You step up a set of makeshift stairs onto the deck of your new ship. With each step, you inspect one element after another to ensure everything is up to your standards. The hull is sturdy and resolute. No single nail is out of place, no boards are missing, and nothing can break through the barrier it creates. Below deck, it's more of the same. Your crew has been carefully selected to match the rigors that await.
There's just one problem: all that time, energy, and resources you poured into those necessities has come at the expense of the sails. Torn and tattered to pointlessness, they threaten to doom the voyage before it's begun.
Like building a ship, building your new business takes time, effort, and expertise. Building a product or service that people want is only the base, you'll also have to find the right talent to help you manage and push forward. But there can't be a tradeoff between these essential building blocks and your marketing strategy. You'll need to put as much time and effort into your sails as you do your ship's hull and crew.
So, at a time when 37% of touchpoints are consumer-driven, is your business ready to capture the shifting Internet winds that lay ahead in 2025? If not, here are four trends to help you discover how to market a new business in 2025.
Create a Website That Conveys Quality Information and Trust
One of the best ways to capture and harness the internet's attention for growth is through a top-tier website. That's why 43% of small businesses planned to invest in their website performance this past year. These businesses understand that an easy-to-use, optimized website that gets customers to solutions quickly is essential in 2025.
In a world where internet users form an opinion about a website in 0.05 seconds on average, you have to put resources into giving users the desired experience. In practice, that means a simple, intuitive experience. When potential customers or clients click on your website from a search, that link should bring them to their answer.
Before your website is ready to launch, it should be optimized across browsers and devices. While beautiful graphics convey trust and authority, your website needs to be scaled down to load quickly regardless of how your potential customer gets online. 53% of internet visitors leave a website if it doesn't load within 3 seconds. If your website looks great on a Mac desktop, ensure it looks just as good on an Android smartphone.
Equally important, though, is the call to action (CTA) on your web pages. The current bounce rate—a measurement of how many people only visit one page on a website—can be as high as 55%. That means over half the people who visit your website will only see one page unless you have compelling CTAs.
Each page should encourage the reader to take action, whether signing up for a newsletter, learning more, following on social media, or even making a purchase. Like sails catching wind to propel a ship, your website must capture attention and turn it into action.
A website designed with these considerations puts a new business in the best position to succeed regardless of industry. As distinctions between the business-to-consumer and business-to-business buying journey flatten, 90% of B2B buyers now expect the same experience as B2C buyers. No matter what your new business does, it needs a well-built website to sail ahead of the competition.
Employ Data-Driven Market Research
If your website needs to solve your potential customer's problems quickly, how do you know their problems and how you can best solve them? As you learn how to market a new small business, you'll need to learn about your customers. Collecting and using that data to make sound decisions on how, where, when, and to whom you should market is how top companies are finding success.
But how do you do market research for a new business? It starts with asking the most pertinent questions. What is the demand and market size? How much does that depend on your customer's economic characteristics or location? How many competitors already exist, and what do they typically charge? These questions form the backbone of your market research plan, and the data you collect in response must be utilized to lead to sound decisions.
As you learn more about your potential customer base, you can learn how they prefer to communicate. Demographic data helps determine which platforms to target. For example, 43% of Gen Zers purchase via social media apps. Understanding who your potential customers are and where they spend time is how you manage your marketing budget efficiently.
This data will also help you understand how your customers speak and what they seek. This data is essential for optimizing your website for search engines. Only 9% of Google users make it to the bottom of the first page of results. Knowing what keywords could point back to your business puts you in the best position to rank higher on the search results. There's more to search engine optimization (SEO) than just keywords but it's a natural starting point when marketing a new small business.
Take Social Media By Storm
After you've completed your market research and used that to build a website that attracts customers through search engines, you'll need to balance it with a social media strategy. If you thought you could market a new small business with some well-placed social media ads, consider this: the majority of marketers don't find social media helpful in boosting sales or generating leads.
That doesn't mean it's time to abandon social media. Quite the opposite. As companies shift towards a reliance on first-party data, social media has a role in generating the data marketers rely on for decision-making. Rather than thinking of social media as an area to place ads like the newspapers of old, you should think of it as a place for building authentic relationships between potential customers and your brand.
Once you understand your potential customers, your social media presence should focus on what they care about and find places where their interests intersect with your brand. In other words, personalize the experience. Unsurprisingly, 96% of marketers feel that personalization increases the likelihood of sales.
One of the best ways to personalize the experience on social media is through influencers who look, speak, and think like your potential customers. But as a new small business, you might feel heavy-hitting influencers are beyond the budget.
While that may be true, it's not necessarily a bad thing. With more users craving authenticity, micro-influencers are the wave of the future. Micro-influencers are influencers with smaller audiences. That can translate to an influencer being more in touch with their community and, therefore, more persuasive. In one survey, 82% of consumers reported that they were likely to buy something if a micro-influencer recommended it.
Give your potential customers the personalized experience they expect through micro-influencers and a branded social media experience that feels at home in their feed.
Embrace Over-The-Top And Local SEO
Another growing area for promising return on investment is in over-the-top advertising and Local Search Engine Optimization (SEO). As a new small business, you want your local community to learn about you first and foremost. Using these two methods can put you in front of some of the people most likely to support your business.
A small business, particularly a new one, must be hyper-focused on its community. In one study, 87% of consumers said they would refuse to travel farther than 15 minutes for purchases. With that in mind, you want to ensure your marketing budget is reaching the people most likely to do business with you.
Over-the-top advertising is a form of digital marketing that uses the Internet to reach customers watching Internet TV channels. Unlike traditional TV advertisements, it can be hyper-targeted to maximize your budget.
It's also reaching a growing segment of consumers as more free ad-supported television (FAST) channels go online. As a result, estimates believe ad revenue from FAST will reach $6.1 billion next year. As an added benefit, the videos produced for OTT advertisements can find a permanent home on your website and increase the time people spend there by as much as 88%.
Local SEO, meanwhile, can vault your small business to the top of the search results on Google and have you showing up when people use apps like Google Maps to find a business near them. Both local SEO and OTT are interwoven with your website, so that must be priority number one for your small business marketing in 2025.
Set Sail With CMG Local Solutions
Your new business marketing strategy must account for consumers increasingly charting the buying decision journey. Over-the-top advertising and micro-influencers can speak to your audience, but they'll ultimately need to go elsewhere to commit to your brand. Putting your new small business in the best position to capture their attention starts with a well-built website.
At CMG Local Solutions, we bring deep knowledge of search engine optimization and rankings, local SEO, and mobile optimization to ensure your website is at the top of customers' minds. Our history of working with new and small businesses means we can save you time on expensive market research and get into the finer details of attracting customers. We'll work with you to build a website that reflects the care you put into building your business so you can set off ready to weather whatever changes 2025 brings.
