Digital marketing for a small business is the marketing of a product/service using a number of different channels to reach new, and current customers. Posting on Facebook, sending a tweet and sharing a photo on Instagram are just three, simple ways to utilise organic traffic.
As a small business, there are other ways you can market your business through multiple digital marketing channels.
Search engine optimisation is all about making sure your online presence is visible to those who are most likely going to need your product or service. Understanding your business, target market and product/service is the foundation for marketing your business through online content using keywords. SEO can be broken down into two types: Onsite and Offsite. Onsite is defined as being optimisation within your website and includes, domain name, meta description, web content, internal links, title tags and keywords, rich media files, permalinks, outbound links, bounce rate and loading speed.
Social Media
As someone who has spent 10,000s of hours of my career connecting on social networks for personal and business, I can say being focused on SMO (social media optimisation) that compliments my SEO, has changed the way I’ve connected with people online and in a really good way, like nothing else in the history of marketing.
Offsite SEO is link building, competitor analysis, website code and Analytics. Search engines will quantify a website’s influence online based on what other online sources say about the site, which is where link building comes in.
Email Marketing
If you decide to run a competition and ask for a name and email address, your end goal for this should be to use it as part of your email marketing strategy. Lead generation is one of the best ways to build your email database. Delivering highly relevant content is a strategic goal, which 67% of marketers say their business wants to achieve through email marketing.
One of the most cost efficient and effective ways to utilise Digital Marketing, is to have a blog on your website. There is some debate as to whether blogging is still as important as it used to be and I can say for certain, it is.
I write two blogs on my Warren Knight website every week and the first is posted on Tuesday (#TechTuesday), the second on a Friday as per my online marketing strategy. It has been one of the best ways to validate myself as an influencer in my industry.
Running Competitions
The key to running a successful competition, is to use a third party application that has been verified. Facebook will NOT let you run a competition on your page without using a third party tool. When running a competition you need to think about what you want from your customers. Are you going to give a product away for free and in return ask for a name and email address? Attractive images, videos and descriptions will need to be included so you can draw your target market in.
Digital marketing is more than what you see online. It extends to offline channels, including: SMS and MMS. It requires a whole new approach and understanding of customer behaviour. You need to analyse the value of every action from a tweet and Facebook like to mobile activity.
Running a webinar is a great way to add value to your audience and enables you to share the value of your business to a large group of people from the comfort of your office or home (as I do on a monthly basis).
To read more about Digital Marketing and how to use it to grow your small business, please click here to pre-order my soon to be released book; Think #Digital First.
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