10 digital marketing tips for small businesses

 10 digital marketing tips for small businesses

What is digital marketing?

Digital Marketing is advertising and selling products to customers using various digital channels like Social Media Marketing, SEO, SEM, Email Marketing, etc. The world has experienced a digital revolution, and thus it is vital to utilize web marketing and advertising approaches. The digital world is a competitive space, and everyone is trying hard to connect with their prospective audience. Digital Marketing is a very effective process to connect with prospective customers and build relationships with them. A successful digital strategy should revolve around adding values to the audience and creating meaningful connections with them for a long time.

The marketing process is no longer limited to promoting the products or services. The audience also has several choices to choose from. Thus, it becomes crucial to understand the prospective customer's problem and empathize with them. As a beginner, you should understand that meaningful relations with the customers would help you be remembered. Brand awareness is the big game-changer in today's competitive world. Digital Marketing is changing how a brand perceives its customers. 

The marketers are concerned about engagement marketing by analyzing people's interests and creating meaningful interactions with them using the data. If you have genuine data to analyze what performs better and what grasps the attention, you'll see yourself performing way better. As a beginner, the bigger picture should be to create authority for your brand in the respective domain. If people trust you, then you have a big competitive advantage.

What are the benefits of digital advertisements for organizations?

• With a lower marketing budget, you can create effective advertising campaigns and track every step of the campaign to optimize it for future endeavors.
• The average time that a person spends in front of digital devices is increasing with time. Thus, there lies a great marketing opportunity to connect with the people.
• You have the great opportunity to talk with authority about topics that are associated with your business.
• An opportunity to interact with influencers who could promote your brand.
• There are possibilities of trying new media forms in the marketing funnel.
• The digital marketing space allows you to socialize with your prospective customers and understand their need to conquer a global marketplace.
• The targeted marketing and data to support the marketing funnels allow you to optimize the conversion rate to get more customers.
• If you want to excel at marketing, focus on building a personalized partnership with the audience. Keep in touch with your audience by informing them about the new products and help them with your content marketing. It would allow you to build brand awareness and loyalty.
• You can keep track of the marketing campaigns from the first dollar spent.

• Research Competitors and Differentiate Yourself.

• Get Your Website Basics Right.

• Improve Google My Business Listing and Customer Reviews.

• Create Interesting Blog Content.

• Consider Google Ads for Your Small Business.

• Create Professional Visual Content.

• Improve Your Local SEO.

Here is a list of 10 digital marketing tips for small businesses:

1. Research Competitors and Differentiate Yourself
2. Get Your Website Basics Right
3. Improve Google My Business Listing and Customer Reviews
4. Create Interesting Blog Content
5. Consider Google Ads for Your Small Business
6. Create Professional Visual Content
7. Improve Your Local SEO
8. Develop Email Marketing
9. Focus on a Primary Social Media Channel
10. Partner with Local Influencers

1. Research Competitors and Differentiate Yourself

ompetitor research is important because as a local business, you’ll want to be able to offer additional value in the market. Google Search is a great place to start. You can see how your competitors are positioning themselves within their ads. In this example, the below shows Google Search Ads results for local Nottingham plumbers. Terms such as “No Call Out Charge”, “Fully Qualified Plumbers” and “1Hr Response” are great selling points.

2. Get Your Website Basics Right

Online users are becoming increasingly demanding in terms of the experience they expect from a website. They want a fast loading website as a minimum requirement. As a local business, you may not have the budget of the bigger, national or international firms, but you can at the very least get the basics right. Jon Martin, our Technical Director at Hallam, recently discussed how to balance fast web page load speeds with rich content.

3. Improve Google My Business Listing and Customer Reviews

Your online reputation as a small business owner could be the deciding factor when a prospective customer is searching for your product/service. Luckily, with Google My Business, you have a level of control when it comes to managing how people perceive your business. My colleague, Stan Dunthorne, has created the easy guide to optimising your Google My Business listing.

4. Create Interesting Blog Content

If you’re in a very competitive industry – and most local businesses are – you would need to think about a content strategy that will drive results. Working with smaller businesses, it’s often the case that it’s highly unlikely to rank on the first page of Google for a broad term related to their product/service.

For example, “Plumbing Nottingham” would be near impossible if you’re just entering the market.

Firstly, this would require a large budget and resources that wouldn’t make achieving this affordable. Secondly, ranking for a broad term may not eventually lead to more customers. This is where your blog content plays an important role.

5. Consider Google Ads for Your Small Business

Previously known as Google AdWords, Google Ads is evolving.

However, the principles remain the same and the fundamentals are covered in this helpful small business PPC guide from Google.

There are eight stages to follow:

1. Set your goals
2. Do your research
3. Define your budget
4. Set your structure
5. Choose your keywords
6. Be relevant
7. Use strong messaging
8. Look at the whole picture

6. Create Professional Visual Content

Content is still king and content marketing is an industry in its own right. Your content will form an important part of your digital strategy.

Video is an area that is growing at an incredible rate, and these statistics from HubSpot show why:

• 97% of marketers say video has helped increase user understanding of their product or service
• 76% say it helped them increase sales
• 81% of people have been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand’s video

Also, an important stat which shows how important video is today is the fact that over 1.9 billion users are logging into Google-owned YouTube each month.

Big brands understand the power of video marketing and constantly create big-budget video campaigns as per the below examples from the likes of Beats by Dre, Apple, Nintendo and Domino’s.

7. Improve Your Local SEO

Local SEO is important if you are primarily a local business. We have previously looked at local SEO for restaurants and Google My Business is a major part of that.

Link building as always is equally important.

You can build local links from the following:

• Newspaper sites
• Bloggers
• Awards/festival sites
• Sponsorship sites

8. Develop Email Marketing

Another digital strategy fundamental for your small business is email marketing.

There is a really comprehensive email marketing guide from Simply Business which ensures you cover all the essential email marketing questions. Some of which are:

• Do you know the legal side of email marketing?
• Have you chosen a provider?
• Do you know what your competitors are doing?
• Do you know how to craft an effective email?

The guide also includes checklists, provider comparisons and split testing guidance.

If you are struggling with this area or need to solidify your knowledge, you can also complete a free email marketing certification course from HubSpot

.9. Focus on a Primary Social Media Channel

Social media marketing strategies are continuously changing along with constant platform updates.

Often small business owners ask, which platform should I focus on?

The answer is simple…

Focus on the social media platform most relevant to your business and where your customers are most active.

• If the nature of your product/service offering is B2B then LinkedIn and/or Twitter are natural choices.
• For B2C businesses, Facebook and/or Instagram might be better choices.

Whatever you decide, have a primary social media channel that you’ll focus on growing. As a small business owner, you probably won’t have the required resource to manage more than one channel effectively.

10. Partner with Local Influencers

My colleague Elle works with local influencers to create share-worthy content for our clients. In one of her recent posts, she tackled the question of “Should Your Brand Work With Instagram Influencers?”

This is definitely an area of digital marketing that is growing, and perhaps your business should consider it too.