Marketing is a business practice that involves identifying, predicting, and meeting your business goals. Effective marketing strategies help businesses isolate the best way to improve their online presence to generate revenue. This chapter will discuss how digital marketing services can help market your small business and reach your marketing goals by discussing social media strategy, search engine optimization (SEO), video content, and building the perfect business website.
To market your small business online, it is important to create a complete online presence on multiple platforms. This is called omnichannel marketing, which is the opposite of channeling all of your efforts in one place. To create an effective digital campaign. One way that you can achieve this goal would be by creating an effective message on multiple social media channels. The key is posting content that will keep people engaged and make them want to take action by following you on Facebook, LinkedIn, Tiktok, and eventually visiting your website for more information.
Here are the main topics of this chapter, if you want to jump ahead.
Before I go over the 4 most important strategies to market your business, let me explain why having a strong web presence is the key to marketing your business.
The Benefits of an Online Presence To Market Your Business
I often get asked by small business owners which marketing service should they focus on to get the best results. And my answer is always the same, all of them. Or at least every small business owner should focus on the 4 marketing services outlined in this chapter.
If your website can’t convert leads into customers, what’s the point of spending money on SEO? If you don’t have a website, where will your social media prospects sign up for your services or purchase your products?
To rank on Google, your business needs to have a presence on multiple social media platforms and online directories. Plus, your website has to be ready to accept traffic and convert visitors.
And as far as video is concerned, it’s the future of marketing, not to mention that it is one of the best ways to get your message across, build trust and position your business as an authority in your market.
Let’s take a close look at the top 4 digital marketing platforms that every small business needs to create its identity on.
Social Media Marketing
Contrary to popular belief, social media marketing is one of the most effective ways to market your business and reach potential new customers. Social media platforms have emerged as an engaging way for businesses to interact with their audiences while providing relevant content that informs them about products or services on offer. However, this form of online marketing is nothing without the right content.
Social media marketing is more effective when you’re providing your audiences with valuable and engaging content that can build brand loyalty, recognition, and trustworthiness from potential new customers in a matter of minutes or hours rather than days. This type of “content” might be anything from an infographic on how to do something specific (such as how to make a cake), or it might be an article on your experiences in launching and maintaining the business, such as “Why I Started A Business.”
To create a strong social media presence, we’ve included some tips that you can follow below.
Identify Your Target Audience
It’s important to understand who your audience is to send the right messages in your posts to engage new followers.
You should know what your target audience likes and how it aligns with your business goals, such as the types of content that might be appropriate to post to attract their attention or promote a sale.
Understanding who your target audience is will allow you to pick the best social media platforms to use.
Choose the Right Platforms
For example, if you target a younger audience, then Instagram and Snapchat might be the best platforms to use.
With Facebook being more popular among older audiences, it might not be wise for your business to spend too much money trying to generate likes on this platform.
Consistent Branding
Once you’ve chosen the platforms that you will be focusing your attention on, it’s imperative to make sure that you take the time to design your profile pages. Your design should reflect your brand on your website and across all of your channels. Stay consistent with colors, logos, tagline, etc.
Keep Up With the Latest Trends
It’s important to know how your business is doing on different social media platforms.
You can ask other people in the company for their input, but it might be better if you take a look at your competition’s channels and compare them to yours. This will allow you to keep up with new trends and ideas for posts.
Schedule and Automate Your Posts
Staying active on social media can be time-consuming. Using software that can schedule and automate your posts, you can save valuable time and increase the number of posts your business is making on social media.
You will be able to schedule a post for every day, week, or month so that followers see fresh content from your company- even when you’re not updating it!
I encourage you to check out the Benefits Of A Strong Social Media Presence In 2021 to learn more.
Video Marketing
Another way to market your small business is with video content. Videos provide another avenue for potential customers to find you and feel who you are as a person or the company behind the products they want. It’s important that if you’re going to add any videos, make sure they align well with your marketing goals and don’t take up too much of your time to watch.
Video marketing is the process of using video content to market, promote, and sell products online. Video can be used in any form; it doesn’t have to be just text on an image or even text overlaid with drawings like some infographics. Videos are easier to digest, so it’s a great way of providing information.
The Benefits of Using Videos
Video content is on its way to becoming one of the best ways of marketing your small business. There are many reasons that video content can help your business grow, including:
Video builds trust – Customers are more likely to purchase after watching a video. Statistics show that 90% of consumers said that videos inform their purchase decisions.
Video increases engagement – Studies show that viewers remember almost twice as much of what they watch if it includes visuals like videos or images in addition to text.
Video helps with branding and marketing efforts – Customers are more likely to be loyal followers because you have a deeper connection with them through the video. According to research conducted by Hubspot, over 50% of consumers prefer to see videos from the brand they use.
Video can be used for lead generation – You can use video content on your website or social media to attract visitors and convert them into leads.
The best way to promote a business with videos is by uploading them onto YouTube, Vimeo, or another site that allows you to upload high-quality HD videos and giving the link out in promotions. You can then share those videos on social media and on your website, which will also help give your business more topic authority.
Take a look at How to Use YouTube to Market Your Business Online to improve your video marketing strategy.
Videos will also help your SEO efforts which is the next marketing effort on our list.
Search Engine Optimization
Another effective digital marketing strategy is called search engine optimization or SEO. This works by identifying what your customers are looking for to find you and ensuring that those keywords are visible on your website. You can also use advertising platforms like Adwords, which will let you pay only when someone clicks on an advertisement about your business.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is critical in any marketing strategy because, quite simply put, a user can’t find your business website without it. Search engine optimization is the process of making sure that you optimize for search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing so they will put your site at the top of their results pages when people search for what you offer.
Moreover, if you list your website on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, it will also help your SEO rank. That’s because Google looks at how active a site is in social media to indicate relevance to the user. So if someone tweets about your business or posts something on Reddit, that too can be considered indexed by Google and will improve your search engine ranking.
As a small business, you can also take advantage of local SEO to rank above the large brands. You can also try to rank on Google Maps, which will give your business maximum exposure on the search engine result pages (SERPs).
Here are some tips to help you improve your local SEO.
Optimize Your Website
Your website is the most valuable online asset for your business, and making sure that it is optimized for SEO can help generate traffic and sales.
Make sure that your meta title and descriptions include your keywords and location.
Add your name, address, and phone number (NAP) on every page of your website.
Create Business Citations
One of the most effective ways to boost local SEO is by making sure that your business is listed on the top directories.
Many local business directories and aggregators list businesses, but the most popular ones include Yelp, Yellow Pages, and Google My Business.
Add Your Social Media Channels
You can also create add your social media platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn to identify your presence online.
These are just a few methods to help your website rank higher. You can check out 7 Tips To Rank Your Website On Local Search to learn more.
Business Website
The final way we are going to discuss is building the perfect business website. This might seem like an obvious thing, but so many companies forget about this important step in their marketing plan and skip right past it for a more modern approach. Your small business needs a place on the internet that is easily accessible, looks professional, and is often updated.
This website should be a place that users can find more information about your business or take action on something you have advertised. Remember to keep your site simple and easy for people to navigate around!
Your business website needs to do it all: represent your company, capture leads, close sales, and connect all of your digital platforms to create a web presence.
To have a lead converting website, you need to choose the right content, write and design your pages, connect your marketing tools, test it out, all while trying to stay within budget.
Below, I will go over some tips to ensure that you get the most out of your business website.
Building a Lead Converting Website
The best way to get started if you have an existing website is to get an audit. A website audit will provide important metrics, including the number of visitors, conversion rates, and much more.
Secondly, identify the pages on your site that are currently driving traffic to your business or sales funnel through things like search engine optimization (SEO), for example.
If you want to improve a specific page’s performance to increase the conversions rate, start by employing some A/B testing.
A/B testing compares two versions of the same web page and determines which version performs better (A vs. B).
This will help you learn what works for your target audience, identify where issues may lie in terms of design or content on specific pages, and optimize conversions rates as needed.
Determine Your Website’s Hierarchy
You can start by drawing out a wireframe of your website’s content to identify your top-level pages. The pages can include your product or services pages, contact us, about us, blog, etc.
Next, you can identify a subcategory page that falls under the main category for each of your top-level pages.
You will also want to add any secondary content or information on these pages and testimonials and FAQs related to these topics.
After identifying all of this, it’s time to start creating individual pages for each of your categories.
The pages you create should have a specific purpose that correlates with the page’s content and title. For example, if you created a blog page, it would be good to include links back to other posts on this same topic or related topics and images from previous posts to keep readers informed about other content that can be helpful.
Clean and Structured Layout Design
When considering how your content will be displayed on a website, it is important to make sure that the text fits within the allotted space and there are no blank spaces at the end of each line. This way, everything looks uniform without any extra white space running through different sections of your site.
Your website’s design needs to be easy to navigate so that visitors can easily find what they are looking for. The more visitors you have, the better your site will rank in search engine results and generate revenue through links or ads on that page.
You can learn a lot more by reading the article, How To Optimize Your Website For Conversions.
Final Thoughts on How To Market Your Small Business
You see, all of the above services work together and are dependent on one another to create a strong online presence, attract visitors, and prove that your business is legit. By having a strong web presence, you will prove to Google and potential prospects that your business can be trusted, that it can provide what you say it does and that they won’t get scammed if they choose to do business with you!
For example, the Max Business Starter provides four different services to power up a new business for an affordable monthly price. Combining multiple services will help create a strong web presence that complements each other and will actually strengthen and build each other to help the business get more traffic, leads, and revenue quicker.
The next chapter will discuss promoting your products or services using digital advertising platforms like Google or Bing and social media sites like Facebook, Linked In, and Tiktok.
