Even if your small store at the corner of the street deserves some digital presence, this applies to small businesses like the local cafe or a fitness studio that just opened up. Let’s understand about digital marketing for small business.
Why do you need digital marketing for small businesses when customers purchase in-store? Well, picture this: there are two cafes standing side by side. One of them only relies on print ads, brochures, and outdoor advertising.
The other one has an Instagram page featuring their customers, allowing them to tag them, and having free wi-fi. Which one will attract a larger audience?
In today’s day and age, digital marketing isn’t just marketing. It’s what marketing stands for. So, here’s why and how your small business should adopt digital marketing. Keep reading.
Understanding Digital Strategy
It needs to be explained that digital strategy is essential for small businesses. Digital marketing for small businesses involves identifying digital opportunities threats and setting clear goals. These goals are broken down into different tasks and implemented for the company to fulfill specific, measurable metrics.
The expected results include growing brand awareness, increasing traffic, boosting revenue through landing pages, or generating leads. Either the goals are for the businesses to become more competitive or to grow the business.
Some common digital strategies for small businesses include working on the following things –
Local SEO would include optimizing your business website for local searchers. You must use local search-specific keywords on the website and your Google My Business Account.
Email Marketing: this is an excellent tool for directly marketing your business or reaching out to customers who left the product on the cart. Email marketing allows businesses to generate leads. To, get into the heart of your lead, address them using their name directly. Write compelling subject lines to convert them.
Google My Business: Take advantage of Google My Business and help your customers find your business.
Key Components of Digital Strategy
- Set measurable goals
- Identify target audience
- Select channels
- Content strategy
Setting Goals
This part involves addressing customer-focused problems. The online presence should make the business easily accessible to customers. It includes improving social media footprints, organic search results, and traffic.
The overarching goal is to increase brand recognition, improve business output, and manage reputation.
Identifying Target Audience
There’s no digital strategy without the customers in the picture. As a small business, you must start market research, analyze your current customer base, and study the competitors. The best way to go about this is by analyzing customer demographics. Start by examining the age, gender, location, etc.
It helps to dive deeper into the customer’s psyche. Understand their pain points, interests, purchasing behavior, and more.
Select Channels
When working on digital marketing for small businesses, make sure your choice of digital channels is goal-specific and audience-specific. There are certain types of products and services for which email campaigns work. There’s no point in spending money on email marketing if your audience doesn’t read emails.
Also, specific audiences (based on age, location, and interests) prefer using particular social media platforms. The age and gender ratio also changes from platform to platform. For example, 50.6% of Instagram users worldwide are female. That same number goes up to 55.4%in the USA.
31.7% of Instagram users are aged between 18 to 24 years old. On the contrary, 61.2% of Twitter users are male and 58.38% of the users are aged between 18 to 34.
When selecting online channels for small business digital marketing, it’s essential decide based on data.
Build Content Strategy
The following steps will help you reach your small business digital presence goals with actionable steps. This is where you build your content strategy based on the target audience’s goals, attention span, and pain points.
Once you are ready with your content strategy, you can create content for specific channels. It helps to understand what content your audience consumes the most on their preferred channel. Work on making a goal-specific content calendar to create, publish, and promote your content.
Customer Experience in Digital Marketing
Whether you want your customers to engage with your social channels or click through to your landing page, digital marketing makes it happen. But a critical aspect of running digital marketing campaigns is to build and improve customer experience.
So, what’s the customer experience for small business digital marketing? It’s the business’ effort to build a good customer experience across the company’s different digital touch points. This helps customers engage further, stay loyal and ultimately leads to massive sales for a company.
The digital marketing initiatives taken across websites, social media channels, etc., work to build the overall customer experience.
Customer Centric Digital Marketing
Digital marketing isn’t just getting the word out about your business in the digital landscape. Small businesses must focus on the right target audience and map customer journeys to fulfill the marketing objective.
Deep Customer Understanding
Once the target audience is identified, the next steps would be analyzing customer motives, pain points, and online behaviors.
Customer Journey Mapping
Customer journey mapping is a big part of building a strong customer experience. Business owners must build the customer journey across all the different digital touchpoints.
This will help generate more leads and convert more customers but also help identify potential friction points businesses can improve sales and marketing funnels with the same data on hand.
Personalization
Targeted Content: Creating content helps customers know what a business is about. But targeted content takes it a step further. It educates the audience about the benefits a certain product or service provides.
Businesses should start with different steps of the content funnel where they educate, inform, and provide solutions.
Dynamic Product Recommendation: Businesses can use different digital tools and data gathered from analytics tools to offer dynamic product recommendations. The customers’ digital footprints leave lots of information about them and businesses can use that to recommend products. This helps them acquire customers.
Personalized Greetings & Messages
Be a little more personal without being creepy. Your customers would appreciate your effort to understand their pain points and tailor an email just to solve their problems. Sometimes, personalized email or website landing pages are the ones that help a business drive more sales.
Active Listening
Digital marketing for small businesses also includes constantly monitoring what the customers are doing and saying. Active listening is very important in digital marketing. Here’s how to listen to the customers actively –
Customer Surveys: Run polls on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, or other social media channels. Taking customers’ feedback is the best way to listen to them.
Social Media Monitoring: Take multichannel monitoring tactics. For example, see where your customers respond and engage with your business the most. This can be on SMS, emails, push notifications, live chats, and more.
Implement Digital Marketing for Small Businesses
Once you have a clear understanding of what to do for your small business, go ahead and start to implement it. But where to start?
Here are specific steps you can follow –
Set Your Budget
What’s the best practice for setting a digital marketing budget for a small business? Start by allocating 2% to 10% of your revenue to digital marketing. However, the percentage and the budget amount might vary depending on the industry, digital marketing goals, and competition.
Build your Digital Platforms
The best thing about digital marketing is that you don’t need to spend much on building marketing channels. Social media channels are free. The investment can range between $500 to $3000.
It’s better to keep the websites simple first to make the process cost-effective.
Create Content
Although AI helps with content creation, you need human intervention to keep the personal touch in your business content. After all, the content is a marketing message tailored to your targeted customers. So, it needs to feel human and not chatbot-ish.
Small businesses can invest in an in-house content creator or hire freelance writers who can help them on an ad-hoc basis.
PPC Advertisement
While organic search and SEO are important, it also helps to spend some part of your digital marketing budget on PPC advertisements. This way, you are improving your digital presence, your conversion rate and getting more customers.
Analyze & Track Changes
Every goal you set for small business digital marketing be measurable. So, start by identifying the digital marketing metrics you’ll monitor.
Some important metrics to measure include – conversion rate, mobile traffic, bounce rate, website traffic, engagement rate, Cost Per Click, etc.
Conclusion
In conclusion, digital marketing for small businesses requires developing a solid digital strategy. The next steps involve implementing the plans you build and break down into phases. We have broken down the entire process into three main parts. It starts with developing a digital strategy, mapping customer journeys and experiences, and implementing them for the business.
This article should provide a brief idea of how to implement digital marketing solutions for your small business. However, small businesses can also hire digital marketing service providers with a full suite of services they need for their business-specific digital goals.
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