Differentiating Marketing Practices for Small Business: Academic vs Everyday

How do you identify your audience?

While academic marketing principles may provide a solid educational foundation, small businesses often need to adapt these principles to their specific needs and constraints. By combining a strong understanding of utilitarian marketing fundamentals with practical, cost-effective strategies, small business owners can effectively reach their target audience and drive growth.

In order to reach new customers, companies have to identify their target audiences. This process will be different for large corporations and family-owned small businesses. However, there can also be some overlap, with small business owners determing the general motivations of their customers while not being overly-specific as in the example of personas.

One of the practices for identifying the business demographic in the corporate world is the creation of personas. These are in-depth profiles that are generated for one person in the intended demographic outlining their needs, goals, lifestyle, and other defining factors pertaining to marketing.

Personas are detailed representations of specific user groups. They often include:

• Demographic information: Age, gender, location, occupation, etc.
• Goals and motivations: What they want to achieve with your product or service.
• Frustrations and pain points: Challenges they face.
• Behaviors: How they interact with technology and information.

While these granular personas may be best suited for large companies, you can still find out more about your audience through user-centric approaches.

You can create a user-centric website and marketing plan by focusing on these broader principles:

1. Understand Your Core Audience: While you may not have specific personas, identify the core demographic that you’re primarily targeting. This will help you understand their general needs and preferences.
2. Empathize with Users: Put yourself in the shoes of your users. Consider their motivations, frustrations, and the tasks they’re trying to accomplish on your website and with your business.
3. Gather User Insights: Use tools like surveys, A/B user testing, and analytics to understand how real users interact with your website. Get reviews and feedback to find what’s most important to them when they consider your business.
4. Prioritize User Experience: Design your website with a focus on usability, accessibility, and overall user experience, including best practices for converting visits to revenue. Find ways to ensure all interactions with your business are positive and strive to resolve issues that might occur.

It’s important to strike a balance between specificity and flexibility when marketing to your small business demographic.

Instead of spending a lot of time pouring over the minutia required to design accurate and effective personas, that time can be better spent by small business owners working to understand your customers in a broader context. You can create these user-centric definitions representing different user segments without getting bogged down in excessive detail.

Ultimately, the goal is to create a digital marketing strategy that meets the needs of your audience while adhering to a realistic budget, especially given economic considerations.

Again, with a small business that “Often operates with limited resources and relies on DIY marketing,” you can maximize the effectiveness of your efforts by learning new skills that increase your ability to compete in your market. Those efforts often translate to profits!

When you’re researching marketing strategies for your small business online, keep in mind the differences between the types of results you might see. Some are centered on the academic definition of a small business while others are aimed at the concepts behind the everyday ins and outs of business ownership. There is a contrast between what is learned in a marketing course at a university and the real-world applications for a family-owned store. Hopefully this post will make navigating your way through DIY marketing a little easier.

Success to you!