Marketing For New Business Owners

You can have the greatest product or service in the world, but if people don’t know you have it, it’s not going to sell.
– Aaron Jarnigan

Marketing Your New Business

For new owners founding their first business, things can very quickly become overwhelming. When you’re opening a new business you have to file formation documents, register an EIN, buy insurance, open business bank accounts, have a way to manage income and expenses, plus a zillion other things. Before you know it, it’s time to pay your first quarter’s taxes–meh.

Guess what though, none of that matters if you don’t have a successful marketing plan. There’s a ton of things that are important for smooth operation of a business and all of them play their part, but, we could argue that a marketing plan may be one of the most important topics within business management.

Why?

You likely already figured this out if you stopped to read the quote at the top of this blog post. If your business isn’t seen by those interested in what you’re selling or providing, you’re never going to make sales. Period. It could be stated simply as, “Get Seen, Make Sales” but it’s really more technical than that.

Increasing Our Online Footprint

There’s a saying I heard a couple years back that goes like this, “When it comes to marketing, you want to think of it like a wet blanket. You need full saturation from corner to corner.”

Competition in business has never been steeper than it is today. In the 1980s, roughly 530,000-600,000 businesses were formed each year, which is a considerable number. However, when we look at todays numbers, roughly 5.67M businesses were formed in 2025 alone. Of course of those 5.67M businesses, less than half of them will exist one year later and a only a microscopic margin will be a direct competitor for your business. Still yet, competition is steep for everyone and this is why it’s important to increase your online footprint. You miss 100% of every shot you don’t take, as the saying goes.

Leveraging The Online Footprint

So how do you expand your footprint online as a business owner? You have to put your branding and name everywhere–and spoiler alert, this can be a full-time job in and of itself. Time management is crucial as a start-up entrepreneur. Before we can expand our footprint, we have to first locate all of the places we can do so. Lets list some of the most popular below and also, there may be more niche pages that exist for your product or service industry.

Your Website
Facebook
Instagram
Threads
TikTok
X
Linkedin
Google Business Profile
Yelp
Apple Maps
Next Door
Thumbtack

You effectively want to create profiles across all of these platforms, load your information and build a database of links that point back to your website. What we’re effectively doing is building an online funnel that puts all of these entities in the top and pushes them to your website. Backlinks are extremely important for the success of online ranking into todays market. To describe backlinks quickly; they are direct links to your business page from other business pages. This builds authority online and proves to Google that your business is real and is working with other businesses. Consider the hundreds of thousands of profiles and websites online that aren’t doing much. Google has to rank the best ones at the top or users won’t continue to use their services to find what they are looking for. Quality sites win in the ranking system.

There’s Also Your Local Community

While online marketing plays a crucial part in todays marketing strategy, grassroots local marketing is still equally, if not more, important. Lets toss up a list of ways you could leverage your business earnings to market your business while supporting your local community.

Have your shirts, hats, cards, brochures and other printed materials made locally. By building a relationship with local businesses, you enter yourself into a local network of entrepreneurs supporting entrepreneurs. These are the people that need support, but will also hand-over-first, support you.
Sponsor the local elementary, middle or high school sports team of your choosing. This usually puts a banner on a fence somewhere that lives in the faces of your potential customers.
Purchase a billboard spot from a local company, or consider using a service like blip billboards.
Find a local company that does ad-spots on their restaurant tables and put your name on them.
Partner with and provide free services to non-profits out of the kindness of your heart, but also because you can leverage your donation as a tax write-off.
Our local Texas Roadhouse will advertise your business all year long for $500 on their TV-Screens and get this–their requirement is that you buy $500 worth of gift cards that you get to keep, so its effectively free at the end of the day.

There are so many different things our businesses can do or pursue in the name of building localized brand awareness.

Build Yourself A Framework

What I’ve found through my own experiences in life as a human being and business owner is that we’re terribly in-consistent at being consistent. You know the vibe; you wake-up every day, brush your teeth, grab your work or gym bag and head out the door only to realize you forgot your keys, that you need every-single-day. You would think after ten or twenty years, you’d have quit doing that, but you haven’t. The same exact thing applies to managing a business. Sometimes we do great at staying on task and other times (if not most of the time) we drift away from the important things unless we practice intentionality or, have a framework.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized this big-time, and it’s that I can’t rely on myself to do the same thing every single day effortlessly and not skip a beat. I will mess something up, no matter how good my intentions are. So with that being said, we have to build ourselves a framework. This could be something extremely well articulated by yourself or something as simple as a daily checklist. When we take the time to put together a list of the things we need to consistently or constantly do, we increase our effectiveness 10x.

Here’s somethings that might exist on my list.

Respond to voicemails
Post paid transactions in Quickbooks
Send follow-up emails to prospects
Make a post on Facebook, Instagram and Tiktok
Make a post on Linkedin
Don’t forget to eat lunch
Build new t-shirt design
Order new business cards
Investigate services that make it quicker to deliver finished projects

Some of these items are one off, but others are every day. Regardless of how much I exercise the muscle and do these things daily, I’m still apt to forget at any moment. This is where building a framework or system you can follow becomes highly important.

Here’s My Challenge To You

Take some time today and build yourself a daily checklist. Hammer down on the things you know you need to be accountable for everyday and then niche down on the things you know you really need to be working on. It could be marketing, day to day operations or anything else for that matter. I know confidently that if you build yourself a framework, you’ll make yourself more effective and day by day, you’ll have more done and feel less stressed about everything that is in front of you now and later.