Digital Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

Small business owners are often struggling to find ways to keep their store running. On top of that, a lack of a proper marketing budget could be another challenge that holds them back from surviving in a competitive market, where a number of businesses, small and large, come and go every day. Whatever happens, all we want is to keep our store running, without any interference or problems. Here comes the importance of marketing strategies for small businesses. You must know the difference between traditional marketing and digital marketing.

So how do you ensure that your store attracts people and is capable of transforming them into loyal customers? There are a number of marketing strategies that you can adapt to ensure that your business is capable of attracting consumers, transforming them into loyal consumers and even retaining them. Check out this customer based marketing strategy.

Some of the tactics might be old and outdated and need to be replaced, while there are those tactics that never go out of style and will always be needed to take your business to the next level. We will take you through some of these marketing strategies for small businesses:

Facebook Advertising

You would be surprised to know that more than 2 million small as well as medium-sized businesses are using Facebook as a marketing strategy to promote their small businesses or are running their store online. Well, most of us are aware of the fact that Facebook ads have a great impact on advertising when it comes to promoting your products to your target audiences. Facebook marketing is one of the leading digital marketing trends in the modern world.

Also, Facebook ads are highly affordable. Reaching your target audiences on Facebook is easier than ever, regardless of the industry domain you operate in because people are in awe of Facebook and use it quite frequently.

Facebook ads come with a wide range of features, including the most important highlight, allowing you to reach out to your intended target audiences. One of the important advantages of Facebook is that you need not worry about who is watching your ads, as on other social media platforms, where you have no idea on who actually saw your ads and who didn’t.

Facebook ads provide you with the convenience of reaching out to your target audiences depending on a variety of demographics, such as age, gender, location, online patterns and much more. When you are creating Facebook ads, you have to ensure that you have a business page for your company.

Then, you can reach out the ad platform, using Facebook Ads Manager. This can be accessed using the drop-down menu on the Facebook account. All you have to do is click ‘Manage Ads’ – this will take you to the essential ad features.

Here are a few steps to follow when you start with Facebook ads:

• Define your aim

Facebook provides you to choose from the buyer’s journey: awareness, consideration and conversation phases.

• Who is your audience?

You can decide your audience category on the basis of a range of factors, including their interests, online browsing patterns, connections, age, etc.

• What’s your budget?

Facebook provides you with two options: first, you can choose a daily budget, wherein there is a limit for the amount you can spend each day. Next, you have the option to choose a lifetime budget, where you have a maximum amount that you can spend for a lifetime on this ad.

It is also important to ensure that you place in something that is compelling and professional, such as an image or video within your ad. Once that is decided, you can create a headline and the remaining content body for your ad.

Besides these factors, where you place your ad is also important. Keep track of your ad’s success over time.

PPC Advertising

PPC is one of another important marketing strategies for small businesses. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is an online ad model or can be thought of as a means to exhibit your ads to people who come in search of related products or services. Each time you get a click from your customer, you ought to pay. Check out this latest PPC trends.

Here we are covering the PPC ads that are mostly used by search engines, including Google. Advertisers start by bidding for certain specific keywords that are related to their product or services that they are planning to serve. On the basis of the quality, relevance and other factors, the search engines use an algorithm to monitor and choose an ad that has to be displayed on the search engine results page (SERP).

PPC is another form of SEO – here keyword research has an important role to play in your campaigns, while you try bidding on keywords. Google Ad Words or Google Ads is another most preferred PPC advertising platform. This is one of the best effective SEO strategy that is proven to be effective.

A number of people are using Google’s search engine to get information about products or services that they need. So, Google would be the most ideal place to start with PPC ads. Google employs the use of landing page quality, keyword relevance as well as a number of other factors to decide your score. This will impact your ads that are displayed on the SERP (whenever a related query is searched for).

You can start a PPC campaign by conducting suitable keyword research. It might seem to take up a lot of time, but investing a little time and effort into this would be fruitful as the success of your entire campaign revolves around the keywords that are used.

However, over time, when search trends tend to change, it is important that you keep your keyword lists updated.

Content Marketing

Another most important marketing strategy for small businesses that you need to take into consideration for small businesses is content marketing. You need to create and publish high-quality content, which is significant to the target audience. This will provide value to your readers or viewers and they will come back to you.

It is important to have a clear picture of what your customers are looking for – which includes their challenges, needs and a perfectly customized solution to sort out their woes by the time they are through the content.

Content marketing is a long-term and ever-lasting marketing strategy, which might not be the case with certain other strategies that come and go. It offers a high range of importance for improving SEO. While you are trying to build trust with your audiences or promoting a brand image, this content would help to build trust. Also, it will help in building long-lasting relationships with audiences that will last forever.

Content marketing offers an unbelievable ROI on your business – if shared and promoted at the right time. So how do you get started with content marketing? Check this article to enhance ROI by leveraging data in your marketing strategy.

It is important that you have a clear picture of who your audiences are going to be if you are to use content marketing to promote your business strategies. This can be done by creating your buyer personas, which will help you to define content marketing strategies on the basis of the audiences that you plan to target. Buyer personas are nothing but profiles of your target buyers, which carries data, including demographics, challenges, interests, the patterns and any other related information that is important to your customers. You can start by understanding what are your customers’ greatest challenges.

Look out for the kind of questions your people ask. Try to frame your content around topics where consumers need not look further before making a purchase decision. Here, you are now at a point where you can start working on topics for various content, including blog posts, social media posts, infographics, and even e-books. Another important point to focus on when you develop your content is to determine where your leads are in their buyer’s journey.

In fact, different topics and even content can be used to target various points of your customer’s journey within the funnel. It might not be easy to create and publish high-quality content on a continuous basis. It would require a lot of time and effort to develop content that is relevant to the target audiences.

Search Engine Optimization

We have already seen how certain marketing tactics can help improve search engine optimization (SEO) results. Now, it is time to discuss SEO trends. Yes, SEO also forms an important part of the marketing strategies for small businesses.

With SEO, you are trying to optimize the structure of your site along with content to ensure that it is easier for people to read or crawl the search engines. All you would have to do is make small improvisations to your site’s structure as well as the content, in order to make it appear among the top results of the search engines. Check these modern SEO opportunities tips.

As your ranking on the search engines improves, the greater the possibility to attract more traffic to your site. This strategy is the most important ones for small businesses as it allows consumers to search for brands to buy at a local level, using their mobile devices.

All you have to do is optimize your site as well as content for local SEO, which will increase the chances of your site appearing on the local mobile search results. It is important to ensure that your site is mobile-ready so that it is accessible across mobile devices, which is important for your business.

Start your SEO strategy with a site audit. With this audit, you can check the on-page SEO factors that will help determine the strengths and weaknesses of your website when it comes to SEO. This will help improve your content and the structure of your site, as well.

If you need expert help with the SEO strategy for your site, reach out to us. We have a team of experienced in-house SEO experts who can help take your business to the next level.

Outbound Marketing

Reaching out to potential clients is part and parcel of building your business profile. If planned and carried out successfully, engagements established through outbound marketing strategies can transform your client portfolio and help drive company revenues and growth.

Contrary to cold calling, it has been shown that email marketing boasts high open and success rates. Up to 33% of clients react favorably to cold emails, and that number can rise dramatically with the help of specific software and adequate customer segmentation.

A standard mailbox provides a neutral yet approachable medium for B2B interactions to flourish. Potential customers can quickly scan information included in the title and the subject of the email and engage with content that sparks their interest or provides solutions to their problems.

User receptivity to email marketing is what makes careful segmentation of potential customers such a crucial aspect of client acquisition. The success rate of your proposals will vary according to the location, profession, size, revenue, and budget of the businesses you reach out to.

Luckily, there are a host of tools out there to help you compile lists and sort potential customers during your digital marketing campaign.

FindThatLead, for example, makes outbound strategies easy and effective by helping you segment and select verified prospects funneled from a host of social media accounts.

Source, sort, and engage potential clients from one simple, easy-to-use, and fully-vetted platform.

Other tools, such as Close and Right Inbox, are also great B2B lead-generating options, providing contact templates, tracking features, and follow-up messages to help your sales team secure clients and get deals across the line.

However, like most strategies designed to turn potential customers into clients, lead generation is a long-term solution that requires patience and constant fine-tuning.

That being said, as long as your pitch is compelling and targets the right profiles, in the end, your business will reap the rewards. 

Acodez is a leading digital marketing agency in India offering all kinds of digital marketing, SEO services. We are also a web design company giving solutions to businesses in India and abroad. Our broad experience of having worked on numerous projects has helped us know the requirements of the clients and providing the best services to them.