The standard list of digital marketing tips for small businesses assumes you have a marketing person. Optimise your SEO, build a content calendar, run paid social, nurture your email list, post consistently across channels, analyse and iterate.
Most small businesses have the owner doing marketing on a Tuesday evening. Given that, a list of ten equally weighted tips is close to useless, because the real question is which two to do.
So these fourteen are sorted by what they cost in money and hours, with a clear answer about which ones to do first at each level. There is also a section on what to skip, which no guide on this term includes and which saves more time than anything on the list.
How this guide was put together
The ranking pages here are consistent: Hallam and FutureLearn each list 10 tips, Falkon SMS 11, QuickBooks 5, plus longer guides from Salesforce and others. Between 1,200 and 2,500 words each.
They cover the same ground competently and present the tips as equally weighted. None sorts by cost or tells a business with four hours a month what to ignore. That is the gap.
Start here: the three that come before everything
If you do nothing else on this page, do these. They cost almost nothing and everything else works better afterwards.
1. Your Google Business Profile, completely filled in
For any business with a location or a service area, this is the highest-return marketing asset you have, and it is free. Complete every field, add real photos, keep hours accurate, and reply to every review.
Time: two hours to set up, ten minutes a week after.
2. A website that answers the four questions
Most small business sites fail on the basics rather than on design. A visitor needs to find, within seconds: what you do, whether you serve them, what it roughly costs, and how to contact you.
The pricing one is the one businesses resist and the one that filters out the enquiries you did not want anyway.
Time: a day, once.
3. Ask every customer how they found you
One question, asked at the point of sale. After thirty answers you know which channels work for your business specifically, which is worth more than any general advice including this page.
Time: nothing. It is one question.
If you have almost no budget and a few hours a month
4. Collect email addresses and send something monthly
Email is the only channel you own. Everything else is rented from a platform that can change the rules. A monthly email to a small list of actual customers outperforms most paid activity at this size.
It does not need to be a newsletter. What is new, what is useful, one thing worth knowing. Once sending it manually each month starts slipping, our guide to building a marketing automation strategy covers the next step.
5. Get reviews systematically
Ask every satisfied customer, at the moment they are satisfied rather than a week later. Reviews affect local ranking, and they affect the decision of every person who reads them.
6. Pick one social platform and be present on it
One, not four. Where your customers actually are, which the question in tip 3 will tell you. Two posts a week sustained beats daily for a month and then silence.
7. Answer the questions you get asked constantly
Every question you answer by phone more than five times a week is a page on your site. It saves you time, it ranks, and it is the easiest content you will ever write because you already know the answer.
If you have some budget and a few hours a week
8. Local search beyond the profile
Consistent business details across the directories search engines cross-check, plus pages for each service and each area you serve. Slow, and it accumulates.
9. Paid search for the terms with buying intent
Not brand awareness. The three to five searches someone makes when they are ready to buy what you sell. Small budgets work here because the intent is high and you are not paying for browsers.
Start with a budget you would not miss, and judge it on enquiries rather than clicks.
10. Retargeting your own website visitors
Cheap, because the audience already knows you. Worth turning on once you have enough traffic for the audience to be meaningful.
11. Content aimed at the questions before the purchase
The slow channel, and the one that keeps working after you stop. Six to nine months before it shows meaningful results, so start it when you can wait that long and not before.
If the constraint is publishing consistently rather than knowing what to write, that is what Distribb automates: scheduled publishing against a topic map with the internal linking handled.
The limitation for a business this size: it produces solid pages from public information, and the pages that convert for a small business are usually the ones written from your own customers' questions, in your own words. Tip 7 produces better pages than any tool, including ours. Use automation for coverage on the general subjects, and write the specific ones yourself.
12. Video, if your product benefits from being seen
Genuinely optional and it depends entirely on what you sell. For anything visual, physical or demonstrable it is high return; for others it is a large time cost for little gain. Video marketing for small business covers where that line falls.
If you have real budget
13. Paid social with proper creative testing
Requires enough budget to test several creatives and enough patience to run each long enough to learn. Below that threshold it produces noise rather than data.
14. A specialist for one channel, not an agency for all of them
When you can afford help, buy depth in the channel that is already working rather than breadth across channels that are not. A generalist retainer covering six channels at a small budget does none of them properly.
What to skip
The section missing from every guide on this term. Small businesses lose most of their marketing time to activity that will not work at their scale.
Being on every platform. Four half-maintained accounts are worse than one good one, because they all look abandoned.
Posting daily. Sustainable beats frequent. An account that posts twice a week for two years beats one that posts daily for six weeks.
Chasing follower counts. Two hundred local followers who might buy beats four thousand who will not.
Complex marketing automation. Multi-branch nurture sequences need volume to be worth building. Below a few hundred leads a month, a well-written monthly email does the same job.
Rebranding. The most common expensive distraction. Very few small businesses have a brand problem; most have an awareness problem, and rebranding resets what awareness they had.
Blogging without a search purpose. Writing posts nobody searches for is a hobby. Tip 7 is the version that works.
Measuring it without a full-time analyst
Three numbers, checked monthly, are enough at this size:
- Enquiries, by source. From the question in tip 3, not from analytics.
- Cost per enquiry for anything paid. Our benchmarks for lead generation cost by channel give the comparison point.
- Branded searches for your business name, in Search Console. Free, and it is the cleanest signal that awareness is moving.
Anything beyond these three is measurement you will not act on. How to measure digital marketing success covers the fuller version once there is someone to act on it, and digital marketing strategy examples shows what these choices look like assembled into a plan.
Common questions
How much should a small business spend on marketing? Common guidance is 5 to 10 percent of revenue, and it is a weak rule. The better approach is to work out what an enquiry is worth to you, then spend against that, which also tells you when to stop.
Which channel gives the fastest results? Paid search on high-intent terms, and your Google Business Profile if you are local. Both can produce enquiries in the first week.
How long does SEO take for a small business? Local search can move in two to three months. Content targeting research questions takes six to nine. Anyone promising faster is talking about branded search.
Do I need to be on social media? One platform, if your customers are there. The obligation to be on all of them is imagined and it is expensive in hours.
Should I hire an agency? When one channel already works and you want it run better. Hiring one to discover which channel works is an expensive way to run the experiment in tip 3.
Is email marketing still effective for small businesses? It is the highest-return channel available at this size, because you own the list and it costs almost nothing to send.
What is the single biggest mistake? Spreading a small amount of effort across many channels. Two channels done properly beat six done occasionally, every time.
What to take from this
Fill in your Google Business Profile, make your website answer four questions, and ask every customer how they found you. Those three cost almost nothing and they tell you what to do next.
After that, do two things properly rather than eight things occasionally, and check the skip list before adding anything. At this size, the effort you do not spend is worth as much as the effort you do.