Running a small business comes with challenges and obstacles that are your responsibility alone, that you have to figure out and solve. Spreading the word of your brand is not the most difficult thing in the industry, but great marketing comes with methods and details that simply sufficient or ok marketing can never hope to emulate. Your business lives and dies on how good your advertising is, and if you want exponential growth, if you want to expand and reach for the stars, then your marketing strategies just have to be on point. Luckily, you have more than enough options available to you; all you need is a little guidance, and this brief guide is going to go over some excellent marketing strategies and tips you can draw back on.
Printed Designs
Have you ever walked down the street and seen someone wearing an outstanding T-shirt with a logo or art on it that just oozes quality and style, which you remembered long after? That could have been print marketing in action, and one reason why it is so effective is the return on investment you get out of it. Say you print a few hundred T-shirts with your custom print, invest in some direct mail postcard designs, and sell them, or even better yet, have them distributed among your customers, perhaps as a kind of loyalty bonus or reward. 
You buy one T-shirt, which gets worn by one person, and when they wear it and walk around, hundreds and hundreds of people see it, react to it, and perhaps remember it, meaning there are hundreds of potential customers out there who can be made aware of your existence by one T-shirt. Invest in a couple hundred T-shirts, and the chances just multiply. This goes for anything physical you invest in; it can be merch, apparel, or perhaps just sending your advertising to the people directly with printed postcards. Take a look at what some of the others in your industry are currently up to, marketing-wise, and take a page out of their book if it seems like it is working.
Social Media
Yes, this is obvious, but the number of businesses and managers and executives who fail and fall staggeringly short of actually utilizing the potential of social media is almost unbelievable. Social media is free tech and used by practically everyone, and a smart social media manager can transform your company’s public awareness overnight. Engaging with your customer base and interacting with the internet, there is so much potential just waiting to be tapped. Whole businesses like KFC or Opera became almost household names overnight because they leveraged social media to their advantage, realizing where their audience was and what they wanted, memes and almost trolling, and they gave it to them, to their great benefit.
Be Consistent
Sure, some posts go viral, giving you perhaps millions of views and clicks, but the backbone of your business will still be the content that slowly gains traction, and with how fast the internet moves, you need to keep up. Post regularly and stay consistent; whether you are getting more or fewer views, it does not matter; you still have to keep at it. That is the discipline of social media marketing, to keep going and posting and sharing even when you seemingly are not growing your audience at all. That is just how the internet works; all you can and must do is stay consistent and signal to your current audience that you can be relied upon to deliver, whether that means social media posts or selling a product. They become synonymous; good here means you are also good there.
Co-Brand
Co-branding, or a crossover, is a powerful marketing tool if done well. All it is is you pairing up with another brand to promote together, like you see all the time with McDonald’s and Disney movies, for example, both calling attention to each other through special deals, offers, or merch. Collaborate with another brand in your industry, get the opportunity to use their existing customer base to grow your own, and attract a demographic of customers in entirely new regions and locations. Co-branding can be an expensive strategy, but when the costs and expenses are split across both brands, it can be a lot more achievable and worthwhile. The trick is just finding the right brand to co-brand with, so doing some research and calling around is the first step here.
SEO
Anyone in the business world knows SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, a marketing strategy that takes time to build up and develop but is worth it in the long run, levelling out the costs of getting it up and running. All it is is building your brand’s presence on search engines, like Google, making it much easier and quicker for anyone perusing the internet and perhaps interested in what you have to sell to find you. Optimizing your website for SEO may seem like a daunting, monumental task, but really, it is not all that; just hire a good digital marketing expert, and they will take care of it for you. Acquiring customers through search engines vs paid advertising is cheaper once it is working, as it is running passively.
Cause Marketing
An often unexplored avenue that can prove quite beneficial is cause marketing. All it entails is advocating for a certain cause, like collaborating with a charity organization or sponsoring a non-profit event to aid a social cause while leveraging and improving your brand reputation. Both parties reap the benefits of this, like increased customer loyalty, good PR, getting ahead of the competition, and building relationships with your customer base. You give them the feeling that you share their ideals and hopes in how to make the world around them a better place. Pretty much everyone wins in this scenario; you just have to leverage it right and find a charity that also aligns with your ideals and pragmatic ideas.
Marketing is built up of numerous building blocks and concepts, and rather than just trying to reel them all in at once, find a few to focus on at a time. Figure out what best represents your brand and what you are all about, and build a marketing strategy from there.