Digital Marketing for Small Business: How to Get Started

When you Google the term digital marketing, you'll find a vast amount of information available on the subject.  And you, a small business owner, may not have the means to test all of the different marketing techniques out there.

Does this mean you should ignore online marketing altogether? Absolutely not. Without a digital presence, you risk losing potential customers to other businesses.

To get started, click on a link below to skip to the relevant section, or read on to discover how you can effectively grow your small business with digital marketing.

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing refers to the use of online channels to promote products and services and engage with present and potential customers. Businesses make use of websites, social media, search engines, emails, and other digital channels for this kind of marketing. 

In simpler words, all marketing activities that take place online are called digital or online marketing.

With the number of internet users increasing by the day, you have a better opportunity to connect with your customers than ever. Through digital marketing, you not only get your business in front of the right audience but also learn more about what your audience needs and how you can improve their experience.

Why is digital marketing important for small businesses?

Before making a purchase, about 70% of customers will research a business, product, or service online. People want to ensure they get the best value for their money, so they’ll compare the prices, benefits, reviews, and other features of a product or service from different brands. 

As a small business, you may be up against more established brands for the same customers. How you position yourself online with key information about your business and offers will determine whether or not customers trust you enough to do business with you.

Let’s take a look at some ways digital marketing can help you stand out.

Increase your reach

With digital marketing, your small business can attract a large audience, both local and global. Being able to reach more people is especially important if you want to extend your business offers to customers in new locations.

You can use channels like social media to find and engage with prospective customers and brand partners. Building relationships online will open your business to more opportunities for growth.

Target a specific audience

Digital marketing tools can help you to identify the people who are interested in your product or service and are most likely to become paying customers. With a solid plan, you’ll be able to target the market segments with the most value and avoid wasting resources.

Build a brand

Having an online presence makes you more visible to your customers. With social media, for example, you can share interesting content or run ads to create awareness of your business. As you reach and engage with your audience, you increase the level of trust they have for your brand. 

When your customers feel connected to you, they’ll choose you over the competition. They are also likely to become advocates of your brand, bringing more customers to you in the process.

Use multiple media formats

According to Wyzowl, 88% of people were convinced to buy a brand's product or service after watching a video. This proves that using video content in your marketing increases your chances of getting customers.

You can also explore other content formats, such as blogs and white papers if you're aiming to attract B2B buyers.

Essentially, you must understand the audience you want to reach and the kind of content that is most effective for them. This could mean experimenting with videos, images, podcasts, and other types of digital content in your marketing campaign.

Measure and improve marketing efforts

 

If you advertise your business on a billboard, how would you know the number of people who saw it and bought something for you? 

Tracking the performance of traditional marketing activities can be difficult. But with digital marketing, you not only see the number of people you reach but can also track how people interact with your business through clicks, comments, and more. 

Being able to measure the performance of your marketing campaign means you can learn what works and doesn’t and make the necessary adjustments.

Save money

Digital marketing has a number of advantages over traditional marketing, one of which is the ability to achieve better results while spending less money.

Traditional marketing techniques like television advertisements might not be the ideal choice if you have a limited budget. You could spend a lot of money without getting the desired outcome.

But digital platforms like social media or search engines let you promote your business to your target audience and track the returns on investment.

Types of digital marketing

There are different types of digital marketing available, and we recommend combining a few in your marketing strategy for the best results.

To help you identify the best types of digital marketing for your business, we'll take a look at the 5 main types.

1. Content Marketing

As the name implies, content marketing is the type of marketing that focuses on creating and sharing digital content, such as images, videos, and texts, to spark a target audience's interest in a product or service. 

Content marketing is a long-term marketing strategy that involves providing valuable content to attract, educate and build a relationship with customers. The goal is to get the target audience to trust a brand and eventually become paying customers.

Depending on your business and target audience, the channels you can use for content marketing include:

• Blogs: Having a blog is an easy and affordable way to drive traffic to your website. Writing and publishing high-quality articles on your blog or another blog in the same industry can help your business rank higher on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) making it easier for your target audience to find you.

• Newsletters: With newsletters, you can reach your customers directly through personalized content about your business. You can share blog articles, special offers, company updates, and other information through your newsletters. Newsletters help you capture leads in the form of subscribers and convert them to customers.

• Ebooks: Ebooks are text (and image) materials people can download to read about your business or a related topic. You can ebooks to build credibility and generate leads by requiring readers to submit their contact information before accessing them.

• Whitepapers: Similar to ebooks, whitepapers are in-depth reports on a specific topic or industry trend. Whitepapers involve data-based research that helps to introduce your business and show your expertise to potential customers and investors.

• Infographics: If you’re looking for a more engaging way to present data to your audience, infographics are the go-to. And since they’re easy to read and share, you can include them in your content marketing to promote brand awareness. 

• Videos: Video content allows you to show the human side of your business with the faces, voices, and emotions of your team and customers. You can share information and testimonials in video format to make people feel connected to your business.

• Audios: Audio marketing is another way to connect with your audience on an emotional level. You can explore different forms of audio content, from podcasts to audio ads, to create brand awareness and promote your product or service.

• Webinars: Webinars are online events that allow you to interact with your audience directly rather than through comments on social media posts. With webinars, you can also get feedback about your business and learn how to improve customer experience.

2. Social Media Marketing 

Social media marketing is the type of digital marketing that makes use of social media platforms to promote your business, engage with your target audience, and acquire new customers. Social media offers a range of opportunities for small businesses to thrive in this digital age. They are free to use and perfect for businesses with low marketing budgets.

Social media enables you to build awareness around your brand, engage your target audience, drive traffic to your website, generate leads and sales, and build relationships with customers and business partners.

Social media channels you can use in promoting your business include:

• Facebook

• Instagram

• TikTok

• Twitter

• LinkedIn

• WhatsApp

• Telegram

• Snapchat

• Pinterest

Your business doesn’t need to be on every social media platform. The platforms you use will depend on your target audience. For instance, if you’re a fashion business, your target audience will most likely be found on Instagram. But if you’re a financial consultant, you may want to focus on LinkedIn.

While we recommend focusing on a few platforms to maintain efficiency, this doesn’t mean you should limit yourself to one or two platforms. As you progress, it could be a great idea for you to explore more platforms for new opportunities.

3. Email Marketing 

Email marketing, put simply, means promoting your business through emails. But it’s not just about opening your email app and sending a message to a bunch of email addresses. You need a proper strategy and execution to succeed at email marketing.

About half of consumers have said they enjoy receiving weekly emails from brands they like, so you don’t have to worry about overwhelming your customers with too many emails.

Email marketing is an effective way for you to communicate directly with potential and existing customers, promote your content, product, or service, share company news and events, and direct people to your website or a landing page. 

Source: Statista

Your email marketing campaign can include the following types of emails:

• Welcome email for new customers or subscribers.

• Follow-up emails for website visitors who did not complete a purchase.

• Newsletters with tips, special offers, and updates to nurture leads.

• Seasonal promotions and loyalty rewards.

If you’re considering email marketing, segmenting your audience and testing different types of email content can help to increase your success rate.

4. Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the technique of setting up and improving your website to make it easy for search engines like Google and Bing to recognize when people search for keywords related to your business. SEO gives your website and blog a chance to get found by your target audience for free. 

There are three methods to implement SEO on your website or blog. They are:

• On-page SEO: The process of improving the content on the pages of a website is known as on-page SEO. It involves writing high-quality content, using relevant keywords and phrases, and having the right title tags and meta descriptions.

• Off-page SEO: Off-page SEO focuses on activities that take place away from your website to improve your ranking on SERPs. Off-page SEO includes brand mentions, social media shares, backlinks, and other actions that build your authority with search engines.

• Technical SEO: Technical SEO aims at properly structuring your website, speeding up page load times, and other technical procedures that enable search engines to crawl and index your website's content.

One thing you must note about SEO is that the results take time but the benefits are worth it.

5. Paid Advertising

More people online means more businesses online. And if you’re depending only on organic reach for your marketing, it can be hard to reach your target audience. But with paid advertising, your small business can get in front of new customers. 

Paid advertising has four main categories - social media, search engine, display, and influencer advertising. You can place your ads on relevant channels or work with influencers to promote your business to their community. You can set your own budget, but note that most platforms have a minimum amount you can spend on your ads. And influencers usually set their own fees, so we recommend finding influencers within your budget - or negotiating. 

• Social Media Advertising: Popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn allow you to place paid ads to promote your business. You can set your target audience, goal, budget, and more to get your desired results. Depending on the platform you use, you can explore different ad formats, such as images, videos, texts, carousels, and stories.

• Search Engine Advertising: If you’re a small or new business, it can take a long time for your website to show up at the top of SERPs. Placing ads on search engines can help to speed up the results. With Google ads options, for example,  you can drive traffic to your online store when people search for products related to your business.  

• Display Advertising: Display advertising uses visual elements, such as images and videos, to advertise a product or service on relevant websites and apps. You can place display ads using Google Display Network to find new audiences and retarget website visitors.

• Influencer Marketing: Your target customers follow various people on social media. Some of these people have thousands or millions of followers. You can work with them to create and post content about your business. This type of advertising is known as Influencer Marketing.

How to create an effective digital marketing plan

If you’re still wondering whether or not investing in digital marketing is worth the effort, consider these statistics:

• The ROI for email marketing is $36 for every $1 spent. (Litmus)

• Facebook has the best ROI on social media ads at 26%. (HubSpot)

• Influencer marketing delivers an average ROI of $5.2 for every $1 spent. (Influencer Marketing Hub)

There is sufficient evidence that digital marketing can open your small business to growth opportunities.

We’ll show you how you can create an effective plan to get the most out of digital marketing.

Identify your goal

When creating a digital marketing plan, it’s important to start by identifying the goal you want to achieve. Your goal determines the focus of your campaign. For example, if your goal is to build brand awareness on social media, your campaign will focus on reaching new audiences. However, if you want to drive sales, your campaign may focus on retargeting engaged audiences.

Whatever your goal is, ensure it meets these requirements:

• Your goal must be clear and specific - e.g. build brand awareness.

• The results must be measurable - e.g. increase followers by 17% in 2 months.

• You must be able to reach your goal - e.g. get 1,000 followers in 6 months, not 10,000 followers in 6 days. 

• Your goal should focus on the current needs of your business. 

• You must have enough time to achieve your goals.

Define your target audience

Your target audience is the people you intend to reach with your marketing campaign. Who your target audience is will influence the type of content you create and which channels you promote your business on. 

When your target audience is properly defined, your ad gets shown to the right audience. Otherwise, your budget could get wasted on people who are not interested in your business.

To define your target audience, identify attributes such as their age, interests, location, and purchasing behaviour. For example, if you sell healthy drinks, your target audience may be adults living near your location who are interested in fitness.

Choose your marketing channels

As we stated earlier, your business doesn’t have to be on every platform. So you need to choose which ones you’ll use for your marketing campaign. Identify which platforms your ideal customers use and tailor your campaign to attract them.

Set your budget

Your marketing budget is based on the cost of advertising and how much you are willing to spend. By setting a budget, you can make sure your money is going to the right channels and that you're never spending more than you can comfortably afford.

With your budget, you can track how much it costs to achieve your desired result and how long it could take.

Conduct keyword research

Including keywords in your marketing campaign helps your business get found by people who are searching keywords. Conduct keyword research to discover which keywords and phrases your target audience is searching for. 

Using keywords related to your business and industry will help you show up on search engines and social media. You can make a list of high-performing keywords and explore opportunities with variations.

Create engaging content

After defining the goal, target audience, and other aspects of your campaign, the next step is to create engaging content. Your target audience should be at the centre of your content creation process. You want to create content they will be interested in reading, watching, or listening to.

Here are a few tips to help you create better content:

• Create and share content on topics your target audience cares about.

• Use catchy headlines that tell what the rest of your content is about.

• Identify the best formats for each platform.

• Post when your target audience is the most active.

• Engage with your audience to learn more about what they would like to see.

• Include the specific actions you want your audience to take.

• Share content that shows the human side of your brand.

Track and improve performance

You get better at digital marketing from experience. While your campaign is in progress, track and analyse the performance to see if it’s going as intended. If your campaign is set to run for a month, you can check the performance at the end of each week.

The metrics you consider when tracking the success of a campaign depend on your goal. Common metrics include website visits, engagement rate, cost per click, and conversion rate.

Learning how your marketing campaign performs over time will inform your decision to keep it running, make some changes, or stop it entirely. You also learn how to create better campaigns in the future.

Wrapping it up

If you are already implementing digital marketing in your business, you may have experienced some challenges or noticed areas that could be improved on. Finding new customers is one of the biggest challenges facing small businesses. 

To get customers, you need to be active and consistent online. But it’s difficult to pay attention to your online presence when you’re also managing the other aspects of your business. 

Because digital marketing is a lot of work, we advise you to work with someone who can help you overcome the challenges you face. 

To get started, reach out to us today.