Marketing Strategies
Small business online marketing is the set of digital channels, mainly a website, local SEO and your Google Business Profile, paid ads, social media, and email, working together on a consistent schedule to generate new leads and repeat customers. The businesses that treat it as one system are the ones that grow in a predictable way.
- By Mike Purvis Co-founder of NH Strategic Marketing
- June 9, 2021
- August 21, 2026
How To Effectively Market Your Small Business Online
More often than not, when a client calls our team to help them with their online marketing efforts, it’s because they don’t know the best way to proceed with their marketing and they’ve tried a combination of things and haven’t seen the results that they’re looking for.
After 9+ years of working with small businesses and helping them grow their small businesses through online marketing, we’ve found that most are making one (or more) of the following three mistakes.
When you spend the time to address the problems below, you’ll see a steady flow of inbound leads coming as a result of your marketing efforts.
What Small Business Online Marketing Looks Like Day to Day
Small business online marketing covers all the little ways people find, research, and come back to your business online.
Someone might spot your company in Google Maps while waiting for coffee, visit your website later that evening, read a few reviews, and send an enquiry the next morning. The journey can bounce between a few places before the person gets in touch. That is pretty normal.
During a typical week, your marketing may include:
Your website
Giving visitors useful information, proof that they can trust you, and an easy way to call, book, or send an enquiry.
Local visibility
Keeping your Google Business Profile, map listings, contact details, photos, and reviews up to date.
Paid advertising
Using Google Ads to reach people actively searching and Meta Ads to introduce your business to a relevant audience.
SEO
Improving your pages and publishing helpful content so your business has more opportunities to appear in organic search results.
Social media
Sharing useful posts, recent work, customer stories, and occasional behind-the-scenes updates. Nothing fancy is required here.
Staying in touch with leads and past customers through follow-ups, useful updates, reminders, and timely offers.
AI search is becoming part of this daily picture too. Clear information across your website, business listings, reviews, and trusted third-party sites gives tools such as ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews better context when your business is relevant to a question.
The focus can shift from one day to the next. Monday might be spent updating a service page. Thursday might involve replying to reviews or checking which ad brought in a call. Somewhere in between, a social post needs a photo and the email draft still needs a subject line. Small business marketing often looks like that.
What matters is how these channels support the customer journey. An ad or search result gets someone’s attention. Your website answers their questions. Reviews give them confidence. A quick follow-up keeps the conversation moving.
When those pieces support one another, online marketing becomes a steady source of new enquiries and repeat business.
Three Marketing Mistakes Small Business Owners Make All The Time
There are three big mistakes we see business owners make over and over that lead to unpredictable seasons and lower sales than they should have.
If you want to remove all doubt and know that your business will grow year after year, you’re going to want to pay attention to these mistakes and be sure to avoid them.
For the longer version of why the first one matters this much, we go deeper in the importance of a marketing funnel; here is the short version.
Mistake 01: Not Having A Digital Marketing Funnel
It’s a simple but powerful idea for any business, but most don’t have any predictable marketing system to predictably get new customers month after month.
As a digital marketing agency, building a marketing funnel will help you to create more customers and that’s exactly what we do for our marketing clients.
When you have a funnel in place that nurtures the leads, you’re going to convert even more of the leads that are coming in.
From the first step where you hit them with cold advertising campaigns on platforms such as Facebook Ads and Google Ads, to the retargeting campaigns that you run to stay front of mind, to the moment that they call you to book your services or make a purchase, you want to be sure that you’re the first company they think of when they’re in need of what you offer.
Just having a proven marketing funnel isn’t enough though…
Mistake 02: Not Constantly Feeding the Top of The Funnel
Just because you have a marketing system doesn’t mean that you’ll automatically generate leads and grow your business through online marketing. You have to constantly “feed the machine” in order for it to produce new customers month after month.
You should be doing something each and every day that feeds your funnel. From launching new ad campaigns, to posting on your social media, to keeping your Google My Business page up to date, you want to be sure that each day you have done something to generate more leads for your business.
When you stop feeding your marketing funnel, business will start to dry up. Rather than having to rush to get things back on track when this happens, you want to keep a steady stream of inbound leads coming your way.
Mistake 03: Waiting Until Business Is Slow To Advertise
Too often, businesses say, “I’m too busy right now to market” only to find out a month or couple months later that they have nothing lined up for the future. Suddenly, they’ve gone from feast to famine, from making good money to making no money at all.
Then, businesses are stuck scurrying around when they realize that they have no new leads, no jobs lined up, nothing.
The fix for this? Never stop feeding the top of the funnel, no matter how busy you are. Do something to grow your business every single day.
Remember, there’s only so many people searching for your goods and services each day, week, and month. In order to be successful, you want to be capturing as many of those prospects as possible, even when you think you’re “too busy.”
The businesses who were investing in their strong online presence during the good times are the ones that will win (and win big), when things slow down.
One of our clients runs a paving business. They had been active on social media for months. They would put time into posts but receive very few enquiries. A familiar story, honestly. We mapped out a simple funnel, set a practical budget, and created a regular campaign schedule. Within a couple of months, the enquiries began arriving consistently, and the team could finally see which marketing campaigns were bringing people in and where to focus their follow-up.
How To Solve Online Marketing Mistakes That Stop Business Growth
Our clients that have gone from one-man outfits to multi-million dollar companies all have one thing in common – they each implemented our proven marketing funnel and they’re constantly feeding people into the top of the funnel (we actually do that for them so they can focus on running their own business).
If that’s something you would like to learn more about then be sure to contact us today.
Helping small businesses grow through smart online marketing is our passion. You’ll know it as soon as you talk to us for 5-minutes. We hope to talk with you about growing your business very soon.
The Core Channels of Marketing for Small Businesses
Once the funnel above is in place, the next question is where to put your time and dollars. Most small business online marketing efforts break down into six pieces, playing a different part in getting a stranger to become a customer.
Your website
This is the foundation everything else points back to. Ads, social posts, and search results all lead someone to your site, and if it does not load fast, explain what you do, and make it obvious how to reach you, the rest of the marketing budget goes to waste. A site designed with conversions in mind turns visitors into phone calls and form submissions instead of quick exits.
Local SEO and your Google Business Profile
For a business that serves a physical area, this is often the highest-impact piece on the list. Your map listing, reviews, hours, and photos determine if you show up when someone nearby searches for what you offer. We cover the specifics in our Google Business Profile optimization guide.
Organic search (SEO)
SEO is the slow-build channel: content and site structure that earn a place on page one without paying per click. It takes longer to show results than paid ads, but the traffic keeps arriving long after you have moved on to the next project.
Paid search and social ads
Google Ads put you in front of people actively searching for what you sell, while Facebook Ads reach people before they know they are looking. Both belong in the mix once your website and offer can convert the traffic they send.
This is the most overlooked channel on this list, and often the most profitable. Litmus reports an average return on investment (ROI) of $36 per $1 spent on email marketing, a figure no other channel here comes close to matching. A simple monthly note to past customers costs almost nothing and keeps you top of mind for the next job.
Content marketing and social media
Blog posts, video, and consistent social media management build familiarity with the target audience that already knows your name. This is a longer game than paid ads, but it compounds: a helpful article or a well-made video published once keeps working for years.
We will look at what you have in place today and tell you, honestly, where the gaps are.
How to Build an Effective Digital Marketing Plan?
A useful small business marketing plan should still make sense during a busy week. Keep it simple. Set a monthly budget. Choose where that money will go first. Decide what result you are looking for, then pick a date to sit down and review it. You should be able to explain the whole plan in a minute or two.
How Much Should Small Business Online Marketing Cost?
The honest answer is a little annoying, but it depends.
Revenue matters. So does the value of a new customer, how quickly you want to grow, and how much extra work your team can comfortably take on.
The U.S. Small Business Administration references spending 7 to 8 percent of gross revenue for businesses earning under $5 million per year with profit margins between 10 and 12 percent.
Treat that as a reference point. If faster growth is the business goal, you may decide to move closer to 10 or 12 percent after looking at cash flow and how many new customers your business can serve.
Another way into the math is to start with the customer.
How much gross profit does a new customer bring in? How much could you spend to acquire that person and still feel good about the return? Once you know those two numbers, setting a monthly test budget becomes much easier.
We go further into the metrics in our guide on how much a small business should spend on marketing.
I still remember a conversation with a client who wanted results in 6 weeks on a budget of around $1K, spread across four different channels. We had an honest talk about the math. Once we ran the numbers, the amount going into each channel was so small that we would learn very little from any of them. For this kind of situation, we suggest funding one promising online channel. Give it enough time to produce useful information. Then take what you learn and use it when you move into the next digital platform.
How to Choose Which Channel to Start With
Think back to your five most recent customers. How did they find you? What happened between hearing your name and contacting you?
The answers will point you in the right direction.
A local service business may start with its Google Business Profile and local SEO because people are already searching nearby. Google Ads can also make sense when the business wants visibility sooner and has room in the budget.
For a higher-priced service, the decision may take a few weeks or even a few months. SEO content can answer the questions people ask during that time, while email keeps the conversation moving after someone downloads a guide, requests information, or joins the list.
A product or service people discover through photos and videos may be a better fit for Meta or Instagram. You get the idea. Start with the way customers already behave instead of forcing the business onto six platforms at once.
Give the first channel a fair run. Once the tracking is clear and the results feel repeatable, bring in another.
Search, Maps, and Now AI: Where Customers Find You Today
Marketing a small business online used to mean showing up in Google’s ten blue links. That is no longer the complete picture. Today, someone looking for a business like yours might search Google, check the map pack, or ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google’s AI Overview directly, and get a single named answer instead of a page of results to sort through.
This shift is happening at a good pace. According to BrightLocal’s 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey, use of AI tools for finding local businesses jumped from 6 percent to 45 percent of consumers in a single year. If an AI tool answers a question about your industry and never mentions your name, that is a lead handed to a competitor.
The good news is that the fundamentals do not change much. What you need for a chance to outperform competitors is a mobile-friendly website, clear site structure, accurate business information, and genuinely useful content for a human reader and an AI model alike.
We ran a version of this test ourselves: we asked ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overview a set of “best [service] near [town]” questions across a handful of client industries. Then we audited the GBPs of businesses that the AI mentioned in the response. To our surprise, the mentioned businesses had optimized FBP profile description, a good number of reviews, and positive sentiment across the web. It was a small sample, but it lines up with what the BrightLocal data shows at scale.
Small business online marketing rewards consistency more than it rewards a single big month of spending. Fix the three mistakes above, put a plan and a number behind your channels, and keep an eye on the AI-driven side of search so you are not caught off guard.
If you would like a second pair of eyes on where your business stands today, book a time to chat with our team, and we will show you exactly where the gaps are.
Small Business Online Marketing FAQs
Q: What is the best online marketing strategy for a small business?
There is no single best strategy that fits all businesses. A local service business usually gets the fastest results from local SEO and a strong Google Business Profile, while a business with a longer sales cycle often benefits more from search engine optimization and email developed over time.
Q: How do customer reviews support small business online marketing?
Customer reviews build trust before someone calls, and they can support visibility in local search. Ask shortly after a positive experience, send a direct review link, and reply in a natural, professional voice. Reviews across Google and trusted directories also give potential customers more context when comparing local businesses.
Q: How can a small business compete with larger companies online?
Small businesses can compete by getting specific. Create pages for the services and locations that matter, answer questions heard during customer calls, collect recent reviews, and respond quickly to enquiries. A larger company may have a bigger budget, but your local knowledge can be far more useful to someone nearby. Here are more ways to attract local customers through your website.
Q: When are Google Ads a good fit for a small business?
Google Ads can make sense when people actively search for your service, the value of a sale supports the advertising cost, and your team has room for new enquiries. Clear conversion tracking is essential because clicks alone say very little. These factors can help you decide if Google Ads make sense for your small business.
Q: Can organic social media marketing bring customers to a small business?
Yes. Organic social media helps people become familiar with your business, see recent work, and get a feel for the people behind it. Posts are more useful when they include a clear next step, such as visiting a service page or requesting information.