Marketing your small business

Build a clear brand, a website that converts and a few marketing channels that bring in customers you can measure.

Who it is for: Small business owners doing their own marketing who want a plan instead of random posts and ads.

Beginner · 7 articles · about 58 minutes

What you will learn

  • Position your business so the right customers recognise it is for them
  • Make your website and search presence work as your best salesperson
  • Choose social, content and email activity you can sustain
  • Measure the return on your marketing spend and cut what does not work

Articles in this path

  • Branding and positioning – Positioning is the place you choose to occupy in a customer’s mind; branding is everything that makes that position recognisable. How to define both for a small business without an agency budget.
  • Website fundamentals – What a small business website has to do, the pages and content it needs, how to choose between a builder and a custom build, and the basics of speed, mobile, security and ownership that owners often get wrong.
  • Search engine optimisation – How search engines decide which businesses to show, the four things that drive rankings, and a practical local SEO plan an Australian small business can run without technical staff.
  • Social media marketing – Which platforms suit which businesses, what to post and how often, how to turn followers into customers, and how to run social media in a couple of hours a week without it taking over the business.
  • Content marketing – How to attract and convince customers by publishing genuinely useful answers to their questions: choosing topics, formats and a realistic schedule, and turning the content into enquiries over time.
  • Email marketing – Why email remains the highest-return channel for most small businesses, how to build a list lawfully under the Spam Act, what to send and how often, and how to measure whether it is producing sales.
  • Marketing ROI – How to work out whether your marketing is making money: the formulas for return on investment, cost per acquisition and customer value, how to attribute results to channels honestly, and how to use the numbers to decide where to spend.

Next path: Building a customer success function