Digital marketing is at the heart of most successful businesses in the modern world. While word-of-mouth and using marketing collateral to advertise your products and services are still highly effective methods, nothing beats the efficiency of digital marketing. So, how do you create a winning digital marketing strategy for your small business? The four ideas below are the perfect starting point!
1. Evaluate Your Resources
In other words, assess and strategize first. Before you start adapting other people’s strategies to your business, take a step back and evaluate your resources and what you can realistically afford to do. As a small and medium-sized business, you probably view your marketing as a patchwork effort to try and tap into as many channels as possible with the smallest investment you can get away with. Diversity is key here. Consider improving your website, using social media to promote your services, focus on Search Engine Optimization, and consider giving paid advertising a chance.
2. Maintain a Blog Section on Your Website
When it comes to having a long-term marketing strategy, you need to understand that its backbone is content. If you want to have a powerful and effective strategy, you should focus on content marketing. In simple terms, that means you need to dedicate a blog section and regularly publish useful content to your audience. This is an opportunity to demonstrate your knowledge and experience in your industry by offering sound advice to locals looking for solutions to their problems.
3. Research Your Target Customers Online
As a small business, you probably already feel like you know who your target customers are. Still, if you want to be effective online, you need to go the extra mile and do additional customer research. There are a ton of free sources available, like the Pew Research report on social media, to help you better understand how and where your audience is most engaged online.
4. Set and Track Metrics
Any successful strategy requires you to find measurable metrics to track its success. Yes, digital marketing is not a perfect science, and finding key performance indicators (KPIs) to track progress is difficult but not impossible. If you’ve never done that before, start small and simple. For example, one of your metrics can be the number of followers on your Facebook page or the engagement percentage of your social media posts. Set realistic goals, however humble they may seem, and build on your progress as time goes on.
Stay tuned for our next topic!