In 2020, digital marketing acted as a lifeboat for small businesses. Brands already on top of their digital marketing game found themselves scalable and in demand. Every business effectively opted for digital solutions to market their small business. This trend has successfully followed itself into 2021.
If you want your small business to create a mark in the online world, here are actionable techniques you can add to your digital marketing strategy today and grow your business digitally.
Transform Your Website Into an Online Content Resource for Your Niche
Most digital marketing strategies cannot do without . The concept of content marketing revolves around creating content that is relevant to your audience consistently. The content you create should have inherent value to make sure your brand is cemented as an authority in the field. When executed well, content marketing attracts new customers to your brand and makes sure the existing ones stay loyal and retained.
A powerful digital marketing strategy is built on content marketing. One of the most popular forms of content marketing is hosting a blog on the website. A dedicated blog works as a web database for present and future customers. The blog gives you a space to showcase your experience and knowledge about the industry.
In this area, you can resonate with your customer’s pain points, so they find you relatable and go further to let them know why you are the legitimate solution to their problems. It is not just about a blog. You can also create infographics, blog posts, ebooks, guides, and other original content.
Moreover, high-performing website content gets social media attention and is shared with a wide audience. Social sharing is an online equivalent to word-of-mouth marketing. Well-performing blogs can also rank higher in the search engines and boost your website’s rankings.
Establish a Strong Social Media Presence
As social media grows by the minute, it cannot be ignored as a key marketing tool. Many small businesses have grown their customer base solely through Instagram and Facebook reach. Along with pushing your products and services, social media opens a direct line of communication with your target audience and gives access to valuable feedback. Using a service for online reputation management will give you the confidence that your business is being shown in the best light to prospective customers. They can manage what people see when they search for you, any reviews and negative comments or even help you to brand your business.
Leverage Influencer Marketing
Marketing can get lonely over a period of time. You may start feeling like you are the only one shouting about your brand from the tiny corner of the internet in this cluttered web space. However, you can tap into the influencer army online to help promote your brand.
This type of digital marketing leverages influential online personalities and taps into the loyalty and trust they have built with their audience to advertise your products and services. Influencer marketing is flexible enough to be scaled as per your business needs. For example, instead of spending a thousand dollars behind a larger influencer with million followers, you can reach out to a network of smaller nano-influencers with a follower count of 10 thousand or less.
Do not feel like you will not get good returns approaching influencer marketing this way. Nano-influencer marketing has time and again proven to fetch decent ROIs for businesses due to their niche connect with the audience. Micro-influencers with less than 5,000 followers tend to maintain an engagement rate of 5.3%. While on the other hand, the engagement percentage drops as low as 1.1% for the larger influencer profiles.
Invest in Video Marketing
Customers respond much quicker after watching a video ad, thus making video marketing one of the most efficient ways to successfully grow your online business. Videos go viral easily, generate more authority, increase audience engagement multifold, and much more.
They are easy to produce, and the possibilities are endless. Webinars, YouTube videos, vlogs, live videos, product demos with voiceovers, commercial ads can all be shot right from your smartphones and edited through an ad maker tool or software online. With videos, brands can explain complex ideas within their niche in an easy-to-understand, enjoyable format. They can also help push the brand or website’s SEO ranking higher up in the search engines.
Set Your KPIs and Analyze Important Metrics
Digital marketing strategies are not science-backed, so it is common to see meteoric success with one and colossal failure with another. That is exactly why you need to create key performance indicators for your small business which can act as a compass for your digital marketing efforts.
Smart KPIs that matter to every small business is customer acquisition cost, customer lifetime value, landing page conversion rates, churn rate, cart abandonment rate, and average order value.
Build Your SEO rankings
You can invest all the time and resources in the world to create a highly-functional website, but without SEO, no one is gonna know about your small business. Optimizing your website for SEO ensures that your business becomes one of the first search results on Google and beyond.
Some small business owners feel like SEO is too technical and time-consuming. However, one should not ignore the fact that SEO is also the most effective long-term strategy that you can apply to your small business. All you need to do is create unique, insightful, and engaging content for humans based on SEO principles. Dig for the most highly-searched keywords and terms within your industry and create in-depth content around them.
Develop Email Marketing
Another digital strategy critical for your small business is email marketing. Email marketing works on the simple concept that everyone checks their email, whether they are b2b or b2c customers in any age group. Use a referral system or a lead magnet on your website to collect information (including email addresses).
Once you have built a solid list, start by creating a monthly email newsletter or sending regular emails with special offers, news, and discounts. Depending on how you collect email addresses and which platform you use to send them out, this can be a low-budget digital marketing tactic that will continue to generate returns for your small business.