Ad Free Organic Marketing Strategy Framework for Small Business
I don’t know about you, but every morning I have at least two emails in my inbox soliciting digital ad services. I’m sure many of these people know what they are doing but I’m not interested. One, they are expensive. Forbes reports Facebook ad costs have increased by 89%, and TikTok’s CPM (aka cost per mille, a paid advertising option where companies pay a price for every 1,000 impressions an ad receives) has increased by 92%. Two, its challenging to track your return on your investment.
Marketing strategy is not one size fits all. I don’t need to tell you small businesses and start ups don’t have anywhere near the marketing budgets of large corporations. Both hiring someone to help you with digital ads and spending on digital ads may not even be an option.
What fires me up is successful organic marketing, the kind where you put out a thoughtful product, genuinely connect with your customer via content that connects, word of mouth increases awareness, you continue to nurture your customer relationships, build trust, make more cool product your customers want and your company slowly grows.
For the past year or so I have been using Alan Dib’s The 1-Page Marketing Plan with my small business and start up clients in the apparel, fashion and beverage space. This template can be adapted to any business including services.
The plan is broken up into three parts and I’ll go a bit deeper into each.
Prospect: aka potential customers
- Who is my target market? There may be more than one. Create avatars for each and write out a narrative about them.
- What is my message to my target market? Do they have a problem and you have the solution? Can you make them feel how they would like to feel?
- What is the media I will use to reach my target market? Where do they hang out? What are they reading? Where are they shopping? Do they use social media and if so what platform(s)?
Lead: Their interest has been peaked.
- What is my lead capture system? Alan refers to this step as “planting seeds”. Not everyone is ready to buy right away, how are you going to build trust and stay in touch? You need a database of prospects and customers within a customer relationship management system.
- What is my lead nurturing system? Seeds need nurturing to grow, how will you continue to follow up and build a relationship vs. pester.
- What is my sales conversion strategy? How do you reduce the perceived risk of buying from you? Educate. Provide value. Build trust.
Customers: How to keep them.
- How do I deliver a world class experience? How can we make their experiences with us easy, pleasurable and/or exceptional. How can we use technology to reduce friction?
- How do I increase customer lifetime value? How can we give customers a reason to come back?
- Finally, How do I orchestrate and stimulate referrals?
Most of my small business clients don’t have a formal marketing strategy, rather they engage in occasional, often expensive marketing experiments. I see this as low hanging fruit for increasing revenue. The 1-Page Marketing Plan takes a bit of time to strategize, get systems set up, ideally automate, analyze results, see what’s working, what’s not, but the alternative is much more expensive with much more risk and you miss out on building genuine customer relationships.
If you’re a small business or start up and need help you can find me here, I’d love to help.
