With the average person spending more than a quarter of every day online, digital marketing techniques is the key to growing your brand, your business, and your profits.
Digital marketing refers to advertising your business through electronic and online channels.
The most important of these are arguably your website and search engines, but this is just scratching the surface.
One of the best things about digital marketing is its ability to level the playing field for small businesses.
Everyone can invest in digital marketing, allowing local businesses to compete not only with each other but with large corporations.
To find out more, view our 7 digital marketing strategies that can help small businesses
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
With 40,000 search queries processed every second on Google, search engines are the gateway to the internet.
When people run a search and click on a listing that’s not an ad, this is called organic search. Research suggests that more than half of all website traffic on the internet is the result of this kind of search.
Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO, is the process of ensuring that your business appears at the top of organic search results.
Through on-page optimization and off-page website optimization, SEO can help you overcome fierce competition.
Page one Google results take up 90% of all traffic per search, with the top few results absorbing most of those clicks.
With SEO on your side, you can appear in the top five results, which means increased traffic, more customers and sales, and a brand that people recognize.
Pay Per Click Advertising (Google Ads)
Pay Per Click (PPC) search advertising refers to the ads that appear above organic results in search engines. On Google, these are known as Google Ads.
PPC works by bidding for keywords and creating relevant ads. When someone searches for your keyword, your ad will trigger if you placed one of the winning bids.
However, the ads that show up are also based on their quality and relevance in relation to the search.
This means big companies can’t simply outbid small ones to get to the top. The Pay Per Click model also means you won’t have to pay if your ad appears but isn’t clicked on.
This results in a cost-effective way to advertise. In fact, Google conservatively estimates that businesses make an average of $8 profit through the combination of Google search and Google Ads for every $1 they put into their advertising spend.
Local SEO
Local SEO is a specific type of optimization that focuses on generating business through local queries.
For example, people who search for a “café in Richmond”, a “plumber near me” or a “dentist nearby”.
A survey by Yelp states that 85% of consumers turn to the internet to find local businesses.
Further research by HubSpot confirms that 72% of consumers follow up their local search by visiting a nearby business.
Local SEO helps small local businesses appear in prime position for these location-based searches.
Strategies include creating a Google My Business, controlling listings in online directories, generating positive customer reviews, and optimizing website location pages.
For an easy way to ask your customers for Google reviews, check out the Supple Review
Web Design
A website that has been professionally designed with a digital marketing mindset will be optimized for a few key purposes.
It will be designed for SEO and UX (User Experience), meaning it will load quickly, work well on mobile devices, be easy to navigate, and be designed efficiently both on the frontend and backend.
These are all things that both users and search engines look for in a quality website.
A well-designed site will also be optimized and designed for conversion.
This maximizes the chance of website visitors becoming paying customers by the time they click off your page.
Without great design, your website will merely look good at best and will be a detriment to your business at worst.
But with great web design, you can enjoy all of the benefits above and more.
Social Media Marketing
The average internet user spends 144 minutes on social media every day.
Through social media marketing, small businesses can connect with their target audience, build their brand, and increase website traffic, conversions, sales, and profits.
With 71% of people recommending businesses because of their social media presence and 37% of people making a purchase as a direct result of it, social media is a powerful asset for businesses of all sizes.
You can get started with social media strategy by investing in paid ads on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, as well as organic social media posts.
It’s targeted, it’s measurable, and it’s easy to adjust, making it a manageable digital marketing strategy for SMBs.
Retargeting Services
On average, only 2% of website visitors will convert on their first visit. But this doesn’t mean the other 98% aren’t interested.
Retargeting is the process of tracking website and social media visitors using cookies.
You can then draw them back to your website by creating compelling ads with a mix of visual and text elements.
These ads will show up for past visitors on websites all over the internet, helping you draw them back and convert them into paying customers.
Content Marketing
Content marketing refers to all the content you create for digital marketing purposes, from blog articles to videos to infographics.
Content marketing can help you build your brand, increase your authority, and engage with customers.
By sharing useful content like how-to guides or e-books, you become a resource for your audience, and this makes them more likely to come back to you when they need products and services.
In short, content marketing can draw traffic to your website, help to convert visitors into customers, and build a small business’s online brand so it can compete with larger organizations.
This is without even mentioning its role in on-page SEO, link building, ad creation, and other digital marketing strategies.
Get Started with Digital Marketing for Your Small Business
The seven points above outline just how effective digital marketing techniques can be for small businesses. However, there is one other fact that underscores all of these points.
Whether you’re partnering with a trusted online marketing agency or doing it yourself, digital marketing is accessible, affordable, measurable, and scalable.
For these reasons, digital marketing is not just effective for some businesses or big businesses.
Rather, it is a viable, attractive, and essential asset for businesses of all sizes.
