. Use print advertising to build your business presence. Print text ads are hard copy printed ads in newspapers, magazines, and journals. So, they can be great if your target audience is reading them.
  4. Press releases. Ensure you have regular press releases that will give information about specific topics. But, always contact media about each press release and allow them to share your press releases on their mediums.
  5. Advertise on TV. Regarding where are your target customers, you can purchase some TV advertising on local, national, and regional TV stations.
  6. Advertise on the radio. You can also use radio advertising on local, national and regional stations.
  7. Advertise on billboards. Find high-traffic billboards and advertise with creative visuals to catch people’s attention. Here is a great example of Mcdonald’s using two functions, showing advertising visuals and what time it is.
McDonalds Creative Billboard With Clock
Image Courtesy of Adsoftheworld.com

15. Special Marketing Ideas

  1. Motivate all your team members to be part of your marketing strategy and marketers for your business. You can analyze and improve the credibility of all your team members and your whole business. Your employees are mirrors of your business, so don’t underestimate their importance in your marketing efforts. Make them become your brand ambassadors.
  2. Google Business Profile. Get listed on Google Business Profiles, so potential customers can find you quickly when searching for businesses like yours.
Google Business Profile Search Result
  1. Group buying services. Use group buying services, but remember, you are not using them for profitability but to bring new customers inside your sales funnel.
  2. Murals. Ask for permission to create large murals.
  3. Please don’t run away from negative reviews, but always respond to them. If you don’t respond to negative reviews, and you will have them, you will not solve the problem. But, if you respond to them quickly, you will remove any negative impact they can have on your business.
  4. Marketing consultant. Hire a marketing consultant if you feel that you need help.

That’s it! Now you have more than 100 marketing ideas. You can start using them today and build a business with exponential growth.

Download To-Do List With All 101 Marketing Ideas

Start implementing them one by one, and you will achieve exponential business growth.

For your small businesses, you can also create work-from-home business opportunities to expand your business.