A small business website plays a crucial role in establishing brand awareness and showcasing key aspects to potential customers. While it can support lead generation efforts, its primary function lies in enhancing visibility, sharing value propositions, and engaging with visitors effectively. Lead generation tactics such as collateral material, direct marketing, email campaigns, and social media strategies are vital for collecting customer data and driving web traffic. It's essential for small businesses to understand that social media platforms like Facebook are not adequate substitutes for a well-designed website with a robust SEO strategy.

MarTech refers to the technology a company utilizes to execute on their marketing initiatives and grow their business. The grouping of technology a company selects is referred to as their Tech stack or MarTech stack. The 4 most valuable items to any small business Tech stack are the website, email service provider (ESP), customer relationship marketing database (CRM), and social media platforms. The 4 most important components fueling the data that is supporting your Tech stack are search engine optimization (SEO) & paid search, marketing partnerships like GRO Marketing for re-targeting your 1st party data, your lead generation program(s), and digital advertising and direct marketing initiatives. While a zillion other marketing options like mobile messaging/advertising, radio, television, and stream service advertising are available, our focus here will be on necessities for Small Business success.

IMPORTANT TAKEAWAY… BEWARE OF CONSULTING COMPANIES CLAIMING TO GROW YOUR VERTICAL MARKET BUSINESS BY BEING AN EXPERT IN THAT FIELD = INSURANCE, REAL-ESTATE, FINANCING OR WHATEVER VERTICAL MARKET YOU’RE IN BY OFFERING BUSINESS COACHING and A FREE WEBSITE, EMAIL PLATFORM, and CRM DATABASE.

While their business consultation and marketing strategies may be top notch for your line of business, most IF NOT ALL will fall WAY WAY WAY short of being truly effective for your small business by simply not having the knowledge or expertise necessary to assemble appropriate and scalable technology for your Tech stack, the symbiotic relationship of customer & prospect data throughout the ecosystem of your Tech stack, and the external partnerships vital to supporting your efforts including Single Sign-On providers (SSO’s), digital trading desks, and data enhancement companies. Free usually means the value and cost are both ZERO

4 Must-Have MarTech Components & 4 Major Marketing Channels for Small Business Success

Search Engine Optimization is the strategy & execution of Keyword Search selections around which your website is built. Paid SEO is the purchase of a search ranking over-riding organic search results and ensuring a high ranking. If your website is beautiful in design but undiscoverable on search engines the point is moot. Your website establishes your Brand, provides Awareness, creates a centralized home for your Social Media & Media Posts, and is your platform for collecting your 1st Party Data.

Your 1st Party Data collected through a line code embedded in your website address represents your Website Visitors which are your most valuable audience members who actively searched for a need and chose your company to explore.

If your SEO strategy and your Website are your most important MarTech components, your Customer Relationship Marketing (CRM) database is your next most important component. It is the lifeblood that houses all of your customer & prospect data, supports the re-targeting of your website visitors, defines your customers & prospective audiences for lead generation, while providing a demographic & geographic profile of your customer base to target across all marketing channels like Social Media, Digital Advertising, Email, Direct Marketing, Telemarketing, and any other channels within your marketing strategy.

While your Lead Generation initiatives such as PR events, trade shows, and cold calling are not necessarily MarTech they are a major contributor to the prospective data feeding your MarTech components (email, social, digital advertising platforms, etc.)

Your Social Media platform selection should represent the digital platforms your customers engage with most frequently. This is the forum to broadcast your company’s culture, value, and product and/or service offering to grow your social audience, create awareness, build interest, and generate website visitors to circularly re-target.

Paid social advertising utilizes social media platforms to target audiences by demographic and geographic filters to reach your “best prospective customers” beyond the scope of your connection/follower base growing your leads and your CRM database. Paid digital advertising places your ad(s) on other company websites to expand your reach beyond your own website. Through automated bidding, digital advertising inventory is made available on other websites and purchased through programmatic automation based on the budget & inventory criteria you create around the campaign to drive prospective customers to a call-to-action. Whether that action is a website visit, phone call, email, or any of your other communication channel(s) it continues to feed your marketing funnel and grows your CRM which grows your reachable audience.

Direct Mail and print are executed both as mass advertising and/or targeted marketing tools. For small businesses mass advertising through direct mail is not a cost-effective option. As both print (billboards, signage, flyers, etc.) and direct mail are quite costly small businesses cannot afford to have their message lost through mailbox or signage clutter. By highly targeting prospect universes within your CRM and outside consumer or business data, small businesses can make direct marketing a valuable part of their marketing strategy. For small businesses t’s all in the targeting and not saturation marketing.

Finally, your Email Service Provider…the technology responsible for customer/prospect response communication, marketing campaigns, automated billing, newsletters, and more. It’s a good idea for small business owners to have a marketing company like GRO Marketing drive the platform you select for email as the strategy, creative, copy, offer, and audience selection need to critically align to determine the success of any given campaign.

GRO Marketing hopes this helps to better understand the strategy, technology, and execution at play in any small business marketing plan!