Digital Marketing For Small Businesses: A Comprehensive Guide
Owning a small business isn’t about building a community nearby your area anymore. It’s about ensuring your customers can find you where they are looking. The most frequented place in today’s time is the “Internet.” Clearly, it has become an indispensable tool for every consumer to make a buying decision.
Since the internet is a significant part of today’s consumer dynamics, the need for digital marketing for small businesses is snowballing. Let’s understand this as an example.
- If you are selling something online, your potential target audience will be searching for your services online at some point during the day.
- Even if you are selling something offline, your target audience is on the lookout for businesses like you online.
In short, the internet offers many opportunities to grow your business and stand apart from the rest. If you still believe that holding on to the traditional methods will help you grow your small business, look at the statistics below.
Revealing Statistics:
The change in consumer buying dynamics pushes the need for modern marketing strategies to grow and survive. The following statistics confirm it all.
- More than 40% of the eCommerce traffic comes from Google searches.
- Each US consumer spends around $1800 per year on an average on eCommerce.
- More than 60% of customers look for price comparisons in a physical store.
- Around 70% of entrepreneurs believe that businesses with a website will grow approximately 24% in the next 2-3 years compared to the ones who don’t have a business website.
With internet users spending an average of three hours on the internet, using the same platform for communication and information sharing will help you expand your customer base.
But,
What Does It Mean For You?
The pandemic established the fact that being agile, an up-to-date digital skill set and go-to marketing strategies are a must. In fact, a survey revealed that small business owners must pivot to a more substantial online presence and offerings.
Hundreds of business owners are trying to leverage digital marketing and other critical business strategies to make up for the competition. So, if you keep using traditional methods, you will ignore thousands of customers searching for you online.
It might not be evident for many entrepreneurs or small business owners that the right digital marketing strategy implemented at the right time will help them reach the right target audience.
So, if you want to:
Meet the customer where they are
Tailor your marketing strategies to gain desired results
It’s time that you lean on various digital marketing tools and techniques. Are you wondering what digital marketing strategies will be ideal for your business? Let’s dig them together and find out how they can be helpful.
What Is Digital Marketing Strategy Best For Your Small Business?
If you look at your customers and identify when and how much time they spend online, you will define your marketing budget according to the strategies to pursue. While testing a few different methods is good, it will be best for your ROI and business growth. Consistency means a lot if you want to keep generating high-quality leads that convert.
Pro Tip 1: You must revisit your marketing plan at least once a year to ensure it’s up to date and meets your current business needs.
Here are a few digital marketing strategies that will be best for your small business.
1. Search Engine Optimization:
This strategy is quite critical for a small business. This strategy alone can give you a chance to compete with larger companies. Since you have an opportunity to be more visible in search engine results, you can bridge the gap between your customers and physical stores/ online stores.
Professional online marketing firms offer this service to rank your website higher on the SERPs. Ideally, they use the following methods to get started.
- Identifying the right keywords and their volume.
- Internal and external link building
- Optimizing content using the keywords
This method is different from search engine marketing since you aren’t paying Google for ads. Instead, you are pushing your content in a way that your customers organically end up on your websites or landing pages.
Source: prestigedevelopment.tech
2. Local Search Optimization:
This is a part of search engine optimization or SEO. This option aims to increase search visibility for small businesses with physical stores or service area offerings. For instance, grocery stores, dentist offices, cleaning businesses, or similar options.
Using this strategy, you can claim a business listing and ensure that your location appears for all relevant keywords on Google. It will also include managing online ratings, reviews, local-centric social media management, and beyond.
Source-semrush.com
3. Content Marketing:
This strategy mainly revolves around providing perspective to your customers around their problems that align with your services. The sales will soon fade away if you keep selling without informing anything.
Since customers are looking for information in different formats, if you want to prove yourself with a certain level of expertise, content marketing will help. It will instill confidence in the consumer. The strategy mainly involves delivering relevant articles and information on your website to attract potential customers. In short, it acts as a call to action which helps you convert a visitor into a customer.
4. Social Media Marketing:
As a small business owner, your focus must be on developing community and engaging with individual consumers and customers. This is only possible if you build your audience on social media platforms.
The idea is pretty much straightforward. Create valuable content and resources that will add some value to your prospects or customers. But it’s not that easy either. Identifying the right kind of social media platform is quite challenging. But it is a critical option to stay connected with your customers.
For instance, if you own a local cleaning business, social media can help drive customer engagement. You can let them know new offers and what other customers are talking about your services. Plus, you can provide some content that can ease their everyday lives. The more your customer will feel you are an asset, the more it will strengthen your customer base to achieve repeat sales.
But you can’t achieve all this unless you find the correct target audience. The rest strategies will depend solely on that.
Source-appointfix.com
This is why it is critical to connecting with the right service provider so that you can get access to the right approach.
5. Pay-per-click Marketing:
PPC is a type of online advertising where you accrue costs whenever the users click on your ads. But to excel in this marketing strategy, you need to create relevance. Remember, the users are searching for specific products/ services/ information. You can use the right keywords to show your targeted ad when they are searching.
For instance, using the right PPC strategy, if a user searches for “blue running shoes,” you can create an ad that will be perfect for this keyword search.
Source: ppchero.com
But relevance is paramount here. Ideally, Google ads and Microsoft ads are used for targeting consumers using PPC. To grow your relevance, you need to grow your quality score and target audience using the correct bid amount to increase leads, sales, and ROI.
6. Mobile Marketing:
With users browsing 70% more web pages on tablets and smartphones and increasing mobile searches, if you don’t target this option, you can lose a potential customer base. Since smartphones are here to stay, having a mobile marketing strategy is critical more than ever.
You can use the following strategies depending on the industry, target audience, and budget.
- App-based marketing.
- In-game mobile marketing
- QR codes
- Location-based marketing
- Mobile search ads
- SMS marketing
If you optimize the ads for local, you can accentuate the results by multiple folds.
Source- wordstream.com
7. Email Marketing
Irrespective of the industry, a small business can leverage the benefits of email marketing. It is one of the best ways to foster customer relationships and drive conversions and growth. In fact, it is the most lucrative option for online marketing for small businesses. The ROI can be as high as 4400%. Isn’t that amazing?
But if you want to create a successful email marketing strategy, everything will boil down to the following elements.
- Email building list
- Identifying the ideal email types for the target audience
- Content creation and email design
- Sending campaign and analyzing results
Source- sendinblue.com
Website Design And Development
In today’s tech-enabled world, people turn to Google to find almost everything. People turn to search engines to find products or services near them. But if you don’t have a website, your potential customers will choose your competition instead.
This is why you must create a place where you can highlight your business information, service descriptions, contact form, service list, or prices. But if you have a company website without any web pages ranking in search results, it can still become a concern.
Therefore, businesses should consider three elements: Dwell time, Mobile usability, and Bounce rate to optimize their business website and make it user-friendly.
Besides that, a lot of focus must be on creating a website with optimum speed, better readability, correct tags, image file names, URL structure, and indexable content. But more than that, sitemaps help Google or other search engines access your website and allow users to find your website.
Source- shopify.com
Why Must You Invest In Online Marketing For Your Small Business?
We are in an era of a digital revolution. Whether customers are looking to buy online or offline, the first step will always be looking at the brand online. So, even if you own a physical store, staying competitive is only possible if you are up to your online game. But that’s not all! Here are a few reasons why you must invest in digital marketing for small businesses right away!
Brand Awareness:
The internet will continue to grow. Right now, more than 4 billion people stay online every day. That means more than 50% of the world’s population. With more access, using the same medium to promote your brand organically will improve brand awareness.
Brand awareness is about how your customers perceive your brand. If you lack in this aspect, you won’t be able to stand out. Digital marketing strategies help small businesses to grow their customer base, trust, and credibility that end up buying from you.
Sales:
With the consumers shifting their preferences, establishing an online presence is more important than ever. Plus, more than 90% of customers read reviews before purchasing. Leveraging data and digital marketing for small businesses is an ideal way forward. This ensures that the business is getting the right leads and better conversions.
Expansion:
By now, you have an idea that digital marketing strategies help generate revenue and build credibility. The same approach allows small businesses to expand their business to a new geographical location using traditional marketing strategies.
These strategies will help you expand your business to new areas without terrestrial challenges. You can set it up in no time with all the flexibility and target your audience without hassles.
Customer Retention:
Did you know that even a mere 2% increase in customer retention can reduce financial costs by 10%? If you don’t realize the importance of retaining customers, growing your business revenue won’t be easy.
With the right digital marketing strategies, you get an opportunity to create a user base and loyal customers, which in turn impacts your churn rates.
Sage Titans Is The Digital Marketing Provider For Small Businesses
In this digital-first world, growing your online presence is essential. But if you try to do everything yourself without understanding the technical details, you might lose more than gain. This is why finding the right help with digital marketing for small businesses will help you optimize everything from SEO to website design and lead generation to reviews.
Sage Titans is a dedicated team of experts with stellar customer response and reviews. You can use our tailored digital marketing strategies to stand out.
Conclusion
The internet has drastically changed how businesses are conducted nowadays. If you aren’t using modern means to market your services/ products, you won’t be able to grow your small business. It’s time that you invest in digital marketing services for your small business.
