3 performance marketing tips for small businesses.

If you are a small business owner with limited capital or you are just starting your D2C journey in the upcoming financial year, here are my 3 most important recommendations for you:

1. Focus on building the right foundation: Many founders/businesses look for shortcuts or ‘hacks‘ when they start.

Building a business takes time and you need to lay the right and strong foundation to build anything sustainable.

Building a strong foundation can be further broken down into 4 parts:

a) Develop a unique brand identity: Today's market is cluttered with brands with little to no unique identity. In the last 7 days, I have met founders who are unclear about their vision, positioning, differentiator, and value system. Everything else around your business is an extension of this identity, spend time to craft this.

b) Leveraging the power of organic social media: There is no denying the fact that social media is critical to running today’s digital-led businesses. However social media is not limited to running ads. Your organic strategy on social is equally important to create consideration towards the brand and drive sales.

c) Developing a fundamentally strong website: Your website is your destination to get sales. Once you compromise on this, it will be the biggest roadblock to your business. There is no ‘hack‘ to building a great website. There is a lot that goes behind building a search-engine-friendly and top-class experience website.

d) Build for repeats: In an ideal scenario, the moment you hit the first 10 orders on your e-commerce store you should kick off the repeat journey and triggers. Building for repeats means setting up the entire ecosystem of marketing automation that sends out the right communication to the right customer at the right time.

2. Performance marketing does not equal running ads: Google and Meta ads are going through a major shift because of an increased focus on user privacy.

   I strongly believe the role of digital advertising will also shift in the coming years. From just ad-level conversions, businesses will have a strong focus on zero-party and first-party data to make data-backed decisions which is the core of Performance marketing.

   I recently spoke about the new ‘Golden circle‘ of digital marketing that businesses of all scales and sizes should build on an Instagram reel.

3. Content and data are your best friends: When your business is small, focus more on the input you give to the ad machines.

   If the input is right, the output follows. Spend time in getting your creative and communication right.

   The central thought of the brand should be extended across all content distribution channels.

   It sounds easy however the moment you delegate this responsibility to a team you will find the challenges of keeping the synergy intact.

Make use of as many distribution channels as possible. While ads are good to kick start and get the influx of users on the website, keeping them engaged on the website and having efficient, knowledge-led automated communication in the form of Whatsapp, emails, notifications, and SMS are equally important.

Data on the other hand is your other best friend. The struggle a small business faces is a lack of data. But when you are small; Less is more. Limited data also means you have laser-sharp insights on which the team can work on building certain hypotheses and proving them.

Focus on 3 fundamentals if you are a small business owner.

If you like today’s newsletter, you will love what I cover in the Dream Performance Marketing Masterclass. This is where I bring out the best of my content, case studies and energy. Because I am a teacher at heart and have been teaching for 4+ years now.

You get an exclusive discount on The Dream Performance marketing masterclass via the Top Decoders Community.

If you are part of this community you get member-exclusive pricing and many more benefits beyond.

Cheers,

Apurv