Marketing can be extremely difficult for small businesses. Huge corporations have the money and knowledge to create and maintain large marketing departments, while small businesses usually have a much more limited marketing budget.

This usually leads to poor marketing strategies, or worse, a complete disregard for marketing in general. The truth is that marketing is not exclusive to large corporations, and even small businesses can reap marketing benefits.

I’ve recently interviewed experts from Mint Global Marketing, a digital marketing agency with 30 years of experience working with small businesses to create and implement marketing strategies. Mint Global Marketing gave me a ton of great advice and pointed out many common marketing mistakes small businesses make. Let’s take a look.

Do you think a lot of small businesses ignore marketing altogether?

I wouldn’t say they ignore marketing. I think they underestimate the power of effective marketing. I think one of the reasons they may do this is because it can be extremely overwhelming to launch a strong marketing campaign.

What many people don’t realize is that it has never been easier to get a campaign off the ground, thanks to modern technology and methods.

What are some of these modern methods and modern pieces of technology that can help small businesses market?

Well, it’s never been easier to launch a beautiful website than now, thanks to services like Wix and Squarespace and even Frameworks and tools like Bootstrap and WordPress.

If you just need a beautiful website that functions on mobile and desktop that advertises your services and gives out your information, that can be built for a couple of hundred dollars.

How can a great website be leveraged with marketing to increase sales?

Well, your website is the first thing users see, so it has to look and function great. Other than that, when you build your website in something like WordPress, you can easily add in analytics, A/B testing, and many other marketing and analytical tools.

These are things you almost never see small businesses utilizing. A/B testing different calls to action, checking analytics to find which pages your users are sticking to the most, and using all of this information to create effective sales funneling.

How about content? Things like SEO and mailing lists. Do you think small businesses use these things enough?

I was actually about to bring that up. No, we do not see businesses utilize the power of SEO as much as we’d like. That’s usually one of the first things we target when we start working with a small business.

We start creating content and excellent copywriting for their website so that we can get them those views. If we can create a weekly or biweekly newsletter as well in order to retain customers, that’s even better.

Let’s talk about customers a little bit. What’s the number one mistake you see small businesses make when it comes to attracting customers. As far as targeting goes with their marketing strategies.

A lot of small businesses make the mistake of trying to market to everyone. This used to be the way to market, but nowadays, we can hit target audiences much more aggressively.

Even small businesses can figure out their target audience and market towards them specifically. This is not only cheaper, but it is much more effective.

In order to get next-level results, you need to consider revamping your marketing strategy. There are many tools that can help pinpoint a target audience, including analytics. But you can even figure it out with good old-fashioned research.