Top Tips on Digital Marketing for Small Business
Digital marketing for small business can help you build your reputation, boost your visibility, and achieve more sustainable growth. COVID influences small businesses to accelerate their investment in digital marketing with more of their customers researching, evaluating, and making purchases online. With a high level of expertise required to succeed in digital marketing for small business, many business owners lack the necessary digital skills in-house.
How to achieve sustainable growth with digital marketing.
In this blog on Top Tips on Digital Marketing for Small Business, we share our five best tips on how to achieve sustainable growth with digital marketing.
Tip 1 – Integrate digital marketing with traditional marketing
It is crucial to integrate your digital marketing and traditional marketing together to achieve the best ROI from your digital marketing.
With a focus on fast results, businesses often start with a new website, Google Ads, SEO, or social media – without knowing what marketing strategy will work best for their business.
Starting with a digital marketing plan that integrates your digital marketing activities with your traditional marketing activities is the fastest way to grow your business.
Customising your marketing strategies to your business and budget through a personalised marketing plan will deliver a better return on your marketing investment faster.
Tip 2 – Build your Reputation
People buy from brands that they trust.
One of the common marketing mistakes we see small businesses make is not using consistent branding and marketing messages across all their marketing channels.
People look for a range of signals online to build sufficient trust to make a purchase. Inconsistency in your branding slows the buyer’s journey down.
Branding goes beyond a professional logo. It is essential your brand story and supporting key messages explain what your customers value most about your brand and why it is different.
Customise your marketing communications to bring your brand story to life to your ideal customers.
If you are serious about building a resilient brand, make sure that your team lives three to five core values that demonstrate your brand story is true.
Tip 3 – Small business website
Building a website that will deliver sustainable growth requires an extensive range of skillsets from technical, graphic design, branding, marketing communications, and the ability to promote an online presence using digital marketing and traditional marketing strategies.
Success factors in boosting the visibility of your website:
The critical success factors to increasing the visibility of your website include:
- Google can find and search your site
- A design that is consistent with your brand
- Quick for visitors to navigate and find information
- Marketing communications that influence action
- Visibility so people know your website exists
- Reliable hosting with sufficient backups
- Keeping the website software up-to-date
The marketing communications need to explain your brand story, what you do well, why you are different, and answer any common questions they may have.
When writing the marketing communications for your website, it is essential to include some basic keywords to help you come up in some Google searches.
Choose a reliable and fast web hosting supplier. Google can penalise websites using poor-quality hosting. If your site loads slowly, people will leave and go to your competitors’ sites.
Tip 4 – Boosting your visibility.
Once a small business website is built, digital marketing and traditional marketing strategies should encourage people to visit your online and offline presence.
Some of the more popular digital marketing channels include search engines, paid online advertising, social media, online public relations, and email marketing.
The type of digital media channels used by a small business is influenced by their objectives, target market, geographic focus, marketing budget, and people available to do the marketing.
Channels to use for digital marketing for small business include:
- Google My Business supported with SEO for local area search
- Google My Business posts, reviews, and review responses
- SEO for your website (from basic setup to visibility search)
- Google Ads, Google Remarketing Ads, and online industry ads
- Social media such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube
- Online public relations’ media releases
- Newsletters, Blogs, and Videos
It’s also important to know that different digital marketing channels support different marketing objectives. Social media is great for awareness and Google My Business for leads. Don’t just focus on Google My Business as they work together to build trust and drive leads.
Digital marketing cannot be done in isolation from traditional marketing.
Integrating digital and traditional marketing will generate the best ROI and sustainable growth for your organisation.
Channels to use for traditional marketing for small business include:
- Print advertising and editorials in relevant print media
- Local area networking such as Chambers and BNI
- Business development including, capability documents and tenders
- Uniforms, vehicle signage, and building signage
- Mail drops, direct mails, and shopping centre advertising
- Industry or local area tradeshows
- Sponsorship agreements
- Radio advertising
So, start with a digital marketing plan as this will focus your marketing budget and resources on the best-performing combination of digital marketing and traditional marketing activities.
Tip 5 – Insights and measurements
Insight tools
Digital marketing gives small businesses insights that help make continuous improvements to their marketing to achieve more sustainable growth.
Examples of tools to access insights for your small business include:
- Google Analytics: information about visitors, content, channels, and conversions
- Sprout Social: social media monitoring and listening
- Moz: tools that make SEO, inbound marketing, linking building, and content marketing easier.
Measuring your marketing is essential.
Measuring your marketing enables you to make continuous improvements. This does require the expertise to understand what measurements to use for the different stages of the marketing journey (awareness, interest, acquisition, and loyalty).
Here are some examples of measurements:
- Awareness: fans, reach, engagement, website traffic, website bounce rates, keywords ranked, and domain authority and links
- Interest: leads direct and leads from website
- Acquisition: new clients, new projects, new sales, and growth of sales
- Loyalty: Client feedback, Google Reviews, and Net Promoter Score.
Grow your Small Business with Better Marketing & Better Results.
By progressively implementing our Top Tips on Digital Marketing for Small Business you can build your reputation, boost your visibility, and achieve more sustainable growth.
To achieve a better ROI with your digital marketing requires expertise in both digital marketing and traditional marketing. At first, this may feel overwhelming.
Sustainable Marketing Services can help you break the steps down into affordable bite-size pieces that make your journey easier and more profitable with more sustainable growth.
Sustainable Marketing Services is an award-winning Brisbane digital marketing agency with a long history of delivering sustainable success for our clients.
Book a complimentary meeting on 07 3446 5837 or via email us here.