Digital Marketing Tips for Small Business Owners

Small business owners have to find creative and cost-practical ways to generate revenue in an intensely competitive environment. This environment can be dominated by large companies that have an upper hand with a bigger budget and a high brand exposure.

In a world thriving on automation and digitization, it could be time to revamp your small business marketing strategy. This post will cover several digital marketing tips for small businesses to implement from content marketing, SEO, and paid-per-click campaigns.    

Quality Content is Key

Create quality and engaging content for your website. There is a variety of content you can create such as blogs, case studies, EBooks, tutorial videos, and infographics. Content can help collect and facilitate consumers down the buying cycle with gated landing pages.

Here are a few things to remember with online content:

• Online content should be optimized so search engines and consumers are able to find your website pages and content. Search Engine Watch recently posted an article titled “SEO basics: 22 essentials you need for optimizing your site ” which provides helpful tips to get your website SEO compatible.

• Ensure your content is shareable. Produce what your target audience will find insightful and interesting, and encourage them to share your content on their social media channels. Speaking of social media, let us talk about social media marketing as a digital strategy for your small business.

Social Media for Small Business

Social media marketing allows local businesses to connect and engage with their consumers. It is a great tool to get insights and answer comments on your product or service. Fundamentally, it’s valuable to be consistent with your business value, as you reach out to different social media channels.

Key Tips:

• It’s common that businesses want to be on all social media platforms to reach maximum visibility. However, for a small team that can be a time consuming and difficult to manage. Start small when selecting your channels. It’s best to have up-to-date and relevant content on specific channels rather than outdated, untrendy content on various platforms.

• Plan and organize a social media plan with this template from Content Marketing Institute. This template can help you organize your social media plan and tailor it to your business needs and goals.

• Build relationships with industry influencers, as you may want to reach out to them to share their content on your social media page, or vice versa.

Local Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Is SEO plausible for small businesses? According to Stoney deGeyter, CEO of Pole Position Marketing, there are 3 things to consider when implementing SEO for your small business: time investment, budget allocation, and only include SEO elements that make sense for your business.

“The idea is to invest what you can, where you can, when you can. And when the returns come, reinvest that even further to expand your campaign and your return on investment. As long as your marketing campaign is returning a positive ROI, then the true cost of SEO is affordable”, says deGeyter.

Key points:

• Avoid keyword stuffing. Your Google ranking will be penalized if you stuffed too many keywords throughout your website and content. Value long-tail keywords that tend to have lower competition and use local keywords to help your business increase visibility for local search results.

• Strategize a local link-building plan. Moz suggests being actively involved within the community can help to “more naturally link opportunities (to) arise from things like local: sponsorships, event participation/hosting, online news, blogs, business associations, and B2B cross-promotions.” This effort can help with establishing a domain authority.

Online Business Reviews Do Matter

Do online reviews really matter to your business and consumers? Yes, online reviews are more important than ever, and these key findings from a BrightLocal survey will depict why:

·      “72% of consumers say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more”

·      “88% of consumers say they trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation”

These survey statistics speaks for itself of making sure that your small business delivers that best experience to your consumers.

In addition, local businesses can benefit from implementing a review management strategy to uphold their online reputation. This strategy includes observing and following up on reviews, getting rid of spam, and to analyze your overall brand impression. There are also platforms that can help gain insights into your great customer service and can easily showcase positive interactions on their company online review page.

Advertising on Google Ads

Google Ads can help promote your online business with paid-per-click campaigns on search engine results pages (SERPs). According to Search Engine Land, Google handles at least 2 trillion searches per year and at least 5.5 billion per day. That is a lot of potential opportunities for online businesses.

With Google Ads, businesses can display ads on SERPs and other platforms like YouTube, Gmail, etc. Google Ads give businesses control of their budget for various business models. Most importantly targeting your business to specific audiences with personalized messaging can mean a better conversion to generate more revenue.

Lastly, small business owners should evaluate which type of online marketing best fits with their overall business model and goals. This can help to avoid wasting time and money in their efforts. Remember, investing in these digital strategies for your small business will help bring in more opportunities and revenue.

Schedule a time to talk to one of our online sales specialists here. We’ll be able to match you with the most effective means of converting your digital efforts into sales.