Digital marketing has taken over the marketing function in most businesses. As such, marketing gurus continue to consistently offer digital marketing advice for small businesses. However, these conventional methods or advice don’t necessarily yield results for small businesses or businesses just launching.
Therefore, small business owners are left frustrated because of the enormous consultation fees, low return on investment, and wasted time. You don’t need to follow the same path while growing your business, revenue, or brand. Instead, you can achieve success by concentrating on what you’re good at, doing away with rules, as well as concentrating on organic growth.
Let’s explore how you can achieve success as a small business.
Strategies to Throw Out of the Window
Marketing experts offer varying digital marketing advice for small businesses as a path to success. However, most require enormous resources, strict timelines, and schedules. You need to take a different route where you’re in charge of your marketing with a bit of flexibility.
Here’s a list of popular strategies you need to eliminate.
1. Automated Sales & Follow-up Funnel
An automated puts you on a fixed program where everything follows a set script. There’s no way to customize your funnel, which makes it feel cold and uninviting. Plus, we all know an automated funnel when we see one these days… and let’s face it, hardly anyone likes them.
This process works for seasoned businesses because they have enough money and resources to put behind getting enough people into this type of funnel. These are incredibly low converting but if you can get enough foot traffic, SOMEBODY will purchase.
What can a small business do instead?
Better advice for a small business owner or entrepreneur is to:
Network, virtually or in person, to create connections.
Connect with referral partners. Who has complementary services where you can all refer each other out?
Reach out personally to your dreamiest clients. Send them some free advice via a recorded video. This personalized, unique touch will set you apart from the crowd and keep you top of mind whenever they do need your services.
2. Posting Daily on Social Media
Social media is the place where all small businesses start out because it’s affordable; however, it’s becoming significantly harder by the day to actually get found, which is why there is so much advice saying to post every single day.
Again, this is easy peasy for larger companies who have a marketing person who only does that. As you grow your business, you start by wearing all the hats and at a certain point posting every single day is no longer the best scenario for you to get the most bang for your time.
What can a small business do instead?
Instead, the focus should be to connect with your audience when it matters. The future of digital marketing like commenting on relevant posts, commenting on stories (Because it ends up in people’s DMs!), as well as offering valuable advice regularly. Genuinely connect!
Search social groups and see what questions people are asking that you can answer and give advice. People are also always looking and asking around for services they need. Make sure to show up for them!!
3. Focusing on Building a Big Email List
Okay, Okay, hear me out. YES! An email list is important and it’s great to have. It can also be highly effective.
BUT – as a new business owners, it’s incredibly time consuming (or costs a pretty penny with ads) to grow a list. I say to put your opt-in up on your website and the link to it wherever you can, but your main, immediate focus SHOULD NOT be blowing up (in a good way) your list.
This is especially true if you’re targeting high level C-suite. They more than likely are not reading these emails… especially if it’s a mass send.
What can a small business do instead?
Again, make sure to focus on the personal emails and reach-out strategies.
Also make sure to get yourself into high-level events and masterminds. This is where you can have direct access to certain people you are looking to reach when selling your high-ticket offerings. This is also where you could find potential referral partners.
4. Sales Goals
In the modern world, figures are the only measure of success or progress. Business owners and marketing experts, therefore, insist on setting sales targets or quantifiable efforts. Even so, the hard figures can stress you out on failing to meet them.
As such, goals are self-defeating and retrogressive in an attempt to achieve sales growth. Instead, reverse engineering works wonders by focussing on broad objectives.
You should therefore focus your efforts on attaining solid sales leads or improving the number of connections. The new approach sets your mind free as well as develops natural connections that eventually power your business growth.
Additional Reminders On How to Move Forward With Your Digital Marketing
Keep the Focus on What You Love
Still in line with minimal rules, ideally, you should focus on doing what you’re best at or your passion. If you’ve created a growing following and community on Facebook, build on that. Prospects already appreciate your work, passion, and are familiar with your ideas. You can therefore set a foundation by developing a marketing strategy around it.
Here’s how you can leverage an existing platform or digital asset:
1. Narrow Down on a Strategy
You can choose a marketing strategy to warm prospects or promote your business. Some of the common methods include video marketing, publishing articles, as well as using value-packed images or a combination.
If you’ve chosen a video, work on your visibility and consistency. You can start by creating pre-recorded videos to explain specific concepts. Grow the strategy by extending to live videos, reels, short videos, transcribing videos into blogs, as well as accompanying social posts. See how we got our client from in just five months.
2. Build on the Momentum
After identifying the foundation, find complementing techniques to fuel your growth. Launch other strategies that complement the initial plan or platform. For example, you can create sponsored posts that target a different audience.
Alternatively, you can list your business on other or TikTok to target a new group of prospects. Listing and creating content on Tiktok can be the perfect strategy to target young founders of start-ups. Additional platforms can also improve the diversity of leads and business revenue. You can also create more content on your website as well as promote it on the growing social media accounts.
A Few Tangible Tips to Incorporate in Your Digital Marketing
As you ditch the cliche techniques, you’ll need additional strategies that’ll build your strong points. The strategies work towards cementing the growing network, ring-fencing the small wins, as well as concentrating on your strengths.
Here are the additional strategies you can apply:
Network with Referral Partners: Businesses create relationships with referral partners to improve their ability to generate leads and prospects. You can improve the relationship’s potential by keeping regular contact on social media, email, as well as in-person meetings. Regular networking creates a solid and natural bond which results in improved productivity or output.
Create a Repurchasing Campaign: It’s costly to recruit new customers in comparison with maintaining existing clients. That said, a repurchasing campaign is a collection of efforts aimed at reselling to existing clients or contracts that are about to expire. It may be a discounted price, coupons, or an affordable product bundle with more value than individual products.
Get Niche with Your Ad Copy and Retargeting: As your strategies and customer base take shape, it’s time to improve your specialization. You can achieve more results by targeting niche prospects. It’s possible to achieve specialized targeting by creating ads that target niche clients on the already established social platforms.
Write Blog Posts with SEO and Repurpose on LinkedIn & Medium: This tactic is so underutilized. It positions you as a thought leader while also allowing you to get found on Google by the people who are actively looking for your offerings.
Utilize Quora: Again, another tactic that positions you as a thought leader while also driving people to your website for free! And if your website is setup to convert, you will get people on your email list on autopilot, if not reaching out to you directly to connect.
Let Us Guide Your Next Move
Irrespective of the multiple pieces of advice from marketing gurus, you get to make the rules as a business owner. The secret lies in the ability to focus on your strength and build on your existing success. Even so, choosing the right strategy may be somewhat confusing. To that end, is here to help you. We’ll help you gain more visibility, credibility, as well as leads with a zero ads budget. If you need help deciding on your next move, .
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