The Basics of SMB Marketing

What Is SMB Marketing?

SMB marketing, or small business marketing, refers to the strategies used to promote a small- or medium-sized business—both online and in person. Business owners themselves, marketing teams, or even agencies that specialize in helping small businesses grow may all engage in this practice. 

Small business marketing doesn’t look the same for every small business. Instead, each strategy is as unique as the small business itself, its community, and its customer base. 

Think of it this way: If you’re an artisanal pizza restaurant in Toronto, do you think a strategy designed for a custom print shop in Paris would deliver results for you? Of course not. Your communities, niches, and products are totally different.

But the fundamentals are still the same. For example, both businesses would probably lean into digital marketing to reach more customers online. That could include, for example: 
 

• Maintaining accurate Google Maps listings
• Fostering social media presences on their customers’ favorite platforms 
• Building customer relationships over time with compelling content and promotional offers

It’s their approach that differs.

That means, no matter what type of business you’re promoting, you can learn the fundamentals and use that knowledge to build a more thoughtful, systematic, and results-driven marketing strategy, tailored to you.
 

The Challenges of SMB Marketing—And How To Overcome Them

While the basics are consistent across the board, marketing for a small business is a different ball game from that of larger enterprises. It’s sort of like comparing American Football to Rugby. At first glance, there are plenty of similarities and even shared roots, but players ultimately have different equipment and different strategies to win. So what are the unique challenges of SMB marketing compared to traditional digital marketing?

Let’s explore a few of them.
 

Challenge 1: Resource Constraints

Small businesses often face greater limitations when it comes to resources than their larger competitors. And that doesn’t only apply to budgetary concerns. Because they often have fewer employees running the show, they may also struggle with time constraints and lack of expertise in areas that, at first glance, seem unrelated to their niche. 

This presents a challenge for SMB marketing. Meaning, how do you make the most of what may feel like a shoestring budget, and still grow your business online? 

Here are three tactics to remember.
 

Take Advantage of Free and Budget-Friendly Resources

If you want to make an impact, you don’t need the most expensive tools. Those are great, but plenty of equally amazing resources are out there that won’t eat up your entire budget. You just have to look for them. 

For example, let’s say you lack expertise launching a marketing campaign. In that case, a free Semrush Academy course like Digital Marketing for SMBs with Greg Gifford could give you the knowledge and confidence to get started.

Here’s another scenario. You’re a one-man marketing whiz for a small but growing business. You’ve got a promising plan, but no time to execute it. 

Here are three resources you might lean on to save time:

• ContentShake AI: Use it to quickly create and optimize blog posts to attract more customers from search engines. Then, use it to generate social media posts to share those articles on all platforms.
• Your audience: Offer giveaways or small discounts to encourage customers to create and post user-generated content, and repurpose that content in ads, blog posts, and on social media.
• Listing Management: Save hours by automating your listing distribution and management processes. We’ll go into more detail about this later.
   

The takeaway: Whatever your biggest SMB marketing challenges, the solutions are within your reach, and your budget. You just have to look for them.

Prioritize Non-Paid Promotional Channels

If you want to boost your visibility online without compromising your marketing budget, focus on organic channels over paid ones. What’s the difference?

• Organic means that visibility is earned naturally, without you needing to pay to place your content there. For example, you can create and optimize content to rank in search results, or post engaging content on social media without paying to promote it.
• Paid refers to any promotional channel where you need to pay money in order to appear there. This could include placing banner ads on other websites, putting ads at the top of the search results, sponsoring your social media posts, or paying an influencer to promote your brand.

Both types of channels have benefits and drawbacks. 

For example, sponsoring your social media post ensures that more people in your target audience will see it, even if they don’t already follow you—but those paid advertising costs can add up quickly. On the other hand, ranking in organic search can pay off in dividends, but it requires time, testing, and patience to get there. 

So why invest the time and effort?
 

• Cost-effective visibility: Because you don’t have to pay to place your content, organic channels allow you to build visibility for your brand without incurring additional expenses. And, in the case of organic search, you can use local SEO strategies to focus on building visibility specifically in your community—making the results even more relevant.
• Building trust and credibility: Success in organic channels is all about answering your target customers’ most important questions and engaging authentically with them when they need you most, meaning you can foster stronger relationships with your current audience while also attracting new customers.
• Sustainability: Paid campaigns do yield quicker results, but if you want to keep them going, you need to keep paying into them. By contrast, organic channels develop over time, and they can continue to deliver results without incurring additional costs. That makes them ideal for sustainable, long-term strategies.  
   

If you want to win in organic promotional channels, you need to focus on maintaining content quality, attracting engagement from your audience, and SEO. Investing time and effort in these non-paid promotional avenues can yield significant, sustainable returns in the long run.

Be Creative

One of the best ways to win more customers, even with limited resources: Be creative! Don’t be afraid to test unconventional tactics to reach your audience without overextending your budget. 
 

Here are a few ideas to get you started: 
 

• Repurpose content: Just because you’ve created something for one purpose doesn’t mean you can’t use it again and again. Got a stellar blog post? Flex your design skills by turning it into an infographic for social media, transform it into a video, or use it as inspiration for a podcast.
• Get involved: If you’re marketing a local business, don’t underestimate the power of your community. Support local events or initiatives—especially if it’s a cause close to your heart. Not only will this get your name out there in the community—and possibly mentioned on social media—but it can also build positive sentiment for your brand.
• Collaborate with hyper-local influencers: Influencer marketing does cost money. But you don’t need to work with the biggest one you can find. Instead, consider working with a nano-influencer in your community. They’re likely to be less costly, while also having greater credibility with the audience you’re trying to reach. 
• Post participation-oriented content: Create fun quizzes, polls, and contests for your social media channels. This can generate extra engagement from your audience with relatively low effort.

Through creative thinking, you can transform your limitations into opportunities to grow your business and build your brand online.
 

Challenge 2: Local SEO

These days, pretty much every business invests in an SEO strategy to improve visibility in organic search. But larger organizations generally do this at the national or global level. If you’re a large accounting firm serving clients across the United States, you’ll probably build your strategy around targeting popular finance-related keywords at the national level.
 

But an SMB market is often primarily local, meaning you’ve got a much more narrowly defined community to target.That’s where local SEO comes in.

Local SEO is the process of optimizing your presence online to be more visible specifically for the people in your local community. This has a two-pronged approach: 

• Finding and targeting locally relevant keywords
• Maintaining up-to-date business information on your website, social media, in directories, and Google Business Profile (GBP)

Let’s go through both of them.

How To Find and Target Local Keywords 

You can find local keywords easily using Semrush. Here’s how.

First, use the Keyword Magic Tool to search for keywords that are relevant to your business. That means they’re related to your products, services, or the pain points your customers want to overcome. And they should also describe content you want to write about in your website content.

Then use the Keyword Overview tool to check the local search volume for each keyword on your list to make sure it’s worth the effort. Just enter your keyword, choose your locale, and click “search.”

Here, you can find out how popular that keyword is in your community. 

If lots of locals are searching for this term, then appearing at the top of the search results could bring in new customers. And if the Keyword Difficulty (KD%) is low, then you could achieve it with relatively little effort.

Use this data to decide which local keywords are the most important for your online strategy. Then, write content—blog articles, social media posts, you name it—targeting those search terms. You can learn more in this article on the Semrush Blog.
 

How To Distribute and Manage Your Local Business Information Easily

When people search for local businesses online—for example, a search like “barber shops near me”—Google uses a few different metrics to decide which businesses to show: 

• Proximity: how close your business address is to the searcher
• Relevance: whether the requested products or services are mentioned on your website or in reviews
• Accuracy: whether Google can confidently return correct business information to the user

So how does the search engine know whether its information is accurate? Simple—it compares information across multiple sources. This includes your own website, your social profiles, your Google Business Profile, and any business directories that mention you. If Google sees the same information reflected in all of these places, the search engine can confidently infer that it is accurate.
 

That’s where Listing Management comes in. By distributing your business listings to many different online directories, you can increase your brand’s visibility in search, making it easier for your customers to find you. But who has time to create or claim business listings in dozens of different directories? Semrush’s Listing Management tool can automate this process, saving you time and effort. Here’s how. 
 

First, search for your business by name, and if there are more than one, select the location you want to check. 

Next, the tool will scan for your business information in more than 150 different global directories, including Google Business Profile, Amazon Alexa, Facebook, and Apple. Then it will report back on its findings. It will tell you in which directories you: 
 

• Are listed and up to date
• Have missing, outdated, or incorrect information
• Aren’t included yet
   

Finally, Listing Management can send out your updated information, adding new listings and updating old ones. Once you’re set up, use the tool to keep your listings up to date. If any of your business information changes, just update it in the tool, and these changes will be pushed out everywhere your business is listed. Learn more about what this process looks like in the Semrush Knowledge Base.

Challenge 3: Measuring ROI

Measuring ROI has its challenges. But it’s a crucial part of any digital marketing strategy if you want to continue growing. 

On a very basic level, here’s how it works: 

1. Calculate the cost of your investment into a specific marketing channel, like SEO
2. Calculate the number of conversions you can attribute to that channel, and their value
3. Use the following formula:
   
   ROI = (value of conversions - cost of investment) / cost of investment

Sounds simple, right? The challenge is collecting the right data. 

Let’s use local SEO as an example. The cost of your investment could include things like the cost of tools and materials, your and your employees’ time, and any freelance or agency services you used. Add up the total amount for a specific month.
 

Next, track the month’s conversions. For this example, let’s assume your business has an ecommerce component, and you want to analyze the purchases made on your site. 

You can do this using Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics. Google Tag Manager is a free tool that allows you to track any “event” or user action on your site with a JavaScript snippet. For our example ecommerce site, you would need to add ecommerce events in order to start tracking conversions. Google explains how to do this on their Analytics Help site.

Once you’re set up, you’ll be able to track all of your site’s conversions in Google Analytics. Just click “Reports,” then “Monetization,” and finally, “Ecommerce purchases.” If needed, you can filter this data to focus only on certain conversions—for example, ones that came in through organic search on Google. This way, you can identify the total value of the conversions during that month. Plug this data into the formula above to calculate your ROI. Learn more about calculating ROI, including more complicated scenarios, in our guide to SEO ROI.

Explore further: Semrush Local also features a robust GBP insights tool, which provides an extended data history beyond what's accessible in the Google Business Profile backend. With it, you can easily track how much traffic, leads, and calls you are getting from your GBP and make more informed decisions to refine your local marketing strategy.

Challenge 4: Agility

What do digital marketing and small businesses have in common? Quick changes, uncertainty, and sudden opportunities. To succeed, you need to approach your marketing strategy with an agile mindset. In other words, be flexible in your thinking and prepared to shift if the winds change. 

This is easier said than done, so here are a few practical tips to help you cultivate agility:
 

• Flexible planning: Rather than building out a single, rigid, long-term strategy, try to plan ahead for unexpected roadblocks big and small, such as new competitors, supply chain shortages, or bad reviews. With pre-planned tactics in your back pocket, you’ll be prepared to shift at a moment’s notice.
• Experimentation: Test new ideas, campaigns, or content formats in smaller, controlled environments before scaling. Learn from these tests to refine strategies swiftly.
• Leverage analytics: Using tools like Semrush and Google Analytics, analyze key metrics regularly to spot trends, identify areas for improvement, and capitalize on what works.
• Save time with automation: Free up time by automating time-consuming tasks like listing management, so you can spend that time on higher-priority business needs.
• Talk to your customers: Solicit feedback from your customers and engage with your community on social media. This can help you stay ahead of customer concerns, spot trends, anticipate upcoming challenges, and build more targeted strategies.

Agility isn't just about speed—it's about adaptability, responsiveness, and willingness to learn. By embracing this mindset, you’ll set yourself and your brand up for success in the face of any challenge.
 

Challenge 5: Investing in the Best Promotional Channels

Knowing where to invest your efforts isn’t always clear. If you’re a business owner new to digital marketing, you might not have the expertise to make an educated choice. On top of that, limited resources and shifting trends can make the decision harder. 
 

So where do you start? 
 

Start by focusing on non-paid channels. While you do need to invest time and resources to succeed, these are more budget-friendly—crucial for a small but growing business. 
 

Here are a few non-paid channels you could lean into: 
 

• Social media: Build a following on your target customers’ favorite social platforms. For example, if you’re in B2B, you probably want to focus on cultivating a LinkedIn audience, while local shops and restaurants might prefer Instagram. If you’re not sure which platforms to use, ask your customers what they prefer.
• SEO: Optimize your site to appear in search results by improving your site’s user experience and navigability, incorporating the keywords your customers are using, and structuring your content so that it’s readable and helpful.  Learn more about building a basic SEO strategy here.  
• Google Business Profile: Increase your local search visibility by building out your profile with accurate business details, relevant keywords, and positive customer reviews. This free digital storefront is your gateway to engaging with the community and attracting more customers. Learn how to maximize your online presence for local audiences here.
• Email marketing: Stay in touch with your current customers through regular email outreach. Offer them advice, updates, and special offers to keep them coming back. Over time, grow this channel by encouraging new and prospective customers to join your email list.

Whichever channels you invest in, make sure to test new tactics and track your results. This will help you improve over time, so you keep growing. Ultimately, your strategy of choice should reflect your unique brand and the needs of your customers. While one business might see the best results on social media, another may deliver more growth through local SEO. Whatever you choose, equip yourself with the best tools and data to set yourself up for success.