Not every marketing activity will work for every small business. The best way to find out what works for your business is to try relevant marketing activities, measure the response and use what you learn to make better marketing decisions.
You don't always know in advance which marketing activity will generate the best response.
The practical approach is to identify an activity that makes sense for your business and audience, give it a genuine opportunity to work, measure the response and then decide what to continue, change or stop.
That could mean trying email marketing, social media, SEO, content marketing, advertising, networking or another channel that is relevant to your target market.
The important thing is not simply doing more marketing. It's taking action, learning from the results and gradually building a marketing approach that works for your particular business.
One of the challenges we see with small business marketing is that business owners can spend a lot of time trying to work out exactly what they should be doing.
Should they be posting more on social media? Should they invest in Google Ads? Should they start SEO? Should they send emails to their database? Should they create more content?
These are all reasonable questions.
But sometimes the answer isn't going to come from thinking about the options indefinitely.
Sometimes you need to actually try something.
Recently, we spoke with two small business owners who had both started taking their marketing more seriously. They were established businesses, so they weren't starting from scratch. They had existing customers, existing databases and an understanding of the products and services they offered.
Their next marketing activity was email marketing.
They had collected their databases, set up Mailchimp accounts and started sending regular EDMs to their audiences.
And something interesting happened.
They started getting responses.
Email marketing can be a particularly practical marketing activity for an established small business because it allows you to communicate directly with people who have already had some connection with your business.
That doesn't mean every email will generate an enquiry or sale.
But it gives you an opportunity to communicate your products, services, expertise, offers or information directly to an audience that has already chosen to hear from you.
For the two businesses we spoke with, their early emails were generating responses and enquiries.
The important point wasn't simply that they had started sending emails.
It was that they were communicating something relevant to a specific audience in a clear and focused way.
That combination matters.
Good marketing starts with understanding who you're communicating with.
An email sent to a database isn't automatically effective just because it reaches a lot of people.
The message needs to have relevance to the people receiving it.
Ask yourself:
The clearer you are about your audience, the easier it becomes to create marketing that resonates.
Your marketing message doesn't need to be complicated.
It could be information about a product or service, a useful insight, a new offering, an upcoming promotion or a reason to get back in touch with your business.
The important thing is that the message has a purpose.
If your audience can quickly understand what you're communicating and why it is relevant to them, you have created a much stronger opportunity for engagement.
One of the traps small businesses can fall into is judging a marketing activity too quickly.
You send one email and don't get a response.
You post a few times on social media and nothing seems to happen.
You publish an article and don't immediately receive an enquiry.
Does that mean the marketing isn't working?
Not necessarily.
Some marketing activities can generate an immediate response. Others are about building awareness, familiarity and trust over time.
This is why it's important to look at marketing as a process rather than expecting every individual activity to produce an immediate sale.
It is also why consistency matters.
When you repeatedly communicate with the right audience, you create more opportunities for people to notice, remember and eventually respond to your business.
Trying a new marketing activity doesn't mean blindly continuing with it forever.
The real value comes from learning what happens.
For example, if you're running email campaigns, you can look at things such as:
The same principle applies across other marketing channels.
You can look at website enquiries, advertising results, social media engagement, search traffic, phone calls, sales conversations and customer feedback.
The objective is to build a clearer picture of what is helping your business.
Testing a marketing activity doesn't mean you have to keep doing it exactly the same way.
If something isn't getting the response you expected, look at what you can learn.
Perhaps the audience wasn't quite right.
Perhaps the message wasn't clear.
Perhaps the offer wasn't relevant.
Perhaps the frequency needs to change.
Or perhaps the activity simply isn't the right fit for your business.
That's useful information too.
Marketing isn't about finding one perfect tactic and sticking with it forever. It's about making informed decisions based on your business, your customers and what you're learning along the way.
This is one of the most important things to remember.
A marketing activity that works extremely well for one business may not be appropriate for another.
Your industry, audience, location, customer behaviour, budget, resources, positioning and business objectives all influence which marketing activities make sense.
That's why copying what another business is doing isn't necessarily the answer.
Instead, consider what your own business needs to achieve.
If you already have a strong customer database, email marketing might be worth exploring.
If your customers are actively searching for your services, SEO may be important.
If your audience spends time on a particular social platform, social media may provide an opportunity.
If you're trying to reach a new market, advertising or other forms of targeted promotion might make sense.
The right approach starts with your business rather than simply choosing the latest marketing trend.
The two small businesses we spoke with recently are a good reminder of this.
They didn't know exactly how their EDMs would perform before they started.
They created their databases, set up their email marketing software, developed their messages and sent the emails.
Then they watched what happened.
And within their first few emails, they were already seeing responses and enquiries.
That doesn't mean every business should immediately start sending EDMs.
It means there can be value in giving a relevant marketing activity a genuine opportunity and learning from the outcome.
Sometimes the next step in your marketing isn't finding a more sophisticated strategy.
Sometimes it's simply taking the first step.
Good small business marketing isn't about trying every possible marketing channel.
It's about making sensible decisions, taking action and learning from what happens.
You may try email marketing and discover that your audience responds strongly to it.
You may test a particular type of content and discover that it generates enquiries.
You may experiment with an advertising channel and decide it isn't the right fit.
All of those outcomes give you information.
Over time, those lessons can help you build a more focused and effective small business marketing strategy.
Because marketing isn't a one-off decision.
It's an ongoing process of testing, learning, refining and improving.
If you're unsure which marketing activities make sense for your business, you don't necessarily need to do more. You may simply need to take a closer look at your goals, audience, existing activity and the opportunities available to you.
At Little Marketing, we've been helping Australian small businesses make practical marketing decisions for 18 years.
If you're ready to review your marketing, identify opportunities and work out what to try next, get in touch with the Little Marketing team.
The goal isn't to do marketing for the sake of doing more marketing.
It's to find the right activities, communicate clearly with the right audience and learn what helps your business move forward.
Little Marketing — 18 years of helping small businesses make their marketing work harder.