We all know how important marketing is to the success of a business.

Marketing makes lots of money for big companies, but lots of small businesses struggle with it.

Not because they don’t have the budget, but because they just don’t know what to do.

That’s where this article comes in; if you’re looking for some easy to follow advice on marketing your business, look no further than these 7 steps:

1) Make sure that people can find you.

This might seem obvious, but there are plenty of businesses out there that don’t do it.

You can set up a website and get on Google pretty easily these days, so do it.

2) Spend some time really thinking about your target market and what you’re going to sell them.

If you just decide on something quickly and change it later when you find out it’s not working then this is a waste of time.

Also, try and figure out if the thing that you want to sell them is to solve one of their problems or make their life easier in any way at all because if it doesn’t then nobody is going to buy from you regardless of how good the price is.

Once again, this might feel obvious, but I’ve seen plenty of businesses that start this way and it’s a terrible idea.

3) Give them discounts.

Once you’ve made sure that people know where to find you, make sure they know what it’s worth to them too.

If the product/service is solving one of their problems or making their lives easier then there should be some sort of reward for buying it from you instead of searching elsewhere.

4) You need to figure out how much your product/service will cost you to provide, and then work out how much profit you want to make on each sale.

This is going to determine how much money you’re going to spend on marketing because regardless of whether it’s free or not if nobody has heard about your business somehow then it’s not going to work.

5) What we’ve covered so far is the pre-marketing of your business, and that’s really important because you can get started straight away with it.

Now I’m going to get into the bare bones of how you get people to hear about who you are and hopefully buy from you.

Once you’ve got the ball rolling it’s time to keep it going.

You need to keep making new content so that Google keeps ranking your business page higher than competitors, which should hopefully translate to more customers.

There are lots of ways to do this too; video reviews, blogging about your industry, or telling stories on social media will all help you get heard, additional hints.

When somebody does buy from you make sure that they’re satisfied with their purchase and become a loyal customer by offering great service after the sale.

Also, make sure that they know how grateful you are for them buying something from you!

6) Identify where all of your potential customers spend their time online; website listings, forums, Twitter etcetera and then try and find them there.

This will be a lot easier than trying to send everyone everywhere at once so don’t be afraid to keep working on this until it’s worked out too because it’ll pay off in the long run.

7) Make sure that you maintain all of these things and keep them up to date because if you stop for too long then everything falls down around you.

I hope you find it useful.

Happy marketing!