Digital Marketing Strategies
For any small business, online presence is now needed as their most important Marketing initiative. Almost 80% of shoppers go search online before contacting a business. If you’re not actively marketing your business online in 2018, then you’re missing out on many potential customers. When it comes to establishing an online presence, a website for your business is the first step to start with. Research show that websites for small businesses help increase the turnover by 45–60%. With over 1.5 billion websites on the world wide web today – how you are going to reach your potential customers? That’s where digital marketing strategies come into the picture.
Digital marketing is the marketing of products or services using digital technologies, mainly on the Internet, but also including mobile phones, display advertising, and any other digital medium.
An effective digital marketing strategy is crucial for the small business to grow those of which may not be able to afford large budget on marketing.
The essential digital marketing strategies are explored here in this article.
SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization.
It is the process of optimizing your website to rank as highly as possible in search engines so that your website comes up on the first page when your potential customer searches. Google is by far the most used and important search engine to focus on for SEO purposes.
Google recommends the following to get better rankings in their search engine:
- Make pages primarily for customers, not for search engines.
- Create a useful, information-rich site.
- Use keywords to create descriptive, human-friendly URLs.
Keywords are the most important SEO element for every search engine, they are what search entries are matched against. Choosing the right keywords related to your business to optimize for is the most important step to a successful SEO.
To rank high in Google
- The website should be secured
- Mobile friendly fast loading website
- Good quality content
- Have your keywords in the URL
- Keywords in header titles
- Good meta description
- Optimised images
- Many backlinks
- Internal links
For free SEO related tools please check out my Link Library.
Content Marketing
Content is King in Digital Marketing. Today, content marketing has taken the web by storm and almost every major corporation has content marketing, either by blog, online magazine, e-book or online videos. By positioning your content as a helpful resource to buyers, it becomes a valuable lead generation tactic.
For small businesses – easy, affordable and doable content marketing can be done through blogging. By producing quality, engaging, search engine friendly and strategically driven blog articles you will reach more customers. Websites with Blog bring more traffic than the websites without a blog. A buyer always wants to know what is your advice/opinion on the product or service you sell. By writing blog articles you are showing your expertise/authority over the product or service you offer.
A good content marketing strategy enhances the visibility of your website over the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing.
My favorite tools to use for content marketing are:
- Google Keyword Planner
- Google Analytics
- Feedly
- Quora
- Buzzsumo
- Hubspot’s Blog Ideas Generator
- Canva
- Powtoon
- Pixabay
- CoSchedule Headline Analyzer
- SEMrush
- Facebook Insights etc.
Need more guidance in this area? Please get in touch with me. I can help you to come up right Blog Topics for your business.
Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing – you can not truly digitally market your business without utilizing Social Media.
In Malaysia, there are over 22 million active social media users – which is 71% of total population in Malaysia.Just imagine the potential of those many people who are on social media, on average of up to 3 hours a day.
Whatever business you do, first identify on which social media channels your target audience use frequently. Based on that, build your profile, promotions on those media. Flyers and brochures are not going to help you much in today’s online world. Your active presence and contribution in social media brings awareness to your brand, and engage customers.
Word of mouth is the most powerful form of advertising, and Social Media is the online marketplace where people are talking and sharing! That means more likes and shares you have on social media, the more visibility your business will achieve.
Popular Social Media in Malaysia.
- YouTube
Tips for your social media activities
- Regularly post articles, testimonials, and photos your audience want to see to create engagement. Your customers need to see your business multiple times before they ACT!
- In your posts tag people, you think important to build connections as tagging is forced share.
- Also, use relevant #hashtags which helps for searching but try to keep it under 4.
Still, there are so many other factors like the time you post, the frequency of your posts, which all play a huge role. Mind-boggling? Talk to me… I can help your business grow with proven Social Media Marketing techniques.
Paid Advertisement
Unlike SEO and content marketing, with paid advertising, you can start generating new sales as soon as you set up and run paid advertisement campaigns. In most cases setting up an advert takes less than an hour. Online advertisement is a billion dollar industry also very attractive because it’s measurable.
Paid advertising has few categories.
One is pay-per-click (PPC) includes Google AdWords, Facebook and Twitter advertising among other social and digital platforms.
Next is pay-per-impression (PPI) or cost-per-impression (CPM) which is the measurement of the cost that one will pay when their ad is shown per one thousand impressions.
Another popular category is display ad, also known as a banner ad, is an online paid advertising that is a designed image or a photo and copy. They tend to stand out very noticeably. Clicking on the image will take the viewers to the corresponding landing page.
Google AdWords is Google’s online service where companies pay to have their website ranked at the top of a search results page, based on keywords. Google AdWords is an obvious choice for many businesses. They offer display and text ads in association with highly targeted keywords.
When it comes to social media platforms, Facebook dominates the paid ads market worldwide followed by Linkedin then twitter.
Retargeting
Retargeting (also known as remarketing) can also be a very effective digital marketing strategy. This works if your site has at least 5000 visitors a month.
Technically, retargeting is cookie-based technology, that uses Javascript code. This code creates a list of people who visit your site by placing anonymous retargeting “cookies” in their browsers. The code will not affect your site’s performance.
The common goals for retargeting are to increase awareness of a brand and increase conversions.
Conclusion
Digital marketing works for any business regardless of B2B or B2C. With digital marketing, you can measure the ROI (Return On Investment) of any aspect of your marketing efforts.
Overall, to stay relevant in today’s 21st Century economy, you need to take advantage of everything you can, with Digital Marketing being an extremely useful tool that needs to be fully utilized.
Ready to embark on a digital marketing journey? Contact me to help you.
The post The Minimalist Guide to Digital Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses appeared first on Slices To Share.
