As businesses continue to face cut throat competition, global downturn and massive slump in demand, more than 55 percent of small business owners have found ways to drive sales with digital marketing.
Leveraging proven online marketing options to create their path to prosperity, more small businesses like yours have evolved strategies to thrive and navigate the failed business trap without falling apart.
Unfortunately, in spite of the overwhelming opportunities available for businesses to drive growth using online marketing, most businesses have failed to find a way around it.
To get you started on this journey to drive effortless sales with digital marketing, I have put together this five part strategy to guide and direct you as you build your business.
What is Digital Marketing for Small Business?
Table of Contents
Digital marketing for small business are a set of strategies, ideas and marketing options used by small businesses to drive online visibility, create improved sales and evolve increased business growth for their business.
This form of marketing leverages some top digital channels, online options and tech driven solutions to generate targeted outcomes with a key focus on driving small business growth.
As a small business founder with the sole aim of driving faster outcomes, instead of trying all available options, you want to identify the key digital marketing strategies for small businesses, find ways to implement them for your business and start enjoying the outcomes in no time.
This is exactly what you will learn in this guide.
Requirements for Successful Digital Marketing
To drive sales with digital marketing successfully, there are some key requirements you have to put in place before getting started with your marketing campaign.
These requirements are not only crucial to your success, to a large extent, they will be pivotal in determining the achievement of your outcomes as you get started with your digital journey.
The following are the key requirements…
A Custom Website
Owning or setting up your own website is one of the core requirements of a digital marketing plan that cannot be wished away.
As a business poised to drive sales with digital marketing, before getting started with any marketing campaign, you need a digital space to host your content, direct your traffic or finalize your conversions. And the best way to get started with this is to get a website.
Most experts might tell you that starting a marketing campaign with your social media platform is a good way to go but that option will leave you with a lot of limitations and most often, regrettable outcomes.
For this reason, you want to get your website sorted out first before utilizing the other digital tools to drive sales, visibility and traffic, using your website. You can get a website here.
Quality Content
Digital marketing is driven by content. Be it Email marketing, SEO, Social media marketing etc., it’s not possible to drive sales with digital marketing without high quality content aimed at solving the needs of your target audience.
With advancement in technology, it’s possible to copy and paste content from other platforms while creating your digital campaigns but to create successful outcomes, you need top quality content, targeted at creating consistent results for a specific audience.
This is very crucial because outside its effect on your end users, the quality of your content will also affect its online visibility, the overall outcomes and also its impact on your brand.
Useful, Relevant & Targeted Content
Another important requirement for successful digital marketing is creating a useful, relevant and well-targeted content aimed at driving a specific result for your business.
This is one of the fundamental steps to drive sales with digital marketing because without creating content that is relevant, useful and targeted at a specific audience, it will be really difficult to drive results.
So, before creating any piece of content, Advertising or marketing plan, you want to identify your audience, find out their problems and find a way to use your content to create a solution targeted at this specific audience.
This is the easiest way to drive digital marketing results fast.
Consistency
To drive effective results for your content marketing campaign, you must focus on creating a certain level of consistency with your digital campaign.
Starting with branding; ensure that your overall brand is consistent with your content and every other aspect of your marketing campaign.
And when it comes to content delivery, be it for SEO, email or social media marketing, you want to be sure that you’re consistently delivering the needed content to the right audience at the right time.
Most small businesses have serious issues with maintaining consistency with their marketing. And this is an easy way to fail and end up not making sales with digital marketing.
Components of Digital Marketing for Small Businesses
Digital marketing is wide and diversified. It has different solutions, strategies and options for businesses depending on their size, target market and other variables.
In this guide, we will be discussing below, some of the key components of digital marketing for small businesses and how you can use these to grow your business without lifting a finger.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is one of the most crucial components of digital marketing. Not only does it drive a large chunk of digital marketing, it is the life wire of all the other aspects of digital marketing.
As a business trying to drive sales with digital marketing, learning how to understand and use content marketing to drive sales is one of the important goals you can’t ignore.
Since you’re a small business owner, to get started, learn about your audience, find what matters to them by researching for and understanding their search key words.
Afterwards, find a way to create quality content that will address their needs, based on the data you have. Then using your key words, optimize the content then share them across to your audience either as blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts etc.
And when you’re done, find ways to share and promote these pieces of content across other platforms to reach as much number of your audience as possible.
Social Media Marketing
With almost 5 billion users, over the years, the social media has proven to be a great tool small businesses can use to drive sales with digital marketing.
As one of its key beneficiaries, over the years I’ve leveraged the social media to drive growth and increased business outcomes. And just as this same outcome has been repeated for most businesses, I can say for sure that this can work for your own business as well.
To get started, identify your target audience and the top social media platforms they use. Study the platforms and how it works; create a profile on these platforms and start sharing content and engaging with your audience there.
For starters, you don’t have to target the whole popular social media platforms. Find the key platforms with the best number of your target audience or shoot for the best platforms with the topmost returns on investment for your effort.
Also, keep in mind, effective social media marketing thrives on your ability to not just create and share content but engage with your audience, use authentic storytelling to make your content relatable and then engage client delivered testimonials to boost social proofs.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most significant tools another great tool to drive sales with digital marketing for small businesses, organically.
As a very useful conversion tool, email marketing has enabled small businesses to create a direct one on one virtual contact with their clients, leads and potential clients via their mails.
Outside using email marketing to create sales, you can also use it to build robust business relationships with existing and potential clients.
This improves their likeness for your brand, builds trust and increases their knowledge of what your business is all about this thus increasing the likeliness of subscribers to patronize your business.
Email marketing thrives on valuable content. Using newsletters for example, you can update your subscribers with relevant and useful content, your latest product, keep them posted with your business activities or get them to sign up for upsells or upcoming product or services.
Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing provides a good option for small businesses who are not willing to start from the scratch, to drive sales with digital marketing, using influencers with widespread audience and social media influence.
As a small business with extra cash spare, you can start with targeting influencers in your niche. This can be influencers from mid to top level range, depending on your budget.
Where you don’t have a specific budget for influencers, you can work on creating a partnership where the influencer benefits from your product or services, in return for the needed exposure.
The good thing about influencer marketing is that it allows you to key into already established audiences without having to start from scratch. However, in some cases, getting to measure the actual deliverables might be tricky.
PPC Advertising
Pay Per Click advertising provides an option where you get to drive sales with digital marketing by advertising your business using services like Google advertising, Bing, Social Media Advertising etc. and paying those companies based on the number of clicks generated by the ads.
It’s one of the most popular, fastest and sometimes best ROI delivering strategies used by businesses to drive sales.
When set up well, PPC advertising can generate real time outcomes, faster than most other digital marketing strategies. However, depending on the niche, it might demand a great deal of budgetary allocation.
For businesses seeking to create faster outcomes while building up organic marketing, using PPC advertising can effectively get you started on the journey to drive sales with digital marketing.
SEO Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a non-negotiable marketing strategy for businesses seeking to drive organic growth online.
It is one of the most sustainable marketing options that businesses can use to deliver consistent growth outcomes.
As a small business that wishes to get a more sustained visibility and web driven sales, you want to optimize your website for visibility, optimize your content for both search engine and end users and then get your social media and other platform all optimized.
While search engine optimization will most likely take a longer time in some cases, overall, it’s one of the most profitable digital marketing options that will deliver outcomes successfully.
Benefits of Digital Marketing for Small Businesses
Now that you’ve read about the best digital marketing options for businesses, if you’re still considering whether to jump on using digital marketing to drive business growth or not, the following are the key benefits of digital marketing that should spur you.
Drives Growth
Digital marketing drives growth. For the past few years, it has become one of the key growth drivers for businesses. This is why you’re seeing an increasing demand for some specific digital skills.
Increases Visibility
Using digital marketing strategies like SEO, Social Media Marketing, PPC Advertising etc., most small businesses have been able to amplify their sales in many ways and you can do the same.
Builds Trust
Creating, posting and engaging with your audience using channels like social media, blog posts, emails etc. is a great way to build trust and likability for your brand. Doing this properly can lead to improved sales outcomes.
Improves ROI
With a robust digital marketing in place, most businesses tend to gain improved returns on investment over a certain period of time. Even though it might be slow in the initial stages, over time, it usually pays off in terms of improved ROIs.
How to Create Successful Digital Marketing Campaign
To get to really drive sales with digital marketing, you have to use some of get started the right way. The following are key things to put in place before starting a digital marketing campaign:
Know Your Audience
Get to know your target audience clearly before getting started. Find out about their needs, preferences, and online behavior and then use these data to create a strategy that will deliver on outcomes.
Leverage Local Insights
Digital Marketing might be universal but to get specific results in certain regions, industries and niches, you have to leverage local insights to build a custom strategy based on needs.
For example if you’re building a strategy for people in Nigeria, consider using the localized approach. This will lead you to pay attention to the cultural nuances, local trends and geographical preferences.
Consistency is Important
As much as possible, you must stay consistent with your online presence, content creation, and engagement to build trust, credibility and consistent outcomes.
Engage Data-Driven Decisions
Don’t make decisions based on personal preferences. Engage the use of analytics to measure the impact of your digital marketing efforts and make data-driven decisions based on those.
Adapt, Innovate, and Repeat
The digital landscape is ever-changing. Be ready to adapt to new technologies, platforms, and trends. Be ready to keep staying focused on your goals until you create the expected outcomes.
Final Words
In conclusion, as a small business it’s possible to drive sales with digital marketing using the strategies you just learned today but one thing you have to do is to create a strategy that is consistent with your goals, your needs and the target market.
Keep in mind to adapt your marketing strategies to meet up with changing trends, audience preferences and real time market realities. And finally, do not be scared to try new approaches until you find what works for you, at every given time.
Finally, you can get started to learn about digital marketing by joining our digital marketing academy here. You can also reach out to us to get you started on your journey here.
Now, it’s your turn. What are your biggest struggles with digital marketing? Drop your comments below.
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