Digital Marketing for Small Businesses: 7 Tips to Ensure You Don’t Fail at Marketing

If it feels like you’re starting to lag behind your competition because of the internet, then it’s probably true. More people are beginning to spend their free time online. If you don’t have a way to reach them there, then your competition will get their attention first. You must focus on digital marketing for small businesses.

Digital marketing ad spends increased by 17.6% globally in 2019. You can’t get away from digital marketing for small businesses anymore.

The question is, how do you get started? Below are seven digital marketing ideas that will help your business stand out online.

1. Build Your Website Right

In many cases, your website is a potential customer’s first impression of your business. If you don’t take the time to give them a good experience, you run the risk of them not giving your business a chance.

Because of this, you need to invest in a good web design that works well for both mobile and desktop users. To do this, you’ll need to use a responsive design. This means your website layout will change to fit the screen size of your website visitors.

You’ll also need to work on your website loading time. With 16% of the United States population using mobile phones exclusively to go online, you need to make sure your site can load when fast internet connections aren’t available.

2. Get Social

Almost everyone has a social media profile these days. Many of these people spend a large amount of their day browsing their social networks to see what’s going on. If you want to get in front of your potential customers, then you need to be where they spend there time.

Make sure you spend some time to build your social media pages for your business. You can use these pages to talk with customers and provide them content. If you do good and provide sharable information, then your fans will share your content and spread it to their friends and family.

3. Work on SEO

Getting a website online is only the first step. All that work is pointless if you can’t get traffic. Getting people searching from Google is one of the best ways.

To do this, you will need to invest in SEO for your website. This process is broken down into two parts: on-site and off-site SEO.

On-site SEO is the process of improving your website pages to better inform Google about what your site is about. You can do this by creating content around keywords and setting up the meta-information for your site.

Off-site SEO is all about getting links for your websites. Google thinks of links as votes for your site. The more high quality links you have, the better Google values the information you have.

4. Build an Email List

You can only rely so much on getting in front of customers on their own time. There’s no guarantee that they’ll ever see what you’re promoting. This is where building an email list comes into play.

It’s hard to find anyone today that doesn’t use email. This makes email marketing one of the most effective ways to get in front of your customers.

When you have an email list, you have instant access to your customers to promote deals and provide content.

5. Use Retargeting Pixels

You probably don’t have much money as a small business. This makes it hard to compete with other paid advertising methods. Using retargeting pixels is a more cost-effective way to do this.

A retargeting pixel is a small piece of programming code that you place on your website. Advertising platforms like Google and Facebook will provide you with the code to use. It keeps track of the people who visit your site.

Once you have a list of people who visit, you can create ad campaigns that specifically target these people. These advertisements are cheaper and more effective than regular ads. You’re targetting people who have already shown interest in your products, so you’re more likely to make the sale your second time around.

6. Invest in a Blog

It’s hard to stand out in a competitive industry. You have a lot of people trying to get attention, so you need a way to provide more value than your competitors. One way to do this is to provide informative blog content on your website.

Your blog can help you stand out as an authority in your industry. Write posts targetting common questions, and you’ll start showing up in Google for those questions. This is a great way to pre-sale your services to customers.

7. Make Use of Google My Business

If your blog content is sharable, you can also benefit from going viral. When this happens, your content will be shared all across social media. This can get you in front of a lot of people that wouldn’t have found your business otherwise.

If you have a local store, then you want to appear on the map when someone searches for local businesses. If you don’t have a Google My Business listing claimed, then achieving this is hard to do.

To verify your business, Google will send you a postcard to your physical address. Once you give Google the code on your card, you’ll be able to optimize your business page. Make sure you update your phone number, contact information, social media profiles, website address, and operating hours for your page.

Once you finish doing this, Google will have a better idea about what your business offers. You’ll be able to start optimizing your local SEO to start ranking for local search terms.

If you need more ideas, check out these tips for marketing your company online.

Digital Marketing for Small Businesses Works

If you think you can get away from ignoring digital marketing for small businesses today, you’re in for a surprise. Older marketing methods are continuing to get harder to do, while digital marketing is getting easier. Once you use the tips above to get started, you’ll be able to get a leg up on your competition that is still stuck with their old ways.

If you’re looking for more marketing tips, we’ve got you covered. Head back to our blog to read our latest tips.