Digital marketing can be an incredibly complex topic to get your head around, especially if you are busy running a small business and have little time for learning. Technology and trends change quite frequently in digital marketing so, without a lot of time on your hands, it can be tough to feel confident with your own marketing endeavors.
That said, digital marketing doesn’t have to be a topic you fear as a small business owner, with plenty of amazing strategies available online that will have your business shining in no time. With access to so many eyes and minds, implementing just a few of these digital marketing strategies will improve your market cut-through almost instantly.
But with so many different marketing channels to choose from, which channel should be taking the majority of your attention first? If you’re a small business owner looking for easy to implement digital marketing strategies, then this guide is made for you.
Courses
Before you even start to tackle what to do with your digital marketing, as a small business owner, one of the best ways to uplift your knowledge and identify a strategy to implement is to look into digital marketing courses. Digital marketing courses are one of the best ways to get an overview of different concepts within digital marketing and provide a taste of how to assess whether different strategies will work for your business.
These courses often provide resources to use after the course and act as a good basis for you as a small business owner to work specifically on your business. Another great opportunity within a course is to network with other professionals and learn about how they apply digital marketing strategies in their businesses. These conversations can really help boost your understanding and learn good lessons about implementation and any potential pitfalls.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
It’s no secret that to find almost anything online, consumers use a search engine. As such, the primary digital marketing channel that you should look towards building a strategy around is search engine optimisation. It is practically a must-have.
There are many different aspects of this strategy with the basics being that you need to firstly understand what your customers search to find your products and services. Then, through a variety of search engine optimisation tactics, the goal is to get your website as high up on the search results as possible so that customers buy from you, not your competitors.
While the most complex to understand, SEO has been proven time and time again to deliver the best return on investment. If this feels like a strategy that may challenge you to handle alone, there is always the opportunity to engage an agency like to do this on your behalf.
The only consideration with this approach is the added cost to the business. However, with some knowledge behind you, you can at least be confident your agency is doing the right thing.
Marketing automation
An incredibly effective, but sometimes expensive strategy to implement within your small business is marketing automation, specifically on digital channels like email.
If your business has a newsletter or email opt-in process on your website, there is a lot of manual workload having to manually send them updates or responses. Marketing automation means you can easily and regularly communicate with your customers, which will help keep them warm and engaged with the business.
Marketing automation platforms work by setting campaigns or contact lists and aligning them to the content you choose, then sending it automatically without you having to do anything at all. These strategies are ideal for things like postage updates, requests for information and regular communications like a newsletter or sales. There are plenty of systems that can be bought right off the shelf and implemented very easily as well, which is perfect for a small business.
Leverage social media
If you are a small business that does not have a huge budget to be spending on different marketing experiments then social media is a great tool to get familiar with.
Social media allows you to reach your audience across a range of different platforms, and you do not even have to spend money! You can post organically and present your products or services to your audience through a range of creative and informative social media posts.
When you start to grow your following and can see value in your posts, you may even wish to run a small paid advertising campaign to boost your reach and test the effectiveness of this channel. There are businesses that have had huge success through social media, and this is always due to them staying authentic to who they are and what they do, so if your small business is clear on your brand and values – social media may be a very successful channel for you.
Just because you are a small business, does not mean you cannot make a huge impact through your marketing efforts. If your time and resources are limited, master one of these areas before moving onto the next. The last thing you want to do is to spread yourself too thin and not make an impact in any way.
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