You’ve built a brand and you’ve built a website, now what? You’ve heard about digital marketing, but what is it all about really? In short, digital marketing encompasses the work you do and systems you have in place for people to find your business online. There are many parts to digital marketing, including everything from Google Adwords, writing blogs for your website, creating social media content, email marketing, and SEO. Each of these is available in your marketing toolbox, and when used together efficiently will drive traffic to your website, help convert leads or sales, and increase brand awareness to your target audience.
Here are our 5 tips and tricks to make the most of your digital marketing strategy as a small business owner.
Leverage Email Marketing
Email marketing has the highest return on investment for small businesses. This is because almost everyone, no matter their age, checks their email. But in order for your email marketing to be as effective as it can be, your emails need to be thoughtfully crafted and engaging.
Start off by building a reliable email list by capturing emails through your website, past customer base or social media following. Create content that provides value and fulfills a particular need to your audience. Pay special attention to your subject lines and preview text as they act as hooks into your email and increase open rates. Lastly, make sure you’re writing your email like a real person – be conversational, relevant, and build your copy around a key action that you want your reader to take.
Have a visible social media presence
Next to your website, social media platforms are a crucial tool for building brand awareness in 2021. And while keeping up on social media can be tough, it’s important. Social media humanizes your brand, builds brand trust, helps your brand stay at the top of your audience’s mind, helps your brand stay relevant, increases website traffic, generates leads, and sooooo much more.
But beware! Only enlist in the relevant social media networks that you can actually upkeep. It looks bad to have a spot of dead presence on the internet. Instead develop a good strategy for one or two networks that your audience actually uses and work on actually doing a good job in managing them.
One great tool when it comes to making online content for social platforms is Canva. It has lots of great templates that you can customize and make your own, even if you know nothing about layout or what fonts should go together. They’ve even added templates for Instagram Reels, social media’s latest (and greatest) digital marketing method.
Use SEO to its fullest
As you start off your journey in digital marketing, make sure you are prioritizing your SEO (search engine optimization). SEO includes a wide range of tactics that you can implement to make your website position higher on search results. One of the best ways you can increase your SEO standing is good user experience design.
Users prefer sites with a great page experience. It’s as simple as that. Prioritizing user experience means that users are more likely to stay engaged on your site, you’ll have more on-page time, higher conversion rates, lower bounce rates, and increased brand loyalty.
If you want to check your site’s current user experience stats, check out google’s core web vitals metrics to see your website speed, responsiveness, and visual stability – all core components of good user experience.
Start Blogging
An effective digital marketing strategy always revolves around getting your audience to your website. The more people you get to your website, the more likely it will be that they convert. A well-written, informative blog can really help with this.
A blog creates relevant content for your website’s visitors, it gives people more in depth knowledge of what you offer, draws people into your site, and helps you answer your audience’s questions which might be left unanswered by your website. As a bonus, blogs also help your SEO. Google loves updated content and posting fresh content on your site is one simple way you can stand out from your competitors. Not only are you making sure people are drawn to your site with interesting content, you’re also making sure that you’re the first one to show up when they google a question or problem that your business might be able to solve.
Use Google’s free tools for tracking your traffic!
Google has a number of business tools besides its search engine that can be super valuable for your digital marketing.
Google my Business is an absolute must for all businesses. Google my Business gives you a free online listing for your business when users search you on Google or Google Maps (you’ve probably even already seen it pop up when you’ve googled a location or company). Google my Business tells your audience who you are, how to reach you, and what others think about you. It also provides you with information about the people who have searched for your business, whether they visited your site, clicked your phone button, or checked your address on google maps, so you can understand your audience even better!
Another great tool we recommend from Google is Google Ads (previously known as Google Adwords). Google ads is an online advertising tool that allows you to easily build ads and launch them globally with the click of a button. The main reason why these ads are so great is that they serve your ads to people while they are already actively searching for your product or service or for keywords that relate to your product or service. All you have to do is tell Google what you want to achieve with your ad, where you want to direct your advertisement, what your message is, and what your budget is and you’ll get an ad cleverly targeted towards people who already want your product!
Other powerful tools from Google we recommend are: Google Search Console and Google Analytics
No matter what industry you’re in, having an authentic online presence is a must for your business’ success. Figure out what your business and brand’s true core values are and show them to the world. You’ll end up attracting a more relevant audience base to your business with your genuine brand storytelling – so not only will you be reaching more people, you’ll be reaching more people who will actually listen and engage with you.
These tricks are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to establishing a good digital marketing strategy. If you’re interested in learning more about how you can improve your digital marketing, send us an email and we can see how we can help!