Small Business Month is coming in May 2025, and it’s a great time to market your business to customers looking to support Small Businesses. Effective marketing is opportunistic; it means making plans to leverage eyes into money ahead of time.
If you want to make the most out of Small Business Month, there are three things you can do to market your small business effectively.
Highlight The Importance Of Shopping Small
Educating your community about the importance of shopping small can not be overstated. After all, small businesses account for nearly half of the labor force in the United States. Many customers don’t realize that they help keep jobs in the community when they support a small business.
The taxes paid by small businesses into the community go directly into services used to support the community, such as social and emergency services. People usually don’t make the connection between the Ten dollars they spend at a local restaurant and their community. Still, business owners are in a unique position to spotlight this link.
Create A Compelling Offer
If customers in your industry are price sensitive, making a compelling low-barrier offer to try your service or product will reduce the friction to doing business with your business. Retail companies have been using low-barrier offers, which they call loss leaders, for decades. In the book The Department Store: A Social History. Leicester University Press, 1995, by Bill Lancaster, talks about how retail stores in the late 1800s discounted products to attract customers to buy, which laid the foundation later for retail and department stores to use the loss leader strategy to attract customers.
Loss leaders are when retail or department stores sell certain products in their inventory at cost or just below dost to attract customers into their stores, leading to purchases of other products, thus driving product sales overall.
So, how do you execute this? First, decide which product or service you can sell at cost without driving you into debt. Second, create a creative social media ad highlighting the discounted price during small business months. Third, ensure that your ad includes urgency to buy (expiration date) and a call to action telling them what you want them to do.
Build Anticipation
Don’t wait until the last minute to start marketing this initiative for Small Business Month. Create a 2-3 week marketing ramp to when your product or service goes on sale. You could highlight your product or service through social media posts, email blasts, testimonials, or press releases to local news outlets. Utilize countdown timers, be specific about how a prospective customer can find you, and try to answer questions in advance.
Typically, what works well is creating a short FAQ that will address past questions that your customers had when they purchased and key information about engaging with your business, such as parking constraints, whether your store is accessible by public transportation, are a cash-only business.
Bonus Point For Small Business Month
National Small Business Month is a great time to partner with other local businesses adjacent to your industry and create cross-referral opportunities. Cross-promotion gives your business visibility to a customer base you usually wouldn’t attract to your business.
Don’t leave money or connections on the table. Take advantage of National Small Business Month in May to position your business as a leader in the small business space, and you will create fans and a strong community.
Read the full article here
