You launched a small business. What's next? You need to attract customers and make your business recognizable. Here's Marketing comes into play.

Traditional marketing models have been known for a while and include, inter alia, market research, analysis of the product range, strategies of promotion, etc.

In contrast, the explosion of the digital world requires marketers to pursue an integrated approach to promoting a company on all possible platforms, combining online and offline communication channels, using scientific methods, and the advantages of modern technologies.

In this post, we'll describe 5 universal approaches to Digital Marketing for small businesses effective in the majority of niches.

Should Small Businesses Invest in Digital Marketing?

As you will see later, the possibilities of digital marketing are almost endless. Its undeniable advantage is the ability to reach customers during their daily activities – Social Media scanning, reading blogs, online shopping, and more.

Particularly such natural techniques let clients interact with your messages in a non-invasive way that does not interfere with what is important to them. User-friendly inbound marketing can bring many long-term business benefits, which is proven in practice.

The Other Key Benefits of Digital Marketing Include

Global Reach

unlike traditional approaches, digital marketing is not tied to any geographic area. This gives you the ability to market and sell to customers who live in a different province or country. Of course, you can focus on a local market, but if you need to go global, digital marketing allows it.

Low Cost of Entry

achieving global reach through traditional channels comes at a high cost. Thanks to the use of digital marketing tools, the same effects can come with a small investment of time and money.

Measurable return on investment: maximizing your profits requires an accurate estimate of your ROI. In traditional marketing, measuring ROI can be difficult or even impossible. Digital marketing gives you full insight into the performance of each campaign in real-time.

Better Targeting

digital marketing allows you to target your efforts to very specific potential customers. By engaging customers from a specific geographic location, industry, or social media channel, companies have a much better chance of reaching the right audience.

Flexibility

unlike long-term, traditional marketing campaigns, progressive businesses can adapt their activities on the fly. Any shifts of the external factors or internal requests can immediately change the course and direction of the chosen strategy without the threat of irreversible losses.

Immediate Connection

nowadays, customers usually search for information online and check recommendations before making a purchase. The first step in this process usually starts with the search engine and allows your company to connect with customers through a mouse click.

Building Relationships

clients want to interact with companies on their own terms. Effective activities on social media can build long-term and loyal relationships with current and potential customers.

Insights

Collecting all the marketing data, analyzing, and reporting is a chance to get insights for improving the entire business growth. For example, you can have a data warehouse to store all the marketing records. Using BigQuery data import,  you'll be able to gather the information from various sources and keep it in one place.

5 Still Effective Digital Marketing Strategies

Depending on your needs and business goals, there are countless ways to conduct digital marketing. However, there is no single strategy that will work for all companies so you better consider them all first when planning the future launch.

Fortunately, the list of strategies below remains efficient for the majority of small businesses. Let's describe them in detail.

Social Media Marketing

For small businesses, the easiest way to reach customers is to deal with social media that every person uses today. However, the type of social media, as well as the way to use it, depends on the type of business.

For some companies, keeping in touch with their customers directly on Twitter is the main part of success. For other businesses, engaging customers with visually appealing posts on Instagram is the approach of choice.

Other businesses, such as local sneaker stores, may succeed in using social media for giveaways, discount notifications, etc. The most important aspect of social media is using it to strengthen your customer base for repeat sales.

Trying to spread out on a wide network of social media platforms can be difficult for small business owners with limited resources. Instead, consider which online channels are most useful to your business and the customers you're trying to reach. Do you direct your offer to professional clients? LinkedIn can be the perfect tool. Do you produce craft goods? Instagram may be the best solution to gain followers and boost sales.

Outcome: social media is effective and easy to try. just find your social media platform.

SEO

This part of marketing is critical to a small business. It gives you the chance to compete with established stores, mature brands, larger companies by being more visible in search engine results. Since people use the search engine to find products, it's important for your business to rank high in search results for words related to what you're selling.

Professional Search Engine Optimization can help your website rank higher on search engine result pages through methods such as keyword and volume research, building internal links, or optimizing the content to obtain relevant, high-quality information.

Location-based marketing includes optimizing your website for search results but also integrates the search engine maps feature. This is especially true with Google, where your business can be listed with maps and address details, giving potential customers what they need to visit your facility. You can also provide your phone number and website address.

Outcome: SEO is arguably the best way for emerging businesses to compete with known brands

PPC

Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing is the display of online advertisements where the business only pays when the ad is clicked. There are many different types of online ads, including those that appear at the top and sidelines of a search, or ads that appear in mobile apps or while browsing the web.

Some of the benefits of PPC marketing are that the business only pays for the results, and you can target ads to a specific geographic location. Although pricing is primarily based on keyword competition – popular keywords with high competition will cost more.

It's unlikely that PPC should be the only strategy you should use. But it's beneficial to combine it with SEO and content marketing. It's a sort of enhancer. For narrowed niche, when you're not competing for high-volume keywords, PPC can show good and quick results.

Outcome: don't skip PPC because it's a great way to enhance your general marketing performance

Email Marketing

This form of marketing can be critical to the success of your small business. This approach is underestimated now. Basically, email marketing is about promoting your products and services digitally – through newsletters, updates, promotions, or general news – and it's about creating a list of your current and potential customers. This list of names and email addresses is made up of people who are interested in your business and you know it's true because they have subscribed to the list themselves.

They may have been offered future product updates as well as coupons for registration. As this list grows, it becomes more valuable. Many marketers consider this a very important long-term marketing strategy for small businesses.

Also, email marketing is automation-friendly. It makes not super time-consuming. Using automation tools for small businesses, you're able to leverage your email marketing efforts.

Outcome: email marketing is a good option for gaining loyal customers and increasing sales

Crowd Marketing

A big part of digital marketing is creating a consistent online presence, whether it's your website or one of your social media channels. Crowd attitude can be described with the ‘whisper marketing’ idea – building a brand through positive publicity, provoking conversations, advising and commenting, helping potential customers, etc.

All this will not strain your budget, on the phase of your business development when a positive image can be invaluable. For example, if you're launching a taxi booking service, with the high competition on the market, good reviews from customers will help you to compete with big players in a local market.

You can widen your online presence with word of mouth. The best way to promote your brand is to let customers do this.

Many potential customers use opinion portals, reading testimonials about the products or services you offer. That is why your presence on such websites is part of a marketing strategy that really works.

Outcome: crowd marketing let the target audience of yours know about your business

How to Choose a Marketing Strategy for Your Business?

Each professional marketing strategy requires a well-thought-out and meticulous plan, but in the case of small businesses, it is of particular importance due to budget constraints.

The choice of a strategy primarily depends on the specifics of your business, the field of activity and the tasks that you set, ways of solving them, and the audience.

All of the above is part of the lean canvas model, indispensable for small businesses. Having the content of your product at hand makes it easier to make further plans for its promotion.

Take a look at your customers and identify where they spend their time online. Your digital customer base may have a different target audience than what you are used to. Your budget will be an important factor when deciding which digital marketing strategies to choose. Don't be afraid to try a few different methods when deciding which digital marketing strategy is best for your business. Take a look at the results to see which methods are most effective for your customer base.

Last but not least, you should review your marketing plan at least once a year to ensure it is up to date and continues to meet your business needs.

Wrap up

If you want to attract the attention of your clients when preparing a strategy for a small company in the field of marketing, remember that gaining an edge in the industry requires you to propose something new, consistent and prudent.

Try networking, deepen your brand publicity, investigate some non-obvious promotion methods. In this way, your limitations will become your advantage – so … go for it!

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