If you run a small business, one thing that you will quickly realise is that it is quite a hassle trying to get your business out there.
Most people start their small business without necessarily making provision for a marketing budget and what they quickly realise is that no business can make real progress without some form of marketing.
Getting the word out about your business will attract new customers, and convince them to give you a trial. Sure, to retain customers, you have to actually meet their expectations, but they have to know about your business in the first instance.
On the back of the proliferation of smartphones and personal computers, digital marketing has become a cheaper alternative that businesses prefer to employ to attract, engage and convert customers. Digital marketing tools are available on the internet for every business to use, but in most cases, small businesses do not know which strategies to employ.
In this post, I will be sharing 6 key digital marketing strategies that small businesses can start implementing today.
Google My Business
Google my business is an easy, free way for you to start getting eyes on your business immediately. Signing your business up on the Google My Business platform allows your business to appear on Google Maps and other Google My Business platforms. What’s more? Signing up on the platform is super easy. All you need to start is a Gmail account.
With your Gmail account, simply visit mybusiness.google.com and you will be guided step-by-step on how to set up your Google My Business account. Please note that you will be required to verify your business address, so make sure that you enter an address where you can receive mails.
Build An Email List
Email marketing is a rewarding-yet-overlooked digital marketing strategy that small businesses can use to boost their growth.
To start with email marketing, you have to get the email addresses of your prospective customers first. The standard practice is to give prospective customers something attractive in exchange for their email addresses. For example, you can run a promotion where customers enter a lottery to stand a chance of winning a gift. To enter the lottery, they have to input their contact details and with that, you can start building and nurturing a relationship with them.
One of the best practices to imbibe when doing email marketing is to embrace personalisation. According to Sendpulse, “Email personalisation is an email marketing process that uses personal information of subscribers to produce more targeted emails. It gives individual treatment to the customer and increases email marketing metrics massively.” Email personalisation will help you get more results as it will make the customer feel more connected to the brand.
Invest In Search Engine Optimisation
Search engine optimisation is the process of preparing web content methodologically to be indexed and ranked. Search engine optimisation or SEO as it is popularly called is an organic way of improving a website ranking and making sure that more people visit your website. It is usually free, but you might have to pay for some SEO tools including keyword research tools, link building tools and the like.
SEO is broadly divided into three and they are on-page SEO, off-page SEO and technical SEO. These three arms of SEO work together to help improve the ranking of websites and should be taken seriously as such.
On-page SEO includes those activities that you carry on the page where the web content is to help improve the ranking of the web content, off-page SEO on the other hand refers to those activities you engage in outside of the web content to improve its ranking- these activities may including link building, improving the website’s domain authority, etc. Technical SEO on its own refers to the optimisation of the website and server that make it easy for search engines to crawl and index content.
Investing in SEO helps improve your website ranking, which in turn guarantees you traffic that you can convert to paying customers.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is an easier strategy to understand, but there is a catch that most small businesses don’t typically take into consideration. The fact is that you do not need to be on all social media platforms. The main thing is to understand which of the channels your customers typically spend time on.
Let’s use the example of a small fashion store that wants to market to customers on Linkedin; while you may make sales on the platform, what you will quickly realise is that the platform was not built for that. Now, imagine the same fashion store posting pictures and videos on Instagram. Chances are that the business will make more sales on Instagram.
Keeping that in mind, make sure you choose the social media platform where your customers spend time, then start sharing educative and entertaining content, while keeping the platform in mind.
Pay-Per-Click
Pay-per-click advertising is a fantastic marketing strategy for small businesses that want to start seeing results immediately. It is a marketing strategy where the digital advertising platform charges you for every click that you receive on your digital ads. You can run pay-per-click advertising via different marketing channels. Social media ads, search engine ads, and other display ads channels are all examples of pay-per-click advertising that you can start using for business today.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is a simple marketing strategy where you share content with your target audience on the platforms they are already using. This may mean that you share content on your blog, via email, on social media and on other channels. Content marketing is a fantastic digital marketing strategy for small businesses because it does not look forced at all to the target customer.
Bottomline
For any business that wants steady growth, digital marketing is a no-brainer. As a small business, your spending might be limited by lean resources, but you can employ the above-listed strategies (some of them free) to boost your business growth. Want to learn more about digital marketing and how you can use it to improve your business? Take the Professional Certificate in Buyer Behavior and Target Marketing course to boost your knowledge and improve your business.
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