Digital marketing has become the bedrock of marketing, exceeding traditional marketing results. Leveraging search engines and social media being the lead digital marketing option, can give your business a smooth ride to boost sales.
With almost 50% of the world’s population using social media, and other search engines, digital marketing is highly fundamental. This is why this content is aimed at exposing digital marketing tips for small businesses.
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing can simply be defined as a form of marketing that works by making use of digitalized means to go about marketing. It is the best form of marketing as most of the other avenues are not as effective as they used to be.
However, the effectiveness of digital marketing keeps going up with the eyes of more and more people glued to their device screen. Thus, the need to understand digital marketing tips for small businesses.
In most places such as a malls, trains, bus stops, restaurants and even just walking down the street, there are a lot of eyes completely glued to their mobile devices. A good percentage of them are doing one thing or another online. Some of those activities include; social media, google services, online games, maps, and the internet in general.
In marketing the major goal is to create awareness for goods and services. This is why you have to target things that get people’s attention and technology devices do this very well. In the past, traditional marketing was heavily relied on. Marketing tools such as billboards were great to catch people’s attention (still effective, but not nearly as much as digital marketing). In car rides people always look at various billboards as they move along. However these days, when you examine people’s activities, there’s a very high chance that they’re looking at their phone.
Digital marketing in a nutshell is using digitalized means such as mobile phones, computers and other digital means that tends to reach more people for sales purposes.
Pillars of Digital Marketing
Now that we understand what digital marketing is, it is important to know what it entails and how digital marketing functions. Usually, digital marketing is a wide concept that spans a lot of terms and principles. Hence, there are some pillars that make up the very foundation of digital marketing. These pillars are;
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Social Media Marketing (SMM)
- Email Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Marketing Automation
- Digital Advertising
- Mobile marketing
- Analytics
These pillars make up digital marketing. Some of these terms might be quite familiar and some might look strange but they’re all quite straightforward.
- Search engine optimization
Search engines are very powerful tools on the internet. This is especially because individuals and most importantly businesses get information by imputing queries on the internet search engines. If you run a furniture business and a person around you opens a search engine and searches “furniture shops near me” would your business pop up among the top search results? What decides this is known as search engine optimization.
In a nut shell, search engine optimization is the process of improving your rankings in search results from search engines such as Google, yahoo, Bing, duckduckgo, etc. search engine optimization is an especially important aspect of digital marketing because it increases traffic on your page or site significantly.
- Social media marketing:
Just as the name suggests, this means the usage of social media as a marketing tool. It is a form of digital marketing which entails advertising on various social media platforms.
Social media has a vast influx of daily users that are doing one thing or another on various social media platforms around the world. With a single advertisement on the platform, you can reach out to countless individuals who make use of it.
There are currently several social media platforms and more are springing up daily. It is important to know which is popular or most used in your area to get the best out of social media marketing. This is because the more people use the platform, the more they get exposed to your marketing campaign.
Some generally popular social media platforms include; Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snap chat.
Facebook: This is one of the oldest social media platforms that is still very solid and going strong till date. With over 1 billion users and 2.7 million active users, it is currently the biggest social media platform.
Facebook is a business-friendly platform with a vast amount of users along with its user-friendly interface. It supports the posting of pictures and write-ups and Ad campaigns which makes it perfect for social media marketing.
Instagram: Instagram is a social media platform that is immensely popular worldwide with billions of users. Its layout allows for the posting of pictures and write-ups also with its main feature being the posting of pictures. Instagram has a lot of features that both support and augment the posting of ads. These functions lets you reach out to more people which means more traffic for your website.
YouTube: YouTube is a social media made for the posting and watching of all kinds of videos. It is useful for watching videos from all over the world and posting video advertisements of all kinds.
The right use of social media marketing helps to support business efforts and build awareness.
Social media marketing benefits
There are so many benefits attached to Social media marketing and some of these benefits include;
1. Social media marketing is stress free
2. The process is cost efficient, hence budget friendly.
3. Social media marketing is easy to get statistics and feedback from marketing strategies
4. It builds brand awareness and encourages loyalty.
5. It helps to create a wider reach with minimal effort
6. It helps to structure decisions with robust social analytics
7. It helps to manage social media workflows and team communication
With the benefits above, the use of social media benefits is quite visible and remains very beneficial to every and any business.
- E-mail marketing
E-mail marketing is both an easy marketing system which is efficacious. It entails a business using e-mails as a form of marketing. This is done by sending mails to both existing and new customers in the form of newsletters and product/services advertisements.
Email Marketing helps build a nice relationship with existing customers as well as attracts new customers to do business with you. Most businesses have developed the habit of sending clients mails on their birthdays or sending to both customers and potential customers on festive seasons and occasions. This helps your clients to know you care as well as reach out to new client’s and by implication, expanding your business.
- Content marketing
Content marketing has to do with the creation and sharing of various online material such as videos, pictures and posts. These posts are not necessarily done for exclusively promotional purposes but are usually to get people interested in your goods or services.
You might have heard that all forms of digital marketing includes or are associated with content marketing. In the real sense, what sets content marketing apart from digital marketing pillars is that in content marketing, a valuable sample is given out for free by a business to the public. This helps to raise their interest as well as attract even more costumers.
- Marketing automation
Marketing automation can simply be defined as the usage of computer software and programs to automatically operate the tasks of various marketing types. It includes; social media marketing, search engine optimization and e-mail marketing.
Marketing automation helps to carry out repetitive and stressful tasks. Some of those tasks includes; sending out of emails, posting on all business’s social media platforms and other similar tasks. However, there are some things that should not be left to market automations such as the generating of leads.
Leads are potential customers to a business. If a company wants to send out e-mails to leads the generation of leads should not be left to market automation.
- Digital advertising
This is the usage of the internet in general to send or post advertisements about your business. For example if an ad about a product is posted on a page that develops a lot of traffic, that is referred to as digital advertising.
With the internet increasing in number of users exponentially digital advertising is becoming more and more effective.
- Mobile marketing
Mobile marketing like the name suggests is the utilization of mobile devices such as mobile phones and tablets to carry out any advertising activity. This can be advertisement through the usage of the short message service (SMS), the multimedia messages (MMS) and notification through pop ups by mobile apps in a smartphone or tablet. It is also one of the digital marketing tips for small businesses.
It can also show an advertisement whilst in app mobile marketing and makes use of QR codes which are scanned with mobile devices. The reason why mobile marketing is effective is because people spend a lot of their time on their phones. With the right advertisement, a lot of those leads could become your client.
- Analytics
This is one of the most powerful advantages of digital marketing. In simple terms analytics is the analyzing and measurement of the digital marketing of a particular business. With this at your disposal, it becomes quite easy to find the efficient method of digital marketing by seeing the influence of various marketing strategies. It can help to directly optimize the return of investment (ROI) of your company with topmost accuracy.
Digital Marketing Tips For Small Businesses
A digital marketing strategy is a series of steps or a plan that helps your business get the absolute best from digital marketing. In a nutshell it is the plan that is followed in order for a business to get the best out of digital marketing.
These strategies can be learned from the digital marketing tips for small businesses. It is aimed at helping businesses achieve their goals. This is made possible via some selected marketing channels online. They are;
●Owned media
●Earned media
●Paid media
Having a digital marketing plan helps you to create and launch your digital marketing strategy with a very high success percentage.
● Owned Media: Owned media has to do with the digital marketing channels which is controlled by that business. A good example is your company website, social media pages and so on. It involves;
-Email Marketing campaigns like newsletters
-Blogs and other owned contents
-Social Media such as Facebook, Instagram and twitter
● Earned Media: This is any post which you come across that has to do with your business but wasn’t created by you. This type of media is usually published by a third party although there are ways a business, establishment or entrepreneur can position himself for earned media. An example is through affiliate marketing.
● Paid Media: Paid media is a piece of advertising that is placed on a platform with a different owner. It can better be understood as running an ad on another website or social media page. This is what is known as an ad.
The benefit of Paid media is that the ads are usually positioned where there is a lot of traffic. This increases the reach of the information passed across.
Small businesses are advised to adopt digital marketing strategies to grow their business. With the right digital marketing strategy tips for small businesses, you would be able to achieve considerable results with minimal cost and effort. As a small business you may be looking for a way to attract more customers with minimal cost.
Here are some digital marketing tips for small businesses;
- Create meaningful content
As a small business one of the best ways to attract customers is to create educative contents. It should be aimed at educating the public on who you are, what you do and what you have to offer to them.
Meaningful creative content that educate the public on why they should patronize you is necessary. Distributing these content to a variety of digital marketing channels is a great way to get clients flocking towards you.
- Proper branding
A brand is something that is unique to your business such as a business logo, quote, business name or a specific design. It doesn’t have to be expensive or over the top, it just has to be something catchy that can capture customers’ attention. When a business has properties that are unique to them in places such as the business website, advertisements, and so on, it makes people want to patronize them for that uniqueness.
- Effective social media management
Social media marketing is one of the useful digital marketing tips for small businesses. It is a powerful tool in digital marketing. If well utilized, operated and managed it can yield effective marketing results.
A dormant page invites decline in publicity so it is important to keep your pages on social media as active as possible. This also helps in increasing traffic on each page as well as the number of people that would view each post.
Hence, keep your page active to increase traffic and get more clients for your business.
- Utilize Google my business
Google my business is a very powerful tool for small businesses. It is one of the local digital marketing tips for small businesses website optimization.
Digital Marketing for dummies involves learning more about website optimization. Registering your businesses under Google my business gets your business among the top listings. This is because Google my business usually appears among the top entries. This would definitely increase traffic for you and lead to sales conversion.
- Engage in referral programs
Referrals are quite popular these days because of how effective it is. The structure of referrals are quite simple and insensitive is given existing customers for bringing in new costumers for patronage.
As a small business especially one in its startup stages, attaining business stability can be daunting. However referrals are a great way to give you that publicity you need to gain stability.
- Sending of E-mails
E-mail marketing is a very important aspect of digital marketing. Most people these have functional email account that they can comfortably access. Generating and following up leads is a great way to stay in touch with customers. It is very easy to convert leads to customers through follow-ups via mailing.
- Engage in video marketing
Video marketing has to do with the sharing of advertisement in video format. The purpose of this is to promote your business via creative, engaging and enticing, video advertisement.
Effective digital marketing for businesses requires use of visual appealing content. Your focus should be to create high-quality and comprehensive content capable of convincing people to buy from you.
Take Away
Digital marketing for small businesses is an integral aspect of business growth. Suffice to say that your marketing strategies cannot be complete without leveraging digital options. Figuring out the digital marketing process for your business growth and combining the process with business activities can be strenuous. To easily carry out IT and professional digital marketing for your business, contact us and let’s help you out.
