Why should you care and invest in digital marketing? Because, you are running a business, period. It’s a big-big world full of opportunities, but there are competitors as well.
With this post today, I am specifically going to stretch out on some essential digital marketing strategies that every small business should take advantage of. And here’s this awesome blog The24HourMarketer that covers digital marketing guides for beginners.
To cope up with the competition, you need to reach out to your potential customers and reaching out to your audience is called marketing. And if your customers can’t recognize your business at the right time, how can you expect your business to grow? Just be available in front of their eyes whenever they are in need of your product or services.
To make your e-commerce website thrive, you need conversions. Visitors to your website are of no use unless they purchase your products or services. Online visual merchandising is a way to use the tools at your disposal to create those conversions on a more consistent basis. Online visual-merchandising is the process of making products visually appealing to potential shoppers, such as in stores when products are deliberately placed at eye level or arranged in a certain way. You can use the visual elements of your website in the same way. Using clear photographs or videos of your products in use helps to attract clients. Placing images of related products on the same page can also encourage visitors to buy multiple products.
With this post today, I am specifically going to stretch out on some essential digital marketing strategies that every small business should take advantage of.
1) Have a Business Website
It’s 2018, when even your grandparents are on Facebook, how can you miss on your business website?Before going any further down to digital marketing, you will need a professional website. A professionally made website adds credibility to your business, expands its reach and also make it discoverable on the internet. Suppose if Amazon were a brick and mortar store in New York, how would they sell something to someone in California?
2) Google My Business
When you are in need of a new salon, what you did? You Google “salons near me”. And what you see on the top of the search results are Google Business Listings. You should sign-up for your business account at GMB and get it listed. Local businesses are the ones that can make the most of it.
And what’s interesting about this, is that it doesn’t cost a dime.
3) Influencer Marketing with Local Bloggers/Vloggers
When you can’t afford to get endorsements from Kardashians or Jenners, local influencers comes to your rescue.
73% of marketers say that they have allocated budget for influencer marketing – Forrester 2015.
Look out for some local influencers, bloggers, or Vloggers who are talking relevant to your business. Get in contact with them and brainstorm a way to create an angle of promoting your business in their videos or content.
We all know that word of mouth is the best marketing channel for any business to grow exponentially. Though it is the hardest to achieve medium of marketing. Do you remember that AR (Augmented Reality) based mobile game ‘Pokemon Go’? How exponentially had it grown during that time? All the credit goes to word of mouth marketing they managed to seize their early stages.
Partnering with the right influencer with a proper digital marketing strategy is the key to achieve tremendous goals even with smaller campaigns.
4) Leveraging Facebook Ads
Effective advertising strategies do pay out quickly with proper and well planned paid advertising channels. If your audience does spend time on FB, you should be there in front of their eyes. At the very least use Facebook ads on your retargeting list.
How? If you have a local offline business. Collect your customers’ email and phone numbers for future interaction and marketing offers (obviously, with their opt-in consent) and then upload that list to FB and start an ad targeting only to them. Whether to retain them to your store or to delight them. The other way of utilizing FB ads is to retarget all your website visitors on FB who have visited your website in recent times. The possibilities of utilizing the FB ads are literally endless.
5 ) Search Engine Ads
Underestimating the power of your user’s searches is a “BIG No-No”. If you can predict or research out some of the high conversion intent keywords and search terms that your potential customers made before making a purchase or decision, then trust me it’s worthy to start some Adwords or Bing search ad campaigns to A/B test the conversions.
6) Standalone Mobile App
Everyone is going mobile these days. An average person spent more than 4 hours on the smartphone every day.
If your business can serve your goods or services through an app, then you should definitely consider building it. You don’t need to hire and manage an in-house team of developers. Instead, you can completely outsource your app development. The cost of outsourcing a mobile app development is based on multiple factors like functionality and complexity of the app.
7) Join Local Business Groups on Linkedin, Facebook, and Meetup
Some of the best advice is shared by fellow business people. But where you can find similar minds? Here again, the Internet comes to your rescue; Linkedin isn’t made to share your cat pictures, it’s a pure business networking platform. You can find some of the most active groups on Linkedin related to your business. Join them and start communicating with the community.
Facebook groups are also booming from last 2-3 years since FB degraded the organic reach of pages. Attending local meetups where your potential customer hangout the most are another way to attract some real eyeballs towards your business.
These are some essential internet marketing strategies that I think every business should leverage at the bare minimum. It is very important for every business to include these ideas to improve their company or services, and of course, to survive in the competitive world. It’s also important to find partners like Poplify.com for business support. When you see the ball rolling, just scale it, and add more marketing channels to your arsenal.
Author Bio:
Azman Nabi is a growth marketer by profession with a 4-year track record in growth hacking startups from the ground up. A marketer who believe in overnight successes, but with the overnight of hustles.