For example, for me it was: when your copy/brand speaks to everyone, it actually speaks to no one. This was a huge perspective change for me personally.
So curious, what is the best marketing advice you've ever received as a small business?
What is the best marketing advice you've ever received as a small business?
byu/Ava_Yuna inEntrepreneur
Posted by Ava_Yuna
17 Comments
I can add a similar one I see with SEO as well. Often I find small businesses focussing on broad keywords like “best company in United States” etc rather than targeting locally like “best dentist in Naperville Illinois”! It’s much easier to be the top result if you are super focused on your target market. These days you can easily use AI tools to actually generate the strategy and blogs to post regularly if you define your target customer and solution carefully. Once you do this, check your analytics regularly, and then find the top performing blogs and double down on it manually by doing a human review/edit.
Think of what ai is looking for when it searches
Everyone is a potential customer and knows someone who might be a customer. Be nice to people. Make time for people. Talk to people. Always be presentable. Keep learning and educating yourself.
Basically no one knows who you are or what your business does. So you can promote a lot more then you think you can without your marketing becoming boring or saturated. Just have to get over that first huge hurdle of no one knowing about you.
Best advice I got was talk about one clear problem instead of listing features because people only buy when they instantly feel like you understand their pain not when you show off everything you can do
Understand the pain points of your ICP in depth.
If you’re going to do something (in marketing), commit to it over 6 months. Adapt, refine and iterate. Then you can start to create a marketing system.
Speak to your target market, to the exclusion of all others.
Talk about the benefits, not the features.
Ask for the order.
start life time deals
Your feelings will get in the way of your reality. Test everything, and often, but pull the trigger when it’s working & don’t overthink it. The closer your marketing is to your reality, the less work you have to do. The more “spin” you’ve put on *anything* the harder it will be to make the brand story stick long-term. You can still do it, but it will take a lot of resources.
When it comes to business and marketing, be more like Rambo and less like Peewee Herman.
Consistency beats virality.
Most small businesses die chasing their next big post instead of building a repeatable signal.
The brands that win just show up – same voice, same message, same values – until people *remember* them.
Focus on creating value, not capturing attention. The best marketing happens when your product is so good it markets itself through word of mouth.
One of the best pieces of advice I’ve taken to heart is that people remember stories more than stats, as a small business it’s easy to focus on features or results but when you use storytelling and visuals to make your message memorable, that’s what sticks. We’ve seen that a clear, emotionally grounded message often outperforms even the most polished marketing assets
As a photographer, your top advice is one that I had been thinking about myself but which was recently reinforced explicitly by a couple of experience pros I follow on socials. In my case, it means splitting out social profiles by genre, and not mixing — for example — sports & headshots & landscapes in the same account. It’s ok to have things combined on a website, but even there it needs to be compartmentalized based on how I’m going to market.
K.I.S.S.: Keep it simple, sweetie.
The clearer your offer, pricing, and process, the faster people buy. Confused customers are very unlikely to commit.
Simplifying my offers down to a sentence or two has repeatedly led to a nice boost in sales. This is tricky for me because I’m naturally long-winded and like to be thorough.
Talk ‘with’ the customer, not ‘to’ the customer.
Too many times I’ve seen comms tell the customer what they think they ought to know rather than what the customer wants to hear.