Marketing Your Small Business Online

Are you trying to figure out how to best market your small business online? Then, you’re in the right place. Let’s talk about how you can best market a small business online. The first thing I want to make sure you understand is that the best marketing channel isn’t going to be the same for every business. The best channel will be the one that you get the best leads from, and it will vary based on your niche.

How can you market a small business online?

There are many different online marketing channels available to you as a small business owner or entrepreneur. You should use a mix of different marketing channels. You don’t ever want to be 100% dependent upon one channel for all of your marketing because if something happens with that channel, you can lose everything.

I always recommend a mix of marketing channels for my students and clients. You can have some organic and some paid, or you can do all paid or all organic. It’s really up to you. Paid channels generally bring more traffic to you faster than organic, but in my experience, organic converts higher, so you can make more money with fewer leads.

How do you decide which online marketing channels to use?

You’ll want to start by thinking about your ideal customer. Who are they, what do they want or need from you? Where do they spend their time?

For example, if your ideal customer is someone in their early 20s, they’re not likely to spend time on Facebook, so you wouldn’t want to focus your marketing efforts there. Your Gen Z consumer is on TikTok and maybe Instagram. They were definitely on Instagram until a few years ago when TikTok took off, and now most of them have moved over there.

If your ideal customer is a Millennial, they’re much more likely to be active on Instagram and Pinterest than other channels, though they may spend time on TikTok or Facebook too.

If you’re looking for Gen X folks, they’re more likely on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest than TikTok, but it doesn’t mean they’re not there at all.

What you want to think about is who your ideal customer is, how old they are, and where they spend their social media time. Most of our ideal customers are active on social media somewhere.

You don’t want to rely on social alone, so you’ll also want to focus on bringing people to your website and building an email list because you don’t have direct access to your social followers like you do with an email list. 

How many online marketing channels should you be using to market your business?

I generally recommend you focus on one social media channel to start and then, if you have the time, add another in the future. Social media can take a lot of time if you’re trying to create short-form videos, editing them, keeping up on trends, etc. You want to make sure that you still have enough time to work on other things in your business.

You’ll also want to work on creating an email list and make sure you’re staying in regular contact with the people on your list. I recommend emailing them helpful content once a week, and that means you’re going to need to create helpful content each week in order to have something to email about.

So, you’re going to have at least three online marketing channels – content (blog, podcast, or weekly video), email, and social media working together to help market your business.

How do you create an online marketing plan for your business?

The easiest way to set up your online marketing plan for your business is to think about your ideal customer and brainstorm the questions they have and address them each week on your blog, podcast, or video show. Then you’ll want to use that content as your inspiration for that week’s social content. You can create short-form videos, static posts, carousels, etc., from that one piece of content. You can decide if you’re going to post daily, on weekdays, or just a few days a week. You’ll also want to email your list each week with the new content piece and a note about why it’s helpful to them.

What’s the most important piece of marketing your business online?

Marketing strategy is the key to successful online marketing campaigns, and it’s also the piece I see most entrepreneurs and small business owners miss. Without a marketing strategy in place, you don’t really know that you’re bringing the right people into your world, and you can be confusing those who do find you because you’re not consistently talking about the same thing that brought them into your world.

What I teach my students and clients to do is work very strategically when they’re creating their online marketing plan. We start by thinking about their ideal customer, who they are, what questions they have, and whether they want our help. Can we help them? Then we think about our business and what we have that can help that customer. We want to bring our solution to the customer who needs help, solving their problem as quickly and easily as possible.

If we’re marketing without a strategy at the foundation of what we’re doing, we probably aren’t getting great results.

How to create a marketing strategy for your business online

Start by thinking about your customer as discussed a minute ago. Next, think about your products or services. How do you help the customer?

Now, you’ll want to create content that answers their questions and provides value while also offering your products or services as a solution. If you don’t do this, you won’t make as much money because people may not realize you can help them with their issues, and if they’re searching, it’s because they want a solution. The key here is that you’re mapping their questions to your solutions. If you don’t do this, you run the risk of creating content that brings in people who have questions about what you do but aren’t looking for solutions or aren’t interested in buying.

You also want to think about your ideal customer and if there’s anything special going on in their lives at different points of time during the year. For example, if your ideal customer is a mom with school-aged kiddos, she’s probably super busy in August or September and again in May. In those months, she’s looking for different things than she might be at other times during the year. She is also potentially too busy with family-related commitments to do anything else. By comparison, if your ideal customer is a retiree, they may have a lot more flexibility and free time. They may be looking for things to help them fill the daytime hours that they have worked for so many years.

Think about your customer, who they are, what their schedule looks like, and whether it varies depending on the time of the year. If so, you may need to adjust your marketing messages across the year as well to connect with them where they are in that time period.

If you’ve been trying to market your business online for a while and you’re not sure if it’s working right or not, I’ve got a super helpful resource guide that walks you through how to do a marketing checkup to figure out what’s working and what’s not. You can request a copy of it here. I also work with entrepreneurs and small business owners 1:1 in my Elite Marketing Coaching program or in a small group in The Confident Marketers Club (coming early 2026). I’d love to help you with your online marketing so you can make more money.