Marketing can be so much fun and we want to help small business leaders like you get inspired and have a seriously good time marketing their business. Because your customers can tell if you love what you’re doing. It’s like how we can tell if someone is smiling on the other end of the phone. We just sense it.

One of the potentially overwhelming parts of marketing your hobby business is where the heck to even start. While there is quite a bit of research, goal-setting, and strategic planning you need to do before figuring that out, we wanted to share a giant list of ideas that might be helpful as you make a better, more fun plan for next month, next quarter, or next year.

So far, we’ve talked about advertising ideas (paid and potentially fast) and public relations ideas (earned and potentially free) so today we round out the trifecta with digital marketing (owned and potentially easy).

Owned Marketing Tactics

Owned marketing tactics, just mean that you own the place that they live. That can mean both physical ownership like the place your store operates, but also digital ownership like your website and email. It typically includes the things most people think of when they think about marketing.

Owned can mean free since you don’t have to pay to use the space like in traditional advertising. However, you may need to pay someone to help you develop the strategy and assets like a designer, writer, or website manager. Plus the tools you use like your website content management system and email service provider can have small fees. It can also mean lots of control since, unlike with earned public relations tactics, a third-party journalist or influencer isn’t the one telling your story. But that can also mean less credibility since you’re the one saying “look how awesome we are.”

Digital Marketing Tactics for Your Small Business

Website: Okay, we know starting with this sounds silly and obvious, but we need to remind you that your website might be the first impression you have with a customer. It’s critical that it not only delivers the information about your products and services, but also entertains and shows personality. It should work just as well on laptops as it does phones and tablets. 

Email Marketing: Another easy one but lots of folks don’t prioritize it enough. In addition to your transactional emails, or subscription confirmation emails, you could add a welcome series for new subscribers, newsletters with regular business updates, abandon cart reminders for those who didn’t finish an online purchase, birthday and anniversary emails, holiday and celebration emails, open positions and new hire announcements, thank you emails, event invitations, special new product previews, customer testimonials, award appreciations, reorder reminders, and so much more. If you want easy templates that are automatically added to your Mailchimp account, we have lots of these in our store.

Content Marketing: Most folks traditionally think of blog posts, but content can be so much more. Consider if some sort of calculator, tester, analyzer or other interactive tool might be helpful for your customers. Primary research through polls or surveys may also be cool to share, or even secondary research or syndication of other great content you love. Your customers may love what you curate, just like our friends love all the TikToks we curate for them. Many folks offer digital products as well as interactive online experiences like a coaching workshop or a course. Another example is lead magnets to encourage prospects and customers to subscribe to your email list. Much of your content could be upselling or expanding how your customers interact with you. If you need additional ideas, we offer more than 50 in a guide in our store. 

Search Engine Optimization: SEO for short, should parallel everything you do on your website and in your content marketing. SEO efforts include both the technical and the creative. Technical SEO efforts are like local-focused optimization, back-end website things like adding schema markup, and even optimizing for voice search. Then, there’s your creative efforts. Working within the technical rules of online search is important, yes, but don’t forget that at its core, SEO is about connecting searchers with the best information out there, so your content should match search, but also be inspiring and dull or odd for your customers. 

Social Media: Yet another obvious category, but with so many not-obvious tools besides your daily posting. Have you thought about how you can build a storefront on Instagram or TikTok? What about posting your events to Facebook, live streaming on YouTube or Twitch, commenting on subreddits, or sharing fun saveable content on Pinterest? There are also awesome social media-esque platforms focused on your industry or niche. Think Untappd, StoryGraph, and GoodReads.

Text Messages: Officially called SMS or Short Message Service, automated and personalized texts regarding event or class reminders or upcoming sales, or even review requests can be a great way to connect with customers who traditionally don’t engage with your emails. We love the idea of adding this option to your preference center so folks can choose how they hear from you.

Mobile App: Sometimes it makes sense to build an app that your customers can use to sign up for classes or events, or just generally engage with you. This can be a big undertaking at the start but can be an awesome way to build long-term relationships with your most loyal fans.

Chatbots and Artificial Intelligence: We are big fans of exciting new technology but you should be EXTREMELY cautious about how you implement these tools into your business operations. Chatbots and chat search tools can quickly answer common questions, however they can also sound impersonal and frustrate some if they aren’t tuned just right and direct back to a human when necessary. AI can help speed up content production, but it’s often lacking your personality and you’ll need to spend a lot of time editing to ensure facts are correct and that it emulates your brand voice and tone. Plenty of brands are using these technologies to their advantage, so we’re here to tell you to go for it, but with caution.

Omnichannel Behavioral Marketing: If you’re really fancy and have the budget for it, there are super rad platforms out there that allow you to pull in all of your customer data to one place where you can set up automations based on purchasing and engagement behaviors, making it an extremely personalized program, and across all your marketing platforms (website, email, SMS, app notifications, etc.)

Loyalty Program: Of course, we weren’t going to get through a whole list of marketing tactics and not talk about the importance of loyalty programs. There should always be perks for shopping with you again and again. Some use something like a sandwich punch card with a freebie after a certain number of visits, others offer discounts after a purchase volume. But also consider low-cost things you can do to celebrate your most loyal customers. E.g. 100 classes at your gym gets them a special Century Class T-Shirt, or maybe they tasted all 40 of your beers so you offer them an engraved brewery glass.

Don’t forget merch! People love having the opportunity to rep their favorite brands. So let them do some marketing for ya!

If you missed our other two posts in this series, go read the earned marketing and paid marketing posts next.

As always, if you want help sorting through these ideas, making a strategic plan for your business, or just executing a couple of them, we’d be happy to help!