Small Business Digital Marketing Tips You Should Know
Marketing is one of the most important elements of your small business. Here are small business digital marketing tips you should know.
Small business owners must wear many hats in order to become successful. While it may be more fun to focus on the business itself if you ignore sales and marketing, you won’t have any customers.
Most small business owners aren’t taught sales or marketing. Or they’re unfamiliar with current digital marketing practices. Unfortunately, ignoring or simply not understanding marketing is one of the reasons so many small businesses fail.
While the prospect of failure is scary, learning small business digital marketing doesn’t have to be. Really all it takes is some time, the willingness to learn new skills, and the ability to apply what you’ve learned in a consistent manner.
Which is why I’m sharing with you the fundamentals of small business digital marketing. So grab a pen and take notes.
What is Small Business Digital Marketing?
All businesses need to market their services or products. It’s how customers know the business is open and what they’re selling.
While most small businesses tend to be local, digital marketing can help reach potential customers with minimum effort. Especially because 81% of shoppers do an online search before they buy.
Which means your business needs to be online if you want to stay in business. It also means you need a marketing strategy. Here’s how.
1) Claim Local Listings
Search engines like Google allow businesses to put their business listings on their sites. In fact, they want you to. It’s an easy and free way for your business to be easily found online.
Don’t forget that there are other search engine sites besides Google. In fact, there are quite a few. While it’s not difficult to list your information, having to go to each search engine site to list your information can take a long time. Sites like Moz.com are willing to do the work for you and continue to monitor the sites for a fee.
Don’t forget to include the most important pieces of information for each listing.
- Location
- Hours
- Phone Number
2) Social Media
Social media should be included in every small business digital marketing strategy. There are so many advantages to using social media to find your customers.
It’s Free!
Whether you prefer Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram or LinkedIn, social media is free to join and use. And with 1.28 billion daily active users on Facebook, a small business owner can easily reach a huge audience with very little effort.
Targeted Paid Advertising
While it is free to use social media, more sites are providing businesses with the option to pay for additional advertising. Even better, for a small business digital marketing strategy, it won’t break your budget.
Most sites offer paid advertising rates at a minimum of $1 per day. Best of all, you can target your audience by location, interests, gender, age, and income. It’s a great way to easily find your customers with little effort or money.
Can Showcase Your Work Easily
Social media sites are a great opportunity for small businesses to show off their work. Share a photo, post a blog, or even host a live video event all without ever leaving your office.
Can Be Automated
While social media can eat up a lot of your time if you let it, there are ways to get the benefits social media can offer a small business while actually getting work done.
That’s because most social media sites allow you to set up a campaign in advance. You choose exactly when your next post goes live even if by the time it does, you’re off working on another project.
3) Keywords
Small business digital marketing is not complete without using the proper keywords for your company. Keywords help your business get found online quickly.
The trick is to figure out which keywords work best for your business. Luckily, there are some easy ways to finding the best keywords for your small business digital marketing efforts.
Relevance
If you’re a small pool cleaning company, your keywords would probably be more along the lines of “pool cleaning company” rather than “hot dog eating contest.” Find common words and phrases most often used or associated with your type of business or service.
Location
People need to be able to find your business, so using your location as keywords is a no-brainer. You can try using your state, city, zip, and neighborhood as location keywords.
Google Keyword Planner
Use the Google keyword planner to help you figure out what keywords you might be missing. It’s a free tool.
Paid Keyword Tools
If you’re short on time then it might be worth your while to turn over your small business digital marketing efforts to an expert. There are sites that can help you find and select the right keywords for your business. The fee is usually around $99 per year.
Research the Competition
Why reinvent the wheel when you can simply take a look at what your competition is doing? What keywords are they using?
What marketing efforts are they using? Seeing what others are doing is often a great idea because it can help you figure out what to do and sometimes, what to avoid.
4) Content Marketing
People go online to learn, be entertained, and to shop. No matter what their reason for being online is, they don’t want to be bored.
Which is why content marketing is such an effective strategy. Great content will bring your customers to your door. Continuing to supply them fresh and interesting content will keep them coming back.
Content doesn’t have to be long, in fact, most of the time, people prefer to skim quickly. It does have to be interesting, informative, and easy to read.
5) Email
Using e-mail as a part of your small business digital marketing strategy is a smart idea. The reason is that there’s a lot you can do with e-mail, like:
- Send an e-mail to a customer who has left items unpurchased in their cart. Offering a slight deal or incentive is often enough to get them to buy.
- Follow up emails after a purchase is made to provides suggestions for similar items a customer may like based on their previous purchases can increase sales and customer loyalty.
- E-mail can be easily automated
- It’s either free or can be provided at an extremely low cost to you.
Keep in mind, the days of full HTML email blasts with no personal touch are over. People want a connection. Send those emails from an actual person, offering a conversation, and ending with “Thanks in advance!”.
Of course, none of this will work if you don’t have a proper call to action. Get people motivated to buy your services or products by telling them what action to do next. Kinda like when I supply this link and tell you to get your free copy of my ultimate start-up checklist!
