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Digital Marketing for Small Businesses

I have launched a small project. What comes next? Growth, promotion, and acquiring customers - you need to establish your brand. This is where digital marketing practices come in.

Nowadays, marketers tend to rethink traditional practices in favor of quick adaptation and using all available channels and technologies to help businesses grow. This is the demand of the modern digital age.

Among dozens of strategies, there are a few that work in the vast majority of cases.

Let's go through 5 global approaches in digital marketing for small businesses in this post.

Digital Marketing - 5 Effective Digital Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

What is Digital Marketing for Small Businesses

Digital marketing for small businesses refers to the use of various digital channels and tactics, such as social media, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and content marketing, to promote a small business's products or services and reach its target audience online. It allows small businesses to leverage the power of digital technology to increase their visibility, generate leads, build brand awareness, and ultimately drive sales and revenue.

Should small businesses invest in digital marketing?

In short, yes, because the advantages of digital marketing are endless. Among its most significant benefits is the ability to reach customers during their daily activities - checking social media, reading blogs, shopping online, searching on Google, and much more.

These organic techniques allow people to interact with your marketing material in a non-invasive way that doesn't conflict with their interests. The long-term business benefits of easy-to-use internal marketing have been proven in practice.

Other key benefits of digital marketing include:

Global reach

Digital marketing has no geographical boundaries, whereas traditional marketing methods do. This way, you get a chance to market and interact with customers from different parts of the world. It is your choice whether to focus on the local market or go global. If you choose to do so, digital marketing practices will help you.

Low entry cost 

Getting a global presence through traditional marketing channels can be very expensive. The same effects can come with a small investment of time and money when equipping a digital marketing strategy.

Better targeting 

Digital marketing allows you to track your efforts and reach highly targeted potential customers. You will have a much better chance of interacting with a specific target audience from a specific location, industry, or social media platform.

Flexibility 

Progressive companies can adapt their marketing activities on the fly. Any shifts in external/internal factors can change the course of the chosen style and address immediately without wasting too many resources.

Building relationship

Buyers want to interact with companies on their own terms. Presenting the human side of your business on social media can lead to building long-term and loyal relationships with customers.

Vision 

Collecting all marketing and analytical data and preparing reports is an opportunity to gain insights to make your business grow. You should consider a data warehouse or a place to store all important marketing data. Using BigQuery data import, you'll be able to collect information, for example, from HubSpot. Then use it for analytics, report preparation, dashboard creation, and adjusting your marketing activities.

5 Digital Marketing Strategies That Still Work 

There are dozens of ways to do digital marketing based on your needs and business objectives. However, there is no single winning strategy that will succeed in every case, so it's best to take them into consideration first when planning your strategy.

Fortunately, the strategies mentioned below are effective for the majority of small businesses. Let's examine them in detail.

Social Media Advertising 

Digital Marketing - 5 Effective Digital Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

The easiest way to reach customers is to engage with social media platforms that everyone uses every day. However, choosing social media platforms and the way to use them depends on the type of business.

For some companies, developing their accounts on Facebook is the best way to increase sales. For others, engaging the audience in visually appealing posts on Instagram is the preferred approach.

Others may succeed, such as local sports shoe stores, by using gifts, discounts, loyalty programs, and so on. The most important aspect of social media is using it to attract new customers and retain existing ones.

Effectively presenting yourself on all social media platforms can be a challenge for small businesses with limited resources. Instead, consider online channels useful for your business and target audience.

Are you targeting professionals? LinkedIn can be the perfect tool. Do you produce craft products? In this case, Instagram is arguably the best profile to gain followers and increase sales.

Result: Social media is a cost-effective and effective strategy that you can try.

SEO 

This is of utmost importance for small businesses. It gives you the opportunity to compete with both mature brands and emerging companies that are more visible in search engine results. Since people often shop online, it is important for your company to get a higher ranking using targeted keywords.

Professional search engine optimization can help your website rank higher in search engine result pages through methods such as keyword research and volume, creating internal/external links, or improving the content of your website.

You should also consider improving local search engine optimization to make your business more visible. Adding your company to the map and sharing your contact information will greatly help not only in getting a higher ranking but also in improving customer trust.

Result: That improving search engine optimization is a powerful opportunity for new companies to compete with established brands.

PPC 

(Pay-Per-Click) marketing is an online promotional display in which businesses pay when an ad is clicked. There are different types of online promotional displays, including those that appear at the top and sides of search results, or ads that appear in apps.

Part of the advantage of PPC advertising is that businesses only pay for results, and you can direct promotional displays to a specific site. Although pricing is primarily dependent on keyword competition, common high-competition keywords will cost more.

There is no doubt that Pay-Per-Click (PPC) should not be the only marketing method you choose. At the same time, it will help you enhance your search engine optimization efforts. It is a type of optimizer. PPC can show good and quick results for a narrow location when you are not competing for large keywords.

Result: That you should not underestimate the purchasing power of PPC because it is a great way to improve your marketing performance.

Email Marketing

Often underestimated while it is essential to the success of your small business. Essentially, email marketing is about promoting your products and services digitally - through newsletters, updates, promotional offers, or general news - and it involves creating a list of your current and potential customers.

This list consists of people interested in your business who have subscribed to receive news and deals from you. Use it actively.

You can offer them free coupons for signing up or updates on new items / features soon to be released 

Many marketers are considering creating a long-term basic marketing strategy for small businesses. Additionally, email marketing deals well with automation to save time. By using automated tools for small businesses, you can benefit from your email marketing efforts.

Result: Email marketing is effective for acquiring customer loyalty and increasing sales.

Crowd Marketing

Digital Marketing - 5 Effective Digital Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

A major part of digital marketing is achieving a consistent online presence, whether it's your website or one of the web-based media channels. You can expand your reach and presence with word of mouth. Let people talk about your brand - social media interactions, discussions, comments, reviews, responses, etc.

People use reviews and testimonials from others when choosing something online. That's why you're thinking about crowd marketing activities on top-rated websites like Capterra, Trustpilot, G2, and reviews on Google.

For example, if you're launching a ride-hailing service, with fierce competition in the market with well-known brands like Uber, good customer ratings will help you compete with major players in the local market.

Crowd marketing won't strain your budget, but the impact may be sufficient. However, it takes time to get reviews.

Result: Crowd marketing allows the target audience to know about your business.

Which strategy to choose? 

Every professional marketing strategy requires a well-planned and accurate plan, but in the case of small businesses, they are especially important due to budget constraints.

The choice of strategy depends primarily on the details of your business, the scope of your activity, and the audience.

Additionally, it's important to make your strategies flexible and adjustable on demand. This can be done using a lean canvas model. It seems that a combination of email marketing and crowd marketing can be very effective in building a successful business.

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