Small Business Marketing Moves That Actually Work: What To Prioritize In 2025

Small business marketing in 2025 isn’t about doing everything you possibly can – it’s about doing the right things strategically. If you’re running a small business, you don’t have a bottomless budget and a massive team, so spending time and money on the wrong marketing strategies can hurt you.

However, you don’t need to spend a fortune like the big corporations. You just need a focused, strategic approach tailored for your business.

The 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle, applies here. This principle states that 80% of your results should come from 20% of your efforts. To accomplish this, avoid trying every new marketing trend and put more effort into the strategies you already know drive results. For instance, nurturing leads through email and expanding profitable advertising campaigns is a better use of resources than trying to go viral on TikTok when you don’t have a following.

If you need a little guidance for your small business marketing, here’s a look at some tried-and-true effective marketing strategies along with the strategies you’re better off skipping.

3 Strategies to Use

The following strategies will give you the most bang for your marketing bucks:

1. Use email marketing

Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies you could employ, but only when it’s done correctly. For instance, if you collect email addresses but fail to send out regular emails, you’re leaving money on the table. In that case, every subscriber you have is a missed opportunity to build trust, loyalty, and sales. An effective email marketing campaign will provide regular, valuable communications designed to build a relationship with your audience over time.

If you need help with collecting emails, building a sales funnel, or crafting messages that turn leads into paying customers, hire a professional marketing company. Having a team of pros manage your email strategy means you won’t just be sending emails – you’ll be creating a lead-nurturing machine that works 24/7 to grow your business.

2. Optimize your website for local SEO

Often overlooked, local SEO can help you grow your business rapidly. If you have a physical location or offer services in a particular area, you want your website to show up in search results conducted by locals. For example, if you’re a plumber in San Francisco, local SEO can help your website show up in search results when people living in San Francisco search for plumbing-related queries.

Search engine optimization is crucial for reaching a local market. Start by claiming and optimizing your Google Business Profile with accurate information and encouraging customers to leave positive reviews. You’ll also need to adjust your website copy and do some technical work. If you don’t have time to learn SEO from scratch, this task is best outsourced to an agency.

3. Track your results

Always track your efforts so you can pinpoint exactly what’s driving results and what needs to be reworked or scrapped. You can’t optimize what you aren’t tracking, which means you need to track everything from your cost per lead to your lifetime customer value.

3 Strategies to Skip

With so many marketing strategies to choose from, you’ll need to be selective about where you put your time, energy, and money. You can always expand your efforts later, but when you’re just getting started with a limited budget, you can skip the following strategies.

1. Daily posting on Twitter/X

There was a time when posting on X could gather a decent following, but many people have boycotted the platform, and posts with external links are intentionally suppressed. If you don’t already have a following on the X platform, it won’t benefit you to post. It will be a lot of effort for little to no return.

2. Brand awareness

Unless you’ve got millions of dollars like large corporations, don’t spend money to generate brand awareness. Let brand awareness be the natural result of another, more profitable marketing strategy, like email marketing or running paid ads.

3. Buying followers

Many businesses try to establish themselves by purchasing followers, fans, and post engagement. When you buy followers, likes, and post interactions, it’s inauthentic, and the followers aren’t real. It might look nice to see the numbers, but it’s not going to do anything to help grow your business. In fact, when real leads see that you have 50,000 fans and almost no comments on your posts, it can hurt your credibility. And depending on what you ask people to post, it could get you in trouble with the FCC.

4. Micromanaging your analytics

Making data-driven decisions is essential, but there’s a fine line that can cause you to cross over into obsession. If this happens, micromanaging your analytics will quickly become unsustainable and will cause you to miss the bigger picture.

Avoid wasting time on metrics that don’t matter. Checking your email open rate every day or refreshing your ad dashboard every hour is a waste of time. Not all metrics are equally important, and some aren’t even accurate. Focusing on short-term fluctuations will distract you from what’s actually driving growth, like improved audience targeting and your content strategy.

If you’re too heavily focused on analytics, you’re more likely to make impulsive decisions without realizing that’s what’s happening. For instance, you might pause an ad too soon, rewrite content that hasn’t had time to rank, or abandon a strategy before it gains traction. Effective marketing requires patience, and micromanagement kills that.

Market Smarter

Marketing is a long-term strategy with a lot of individual components, and that’s why most businesses hire a marketing agency to do the hard work. Professionals know exactly what marketing channels to use for each industry, and which ones to avoid. They have a system in place that allows them to get results without wasting time or energy.

If you don’t know where to start, you’re more likely to burn yourself out attempting to implement every marketing strategy possible. The small businesses that will thrive in 2025 will be the ones who get laser-focused on revenue-generating marketing strategies. Prioritize the marketing channels that work best for you, track your numbers, and don’t be afraid to call in the pros when you’re ready to scale your small business.