What to Do When Your Small Business’s Marketing Isn’t Working

How to Stay Focused and Move Forward

Remember when posting on Facebook a few times a week would grow your follower count and lead to sales? Or when email newsletters had great open rates because they weren’t relegated to Gmail’s “Promotions” tab?

Marketing is an ever-evolving sector, which means you need to keep changing in order keep your small business growing.

In this piece, we’re going to break down the why behind the problem before bringing you a solution to keep you focused and moving forward.

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Problem: Marketing Keeps Evolving

If you’re wondering what happened between the days of easy Facebook engagement and today, it can be boiled down to one word: revenue. Facebook and other social media platforms needed a way to bring in revenue, so they developed advertising.

And in order to gain traction with their advertising platforms, they started decreasing how many people business pages could reach, which would encourage companies to start paying for ads.

The other piece of this is Facebook’s desire to focus on showing users their friends’ posts, which also decreases the chances of your posts being seen. There are a finite number of posts a person sees a day, which means that friends’ posts take up more of that finite space.

Facebook is focused on building revenue and serving its individual users, not necessarily businesses. Both of these changes are an example of how it’s important to always be evaluating platform performance as it relates to your business to see whether it’s working for you.

Even with all the changes, though, the strategy remains the same.

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Solution: Different Tactics for the Same Strategy

Every marketing strategy comes down to reaching your customers at the right time and with the right content that provides enough value to make them purchase.

The tactics may have evolved from physical mailers to MySpace to Facebook and now to emerging platforms like TikTok, but as long as you focus on timing and content that your audience finds interesting, you’ll grow your brand and revenue online.

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How to Find New Marketing Tactics for Your Business

We aren’t going to list specific tactics in this piece, because it’d be null in a month. What we are doing, though, is showing you how to find new marketing tactics so you can continue evolving as needed.

  1. Follow marketing thought leaders and industry publications to see what they’re recommending.
  2. Test new platforms, even if they may seem like an odd match. That could make you stand out!
  3. Don’t be afraid to pull back on what’s not working. Devote your time to what’s providing results.

The goal here is to test frequently and be ready to pivot as needed if one platform takes off or another fails. It’s okay if that happens, too.

The important thing is that you tried it for your company. Focus on what does, and continue testing as new features or platforms come out.

As a small business, your marketing will evolve. And it’s not if, it’s when. But by focusing on trying new tactics that align with your strategy to reach your audience, you won’t have to worry about Facebook changing its algorithm again.

You’ll be ready to make it work because you’re focusing on the strategy more than one specific tactic.

[ Infographic ] How to Find New Marketing Tactics for Your Business

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If you’re ready to take the marketing that you’ve started and accelerate it, let’s talk.

We’re passionate about how small businesses can achieve more through digital marketing, and we can help you reach your goals. Send us a message or give us a call at (415) 640-8009.

Marc Apple

Marc Apple

Digital Strategist

I like inbound marketing strategy, creative design, website development, analytics, and organic and paid search. That's what I write about.