Create the right small business marketing for your target audience.

Build content for the ideal marketing channels to help you to connect with potential customers.

Woman sitting outside in front of a small business that sells ice cream.

Target the best channels for business growth.

No matter how impressive your product is or how perfectly it may fill a niche for customers, you can’t expect to have people find you without help, especially in a crowded market. Good small business marketing begins by understanding your target market and meeting them in the channels they use most. If your marketing efforts don’t show up where your ideal customer needs to see them and they don’t match up with what your ideal customer needs, all your work will fall flat.

Fuel your process with market research.

An effective marketing strategy is informed by thorough research. Before you begin creating any content marketing, conduct interviews to gather primary research. Supplement that information with secondary research that allows you to gain greater insight into learnings from the interviews. This will help you to begin to develop an understanding of your customers. You may believe YouTube ads will reach a younger audience better than a mailed flyer, but you shouldn’t assume. Market research will ensure your work is based on data, not on guesswork.

Once your research is complete, you can create buyer personas. These composites distil the essence of what your customers care about and are valuable tools to help you to create an effective marketing strategy. They’ll also guide your creative team as they work to build the best assets to appeal to the customers your personas represent.

Establish your brand.

Once you know who your potential new customers are, it’s time to connect with them. To make sure those attempts to connect are as effective as possible, it’s important to establish consistent branding for your company that will show up in your marketing materials. Consistent brand identity will build brand awareness by forging a stronger connection with your audience to create a good perception of your brand, which can increase sales.

Creating a brand kit that specifies the ins and outs of your brand’s visual identity will guide your team, helping them to create cohesive creative work, from your company logo to Instagram posts.

Artwork by Markaworks.

Create marketing for the channels your business needs.

Large brands may have the ability to produce marketing for every imaginable channel, but small business owners have to prioritise where to allot their resources. This rundown of different channels will help you to weigh your options.

Impress with your website.

Web presence is increasingly important for small businesses. Building a website that conveys your brand, explains your products or services and allows you to engage and communicate with your audience helps create confidence in your company. Blogging is a great way to expand your site and further explain your business and discuss issues that affect your customers and community. It also gives you additional webpages to add search engine optimisation (SEO) content to your site. SEO content helps search engines like Google catalog your pages, a process Google goes through to understand the content of each page better so they can provide the best resources to searchers. Learning what your prospective customers are searching for and writing content to capture that web traffic can improve leads and sales.

Designing a small business website in Adobe XD.

Connect directly with an email list.

Email newsletters are a great way to build rapport with your audience. By gathering email addresses with a newsletter signup form on your site, you can build a network of current and prospective customers, making it easier to keep them aware of new products and brand initiatives. Email not only boosts customer engagement, it’s also easy and has a high return on investment. With templates available in Adobe XD, you can quickly build an email and begin communicating with your customers.

Keep the conversation flowing with social media marketing.

You can’t talk about online marketing these days without looking at the impact social media has on business. In a constantly connected world, it’s essential for businesses to engage regularly on social media platforms like Twitter and Instagram. By setting goals for social media engagement, you can create compelling content for your channels. There are a number of strategies to improve your digital word of mouth with social media marketing, from what you create to what influencers you partner with. Make sure to place emphasis on your post times to maximise audience engagement. Adobe Photoshop is perfect for creating social media graphics and invites or look to Adobe Express for help creating Facebook ads, Twitter header photos and more.

Sponsored social media post for a small business that sells ice cream

Amplify your marketing efforts with video.

It’s a streaming world out there and that means video isn’t simply a flashy digital marketing asset, it’s an effective sales tool. Consumers love video and the numbers back up its value: 72% prefer to learn about a product or service via video and 64% of consumers make a purchase after viewing a branded video on social. From webinars you host on your site to short social clips, you can use Adobe Premiere Rush to easily create videos for your company on your desktop or mobile device. You don’t even need to capture your own footage. With Adobe Stock you can license videos to use for any marketing project.

Create eye-catching ads.

Ads are an important way to keep your business or product top-of-mind with customers. You can create print ads for newspapers and magazines, depending on your audience, but digital ads are the most prevalent now. Well-designed ads can be a great way to bring new people to your website, helping you acquire new customers who might not otherwise search for your brand. With retargeting ads, which you can set up with Google Adwords and other platforms, you can make sure visitors who didn’t purchase on their first visit are reminded of the products they viewed as they continue their internet use on different sites.

Make a lasting impression with printed materials.

Digital marketing can reach people anywhere, but printed marketing materials can help your business stand out. A stylish pamphlet printed on nice paper stock, something that a potential customer can take with them after visiting a store or chatting at a trade show, is the type of marketing that sticks with people. Using InDesign and Photoshop, you can create stunning and informative brochures, flyers, and more that deliver relevant information for customers to refer to again and again on their way down the marketing funnel on the way to a purchase.

Make every kind of marketing with Creative Cloud for teams.

With a good marketing plan backed by solid market research, you’ll be able to tap into the channels you need to reach your customers. But as markets change and needs shift, your brand may have to adapt. A Creative Cloud for teams plan not only gives you incredible versatility to work with photography, design, illustration, video and more, it also allows your team to share assets seamlessly and collaborate — building efficiency into every workflow. Creative Cloud also includes access to Adobe Acrobat Pro, which helps your business to stay agile with protected PDFs, digital signatures and more.