Around half of small businesses go under in less than five years after getting started.
And unfortunately, with more digital markets dominated by the big players like Amazon, the competition is only going to get tougher from now on. The good news, however, is that there are still plenty of opportunities to thrive for businesses who know how to use digital marketing to their advantage.
With the right digital marketing strategy, even small businesses can compete for customers with large multimillion-dollar corporations, which presents an abundance of opportunities in all industries.
And as any internet business broker will tell you, small businesses routinely make the jump to becoming dominant figures in their market simply because they discover the right way to attract new leads on a large scale.
So, in this article, we’ll explore some of the most important things you must consider when setting up your digital marketing strategy in 2019.
Ready to get started? Then read on below.
Figure Out Your Place in the Market
Many small businesses make the mistake of entering a market without having a clear understanding of how they’re going to attract customers.
Just because other companies are making sales, doesn’t mean that you can come in and lure away a portion of their customers – they already have better brand awareness, a more loyal following, and more social proof, so as a newer and smaller company, you’re facing an uphill battle.
That’s why, if you want to have a shot at succeeding, your digital marketing efforts must revolve around finding a way to differentiate yourself from the competitors.
When entering a new market, you will need to be able to offer something that no one else has, or at least position yourself in a way that appeals to a segment of the audience that isn’t catered to by others.
When analyzing some of the recent small business success stories, you would often find that most of the online sellers had some kind of unique selling proposition that made them different than others.
Whether it’s a new segment of the market, an innovative marketing approach, or a better pricing system, you need to find the thing that will make your business different and help you stand out.
Track and Analyze Performance
Succeeding in today’s hyper-competitive online marketing landscape comes down to using every single advantage that you can.
And that means that you need to be continually looking for ways to improve your efforts by tracking and analyzing your performance and looking for areas that need optimization.
You should track your website visitor behavior, sources of traffic, conversions, mentions on social media, and everything else that could be relevant to your business and give you ideas on how to improve.
You should also make sure that the data that you collect is presented in a way that you and your team can easily understand – if you’re using MongoDB for collecting data, you can use the MongoDB Tableau integration to create beautiful visualizations that will bring your data to life.
If you take time for tracking and analyzing your data, it will provide you with a significant advantage over your competition as time goes by, since you will not only understand how you can improve your own efforts but will get to know your audience on a much deeper level in the process.
Make the Most of Email Marketing
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Even though there are plenty of new ways to reach and market to your audience, email marketing remains unbeatable in terms of cost-effectiveness, with some studies reporting as much as a $44 return on every dollar spent on marketing through email.
With such incredible potential, you need to give email marketing the attention that it deserves and make sure that you’re growing your list and keeping it engaged.
But how can you maximize the potential of your email marketing campaigns?
Well, here are a few simple things that you should focus on if you want to significantly increase your email marketing campaign performance.
First off, you must establish clear expectations with your subscribers when they leave their email address and then follow up on those expectations throughout your relationship with them.
If you say you’re going to email them a weekly newsletter with updates and best deals, don’t start bombarding their inbox with daily spammy emails, as that will cause your open rate to plummet fast.
Another thing you should consider is making your emails more focused on a singular idea or promotion – if your emails are all over the place, you’ll end up distracting your readers and lowering your chances of success.
Finally, as any experienced sales consulting agency will tell you, in order to make more sales, you need to tell your readers to buy from you.
Always include a clear and persuasive call-to-action, and don’t be afraid to use it a couple of times throughout your email, as in the end, the main goal of the majority of your emails is to get the reader to click through to your offer.
Use Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is one of the most exciting strategies that’s becoming more popular among small businesses every year.
Although initially it was mostly used by e-commerce stores that wanted to raise brand awareness and drive sales, it can be just as effective in almost any field that has influencers in their niche who have a responsive audience.
The process behind influencer marketing is relatively simple:
- You find relevant influencers in your niche who have an audience that’s likely to respond to your products.
- Then, you reach out and offer them to partner up in promoting your products, either providing them a flat fee for a post or using a profit share system from the revenue that the influencer generates.
- Once you reach an agreement, you and the influencer would work together to craft a compelling message that is likely to generate a positive response from his following.
- Finally, you launch the campaign, publish the post, and track the results, watching as you get an influx of new orders in a matter of hours.
The important thing to remember when organizing influencer campaigns is that the fit of the brand with the influencer is vital.
Since you likely won’t be dealing with A-list influencers who have millions of followers, you need to make sure that the influencers with smaller audiences have a majority of followers who could be interested in your offer.
Luckily, there are plenty of micro-influencers who operate in very narrow and specific fields, and it often just may take time to track them down because they are not as visible.
Over time, you can develop a trusty list of influencers with whom you can organize regular promotions with, providing you with a steady stream of leads month after month and making influencer marketing one of the most cost-effective ways for small businesses to promote themselves in 2019.