Small Business Marketing Essentials

If you’ve recently started a small business, or you’re looking to grow your already established small business, having a solid digital marketing strategy is essential, especially if you don’t have a huge budget.

Not only is digital marketing essential for promoting your products and services, but it can also have a huge effect on your business’s overall success.

If you have limited marketing experience, or just aren’t sure where to start – don’t worry! We’ll go through everything you need to know about growing your business with digital marketing in this post.

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing is the use of the internet to promote your brand, products, and services and connect with your current and prospective customers.

Why is digital marketing important?

Digital marketing helps you reach a larger consumer base than you could through traditional methods as it helps you to raise your brand’s profile and get people interested in your products and services so that they go on to become customers.

It’s much more cost-effective than traditional marketing and enables you to measure success regularly so that you can tweak your marketing plans when needed.

Before you start implementing your marketing strategy, it’s essential to target the right audience. By developing a strategy that focuses on your target demographic, you’ll be able to reach more people and can tailor your content to suit them.

Once you understand your target audience, you can start implementing your digital marketing strategy. Below are 5 essential tools and features you should consider implementing:

Website

For many businesses, digital marketing starts with their website. Because your website is a place where existing and new customers interact with your brand, it should clearly show who you are, what you do, and your USP.

Your website should follow one consistent theme, be easy to navigate, feature high-quality content, and should be optimised for mobile.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

If you’ve already tried your hand at digital marketing, you’re probably familiar with SEO. But what is it and how can it help your small business? SEO is essentially getting your website to rank higher on search engine results pages (SERP), with the goal being to rank on the first page of Google results for search terms that resonate with your target audience.

To rank higher on Google, you should ensure that you follow SEO best practices including keyword research, creating high quality, useful content, including relevant links from high-quality sites, and linking your business with directories.

Social Media Marketing

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are great places to gain new customers. They are fantastic for sharing information and engaging with your consumers, but to succeed you need to ensure you’re regularly active on them and know exactly what your audience wants from you. That means posting regular and original content, engaging, and interacting with your customers, and providing customers with solutions to their needs.

Some effective social media marketing strategies include:

• Regularly publishing content – this can either be images and videos, or written content that gives your customers a reason to engage.
• Review and respond to customer comments, questions, and feedback regardless of whether they are negative or positive. Responding to your customers will help show that your brand cares and paint you in a positive light.
• Regularly use the built-in metrics to help you understand how well you are reaching your audience and tailor your content to suit your goals whether this is more shares, likes, comments, or click-throughs to your website.
• Most importantly, think of your social media platform as a conversation driver – don’t hard sell, and don’t be boring!

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a proven and effective way of engaging with your potential clients and turning them into leads, and eventually customers. In fact, 89% of marketers named email marketing as their most effective lead generator of any channel.

For email marketing to work effectively, you need to ensure it’s implemented properly including:

• For your email marketing strategy to work, you need to ensure that you have a good customer base. Offer things like coupons to people who sign up – if they give you their information, they are already interested in your products so giving an extra incentive can help to close a sale.
• Creating attractive subject lines – this should make your readers want to click on the mail, it should be alluring without being spammy.
• Create responsive emails that show up correctly on a variety of devices, including mobiles and tablets so that they can be opened and read properly.
• Have one call-to-action (CTA) per mail, having too many can confuse your recipients and come across as pushy.
• Use built-in data to learn from and tailor your email marketing strategy.

Online advertising

Paid online advertising for small businesses is sometimes regarded as a waste of time and money, but since 2007 it has shown steady and impressive growth. Consumers rely heavily on the internet for information, so using online advertising to gain new leads for your business makes sense.

The good news is, you don’t need a big budget to be successful either.

Google, Facebook, Instagram, as well as other social media platforms all offer paid advertising where you can design ads and push them into your target audience’s search results and feeds. You can run campaigns on a local, national, or international scale and you can tailor your advert to target people meeting certain demographics too.

Another great thing about online advertising is that it can be tracked easily, so you will know whether your ads are achieving your goals and what your ROI is.

So, there you have it. Those are the most effective types of marketing essentials for small businesses that you may want to consider when you sit down and plan your marketing strategy.