Marketing your small business is no longer about pushing messages about your products and services to your targeted buyers. The new world of marketing is about developing your business and helping it to grow by knowing everything you can about your targeted buyer personas (you can read about buyer personas in my article “What every small business owner needs to know about Buyer Personas“) and focusing on their current interests. This new world of marketing is called “inbound marketing” because the objective is to pull in prospective and existing buyers by delivering relevant content that aligns with their current interests and intent.

Successful small businesses (well all businesses I guess) know that happy customers are key to their growth and future. The best way to keep customers happy is to know them as well as possible and serve them in ways that are meaningful to them specifically. Whether you market B2B or B2C, your target audience groups consist of real people, with real lives, wants, pains, goals, responsibilities, challenges, and jobs, with bosses they have to answer to. The goal is to get to know them on a personal level so that you can start to deliver useful business content and messaging that will resonate with them and get them to take action.

More and more consumers and businesses are using smartphones, tablets, and other handheld computing devices to search the web, engage with social media, do banking, and make purchases online. That means a website designed for a desktop experience won’t work optimally on a device with a smaller screen.

A bad experience with your website on any device can hurt your brand and your bottom line.

Running any business is hard. If you wanted life to be easy, you wouldn’t be putting in 12-hour workdays, powering through weekends and adding the time you spend commuting to your accrued vacation hours – not that you take vacations.

For driven entrepreneurs who have the guts and determination to turn an idea into a marketable product or concept though, the stakes are even higher. If you own a startup or early-stage small business that depends on a few core employees and regularly faces down failure, you need to give your company every advantage in a competitive marketplace. Start with these four tips for getting your business noticed online and off.