Top Digital Marketing Tips for New Small Businesses – Keegan Edwards

Digital marketing has revolutionized the way businesses promote themselves, connect with customers, and drive new business. For small business owners, especially those operating on tight budgets, leveraging effective digital marketing strategies is crucial. These tips are designed to help locally-owned companies, freelancers, and startup founders grow their ideas into larger enterprises without overspending. Let’s dive into the top digital marketing tips that have proven effective for small business owners.

Key Takeaways

• Identify where your target audience spends their time online to focus your marketing efforts effectively.
• Create a digital marketing strategy that is both structured and flexible to adapt to changing market conditions.
• Invest in enhancing your visual marketing capabilities to capture and retain customer attention.
• Expand your mobile marketing efforts to reach customers on their preferred devices.
• Involve your audience in content creation to foster engagement and build community.

1. Know Where Your Audience Hangs Out Online

Whether your audience consists of consumers or business professionals, the number of online channels and communities has expanded. The fact that many people use these channels simultaneously, both as consumers and business professionals, can further complicate the process of finding these targets. Knowing where to find the people you want to speak to is marketing 101.

To develop a successful online marketing strategy, you need to be aware of all the possible locations where your audience hangs out and make the most of technology to better understand why they spend so much time there.

How to Find Where Your Audience Hangs Out Online

• Thoroughly research all channels: You need to understand how each channel is used, what the demographics of those channels are, and why people hang out on them. This can help guide your interactions with that audience, as well as your strategy and content development.
• Leverage technology to deepen insights: There are numerous tools that analyze social media sites, posts, content, and online behavior. These tools can provide valuable insights into your audience’s preferences and habits.

Remember: It’s important to be where your audience of potential customers is today, and where they might be tomorrow. It’s better to be ahead of the curve than behind.

2. Develop a Structured, Yet Flexible, Digital Marketing Strategy

A digital marketing strategy is essential to long-term success. It should provide a clear framework that allows you to implement your B2B marketing strategy and tactics. Everyone needs to know what they are responsible for so that actionable items can be measured and tracked.

Digital marketing is constantly changing due to shifting expectations, trends, and technology. A structured plan offers a strong foundation from which you can adapt as necessary, without losing your focus.

1. Understand Your Target Audience: Before creating marketing campaigns, you must know who you’re talking to. Each business has a target audience — a group of consumers whose needs and preferences match the business’s strengths.
2. Set Clear Goals: Define what success looks like for your business. Whether it’s increasing website traffic, generating leads, or boosting sales, having clear goals will guide your strategy.
3. Choose the Right Channels: Identify where your audience hangs out online and focus your efforts on those platforms.
4. Monitor and Adapt: Regularly review your strategy’s performance and be ready to make adjustments as needed.

In this dynamic landscape, where trends emerge and fade in the blink of an eye, the challenge lies in keeping up and identifying strategies that stand the test of time.

3. Enhance Your Visual Marketing Capabilities

Visual content appeals to both business and consumer audiences. Whether it is images, vertical videos, 360-degree videos, live videos, disappearing stories, or social TV, the demand for visual marketing continues to grow.

This is one of the most engaging ways to connect with your audience, which means it’s critical to incorporate visual marketing for all screen sizes into your digital marketing strategy.

How to Enhance Your Visual Marketing Capabilities

1. Include live video: One visual marketing tool is to use live video when you have something special to share — like a new product or service, or when you are on-site promoting a special event. Make sure you focus on planning and practice before using live video. Also try to keep it under ten minutes, and consider what will interest both your live and replay audiences.
2. Create a YouTube channel: In addition to embedding videos on your website, blog, and social media profiles, you should also consider creating a YouTube channel to reach a broader audience.
3. Experiment with photo and video content: According to HubSpot research, more than 50% of consumers want to see brand videos. Additionally, most social media apps, like Facebook and Instagram, are embracing more visual layouts.

Enhancing your visual marketing capabilities doesn’t have to require a significant investment. With the right strategies, you can produce engaging visual content on a budget.

4. Expand Your Mobile Marketing Efforts

Just looking around you should be a reminder of the importance of mobile marketing. No matter where you go, people are looking at their screens, so make sure that they are looking at your content, website, and digital presence.

Mobile marketing is an excellent way to capture this attentive audience, often without them realizing that they are being marketed to. By using available tools like location tracking and search history, businesses are able to customize their marketing campaigns to mobile users.

How to Expand Mobile Marketing Efforts:

• Look for unique ways to use mobile: Augmented reality mobile technology is on the rise, adding a new dimension to the mobile experience for users. Think about how you could use this technology to immerse your target audience in your product or service so they can see and feel the value of your offer.
• Add cloud-based app capability: With the growth of artificial intelligence, the proliferation of data, and the increased use of cloud-based apps, businesses can offer more personalized and efficient services to their customers.
• Optimize your website for mobile: It’s official — more than half of all searches and almost two-thirds of email opens happen on mobile devices. Your website needs to look professional and polished if you want to land those on-the-go customers.

Mobile marketing is much cheaper than traditional advertising and isn’t overly complicated to set up. You’ll need to start by making sure that every aspect of your own small business website is completely mobile-friendly, from browsing to purchasing. Once that is set, you can begin experimenting with other options, such as location-based ads.

5. Get Your Audience Involved in Content Creation

User-generated content (UGC) deepens engagement because your audience likes to see and share content they’ve made for a brand. It is a cost-effective way to stretch those digital marketing dollars.

Plus, it can increase sales. According to a study by TurnTo Networks, 90% of consumers surveyed believe that user-generated content influences their buying decisions more than promotional emails and search engine results.

How to Generate Audience Content Creation

1. Encourage Reviews and Testimonials: Ask your customers to leave reviews and share their experiences with your products or services.
2. Host Contests and Giveaways: Create contests that require participants to create and share content related to your brand.
3. Feature Customer Stories: Highlight stories from your customers on your website and social media platforms.
4. Create a Branded Hashtag: Develop a unique hashtag for your brand and encourage your audience to use it when sharing content.
5. Engage on Social Media: Actively engage with your audience on social media by liking, sharing, and commenting on their posts.

Involving your audience in content creation not only builds a sense of community but also provides you with a wealth of authentic content that can be used across various marketing channels.

6. Don’t Skip Email Marketing

Email marketing may not feel as exciting as chasing social media virality, but there’s no doubt it’s effective. One study found a 42:1 return on investment for every dollar spent on email marketing. According to CampaignMonitor, email marketing provides an average return on investment of $44 for every $1 spent. This return may grow further because a study by The Radicati Group predicts global email use will increase from 3.8 billion users in 2018 to 4.2 billion by the end of 2022.

To make the most out of email marketing, follow these tips:

1. Use dedicated email marketing tools. Some common options are Hubspot and Mailchimp.
2. Personalize wherever possible. Go beyond “first name/last name” fields to make emails relevant. Think loyalty milestones, personalized discounts, and more.
3. Look outside your business. Know a relevant influencer with a weekly newsletter? Try sponsoring a section in their next issue.

While you’ll want to be careful not to bombard the people who sign up for your email list with too many emails, it is essential to send enough updates to keep your prospects informed and engaged.

Streamlining an email marketing strategy can be hugely important. For example, HubSpot’s metrics improved after streamlining their email marketing approach.

7. Nurture Your Customer Relationship Management Process

With so many channels and tactics to oversee, it’s easy for things to get lost in the mix. If you don’t implement a formal communication strategy with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to effectively manage your leads, you might miss out on potential conversions.

Organizing your customer and prospect data into a CRM platform helps identify more opportunities. It allows you to personalize your digital marketing outreach, track digital marketing tactics, and further segment customers and prospects to deepen engagement. Plus, it’s a powerful tool that should unite and streamline the collaboration between B2B sales and marketing.

How to Develop Your Customer Relationship Process:

1. Build Your Contact List: Using CRM with email marketing is an effective tactic to build loyalty and engage new customers. CRM software can help you collect and store information about your contacts.
2. Roll Out CRM in Phases: Since CRM platforms are powerful, it’s more effective to roll them out in phases. Focus on building out user groups and segments, employing certain features for specific campaigns and tactics individually to better understand the results and insights.
3. Personalize Your Outreach: Email marketing works best when you’re sending personalized, targeted emails. Use your CRM to store information about your leads, prospects, and customers, helping you keep track of customer interactions and identify sales opportunities more effectively.

8. Upcycle Your Marketing Content

You may have come across articles that suggest you recycle marketing content. However, the best way to get more mileage from existing content is to view it more as an upcycling project. These digital marketing terms may appear to mean the same thing at first glance.

This repurposing can lead to more relevant and compelling content — unlike the recycling tactic of cutting and pasting in some new statistics or copying a paragraph from a blog into a social media status update.

How to Upcycle Marketing Content:

• Don’t upcycle content that wasn’t very good the first time around: Be selective about what content you upcycle. If the content didn’t provide solid research and actionable advice the first time around, there isn’t much benefit to leveraging it for future content. Only consider marketing, social, and visual content that has “good bones” to build on with new findings and value-added tips.

Upcycling is a specific form of recycling where you turn existing materials or products into something original and truly unique. Instead of breaking down the materials — or, in this case, marketing content — you find ways to transform it into something that appears completely new and different.

9. Adopt a Performance Mindset

To see measurable results, one of the best online marketing tips for small businesses is to pursue performance marketing. This digital marketing strategy targets particular results, such as direct sales conversions or newsletter sign-ups. The typical arrangement with performance marketing agencies is especially friendly to your bottom line—you only pay them once they meet your specified goals.

Identify where your most significant impact will be. Where is the most prominent blind spot in your marketing prohibiting your growth? Set a performance goal around that one key area, and focus all your resources on the activities and tactics to help you achieve that one goal.

Then, once you’ve made progress in that area, you can expand your efforts or pivot to other initiatives.

• Know your audience.
• Emphasize your value proposition.
• Stay focused on singular goals and objectives.
• Capitalize on short-term plays.
• Double down on what works.
• Understand the power of existing customers.
• Use free promotional tools.
• Create a website to own your online presence.
• Consider blogging to attract prospects to your website.
• Promote yourself on social media.
• Collaborate with influencers to create brand awareness.

Start scrappy. As you scale, seeing ROI sooner rather than later is critical. This will give you the momentum and cash flow toward larger projects, long-term plays, and more sustainable growth models.

10. Utilize Available Digital Marketing Tools

Within digital marketing, there are many tools at your disposal. Consider using content marketing to create videos and blogs that will enrich the quality of your website and optimize it for search engine optimization (SEO) to help with search engine result pages (SERPs). In addition to boosting your organic search results, you can invest in paid search to target consumers searching for keywords related to your business through ads. Finally, assess which social media platforms best complement your target audience.

Here’s a list of marketing tools (some free, some paid) that may be useful:

• SEO Tools: Tools like Google Analytics and SEMrush can help you understand and improve your search engine rankings.
• Content Marketing Tools: Platforms like WordPress and Medium allow you to publish and share high-quality content.
• Social Media Tools: Hootsuite and Buffer can help you manage and schedule your social media posts.
• Email Marketing Tools: Mailchimp and Constant Contact are great for creating and managing email campaigns.
• Paid Advertising Tools: Google Ads and Facebook Ads can help you reach a larger audience through targeted advertising.

In my experience, it’s best to use free promotional tools wherever possible. Only commit to paid tools if you know they will drastically improve existing operations or performance.

Conclusion

In conclusion, digital marketing offers a wealth of opportunities for small businesses to grow and thrive in today’s competitive landscape. By understanding where your audience spends their time online, developing a flexible yet structured marketing strategy, and leveraging various digital channels, you can effectively reach and engage with your target customers. Remember to enhance your visual and mobile marketing efforts, involve your audience in content creation, and never underestimate the power of email marketing. By nurturing your customer relationships and upcycling your content, you can maximize your marketing efforts without overspending. Embrace these tips and watch your small business flourish in the digital age.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are some effective digital marketing tips for small businesses?

Some effective digital marketing tips for small businesses include knowing where your audience hangs out online, developing a structured yet flexible digital marketing strategy, enhancing your visual marketing capabilities, expanding your mobile marketing efforts, getting your audience involved in content creation, and not skipping email marketing.

Why is it important to know where my audience hangs out online?

Knowing where your audience hangs out online is crucial because it allows you to focus your marketing efforts on platforms where your potential customers are most active, thereby increasing your chances of engagement and conversion.

How can I enhance my visual marketing capabilities?

You can enhance your visual marketing capabilities by investing in high-quality images and videos, utilizing graphic design tools, and maintaining a consistent visual brand identity across all digital platforms.

What is the significance of mobile marketing for small businesses?

Mobile marketing is significant for small businesses because a large number of consumers use mobile devices to access information and make purchases. By optimizing your marketing efforts for mobile, you can reach a wider audience and improve user experience.

Why shouldn’t I skip email marketing?

You shouldn’t skip email marketing because it is a cost-effective way to reach your audience directly. It allows you to build relationships, promote your products or services, and keep your customers informed about your business.

What does it mean to upcycle marketing content?

Upcycling marketing content means repurposing existing content into different formats or for different platforms. For example, turning a blog post into a video or an infographic. This helps in maximizing the value of your content and reaching different segments of your audience.