How to Grow Your Small Business with Online Marketing?
How to Grow Your Small Business with Online Marketing?
Almost 90% of the business population around the world consists of small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs), a report by the World Trade Organization declared in 2019.
If this article has interested you, then you must be a part of this business population or thinking of becoming one.
Are you facing troubles marketing your small business online? Especially, after this pandemic situation has triggered the need for businesses to go online?.
The online marketplace, over time, has become a widespread, overly populated and immensely active place to be, for both businesses and consumers.
What’s in it for You?
- Making an Online Presence for Small Business
- Building a Blog
- Engaging Content
- Content Marketing & SEO
- Target Audience
- Social Media Platforms
- LinkedIn and Networking
- Email Lists
- Web Analytics
- Video Marketing
- What is PPC?
- How Paid Ads Work?
- Key Takeaways for Small Businesses
In a world, where there are billions of people going online every minute, how do you stand out as a small business? What are the things you need to know about digital marketing? And how to use them to grow your small business and generate more leads? How can you convert your leads to making more profit?
Let’s unleash the best online marketing strategies for small businesses in the number of 12!
12 Best Online Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses
So without further ado, let’s get to the business of online marketing. We have handpicked 12 useful tools for you and your business to work online.
1. Reach out to Get more Reach!
For the starter, reaching out to the crowd is one of the most powerful strategies for businesses today, and what is a better way than making your presence on the web. Designing a user-friendly, robust website (both for desktop and mobile), and adding shareable, appealing content regularly that gets to the reader and not only search engine results page is important. What do you think Neil Patel is doing differently?
Good quality and relevant content, along with smooth eye-catching graphics, a perfect welcoming landing page, gravity in call-to-action can give you an on-the-spot competitive edge over others.
Also do not hesitate to put yourself out there on social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and also platforms like LinkedIn.
2. Your Business Needs a Blog
Blogs have made a big comeback and companies are focusing on it as a marketing strategy, more than ever. Blogs are a very good way to attract and engage readers with your Content. There are around 400 million visitors who read over 23 billion blog post monthly, according to WordPress.
Published blogs offer quality backlinks and are a trusted online resource for marketing your business website. If you’re serious about digital marketing for small business, then blogs should be an indispensable part of your Content Management System (CMS).
3. Content: Keep ‘em Coming!
Growing your business online, without spending time and effort on your Content is a complete waste of energy. Content is what draws your target audience and generates leads and also converts them into sales. Content is the fuel for online business growth, but holding the attention of viewers is tough because on average you’re getting only a few seconds to do that. With millions of Content going online every second of every day, it has become quite a challenge to stand out in the crowd.
Content means your web copies, off-site campaigns, ads and blogs, social media posts. You should not only focus on optimization but also on delivering some added value to your audience.
4. Leveraging SEO With Content Marketing
SEO ranking of your site is only a little part of what we call Content Marketing. Keywords are an essential part of generating more website traffic. You can always get a look at your current SEO situation with lots of free tools out there, and work accordingly towards meeting your marketing goals. Stressing on organic traffic, i.e. traffic generated without you paying for it can do well for your business and your Google page ranking is going to do that for you. Come up with proper keyword research, keyword planners, LSI keywords, keywords reach for your blog and website.
5. Knowing Your Potential Audience
This one’s a tricky job, cause if you don’t know who you are addressing, or what type of customers to target, then all of your digital marketing for small business tactics will go into vain. Be more vigilant on social media, question-answer platforms like Quora, websites like SimpleWeb to know what others are up to. Using Google Forms and running online surveys are also great ways to know what your audience is looking for and also how you can help them through your content, product or services.
6. Using Social Media as Your Online Marketing Tool
Social Media is one of those places where your audience is spending their most time, so be there, be noticeable. From creating your Facebook business page to interacting in industry groups it takes a lot of time and effort to build a healthy visual presence.
With an Instagram business account and posting user-generated content, on a regular basis is another key. Promote your business with regular updates, connecting to like-minded individuals, responding to customer queries on time.
Twitter is another great platform to interact with industry experts for upscaling your strategies, always modernising your business with trending tactics. You can also engage with influencers to promote your services among social media networks.
Offer contests, frequent giveaways and also make videos to get more attention from your audience.
7. Get a Good Grip over LinkedIn and Networking
No matter what if your company is a B2B or B2C service provider, LinkedIn is the platform for you! From building a network and generating leads with more conversion rates, LinkedIn has so many things to offer for marketing your business if you’re willing to stay consistent.
This platform has always worked for business owners and freelancers like nothing else. When it comes to getting more reach for your business, and also your website, LinkedIn has the best features to offer, and most of them are free!
8. Building and Improvising Email Lists
An email list is a goldmine for start-ups, entrepreneurs and small businesses. A solid email list can change the mode of growth in a very small amount of time. On top of that, the ROI (Return of Investment) is very high compared to other marketing channels. As there are email automation platforms like MailChimp, the hassle of extracting a good old email list with constant nurture has become quite an easy task. These platforms not only extract emails and contacts of your prospects but also leverage your marketing campaigns by providing templates and automated emails while drawing more attention with email subscription for consumers.
9. Keeping Track of Analytics
If you’re getting website visitors by the time you’re reading this, then congratulations! You’re almost halfway there to building a killer marketing strategy.
Keeping a close eye on your website traffic, monthly visitors and also bounce rate not only help you identify your mistakes but also opens up doors to advancement. Especially, when there are tools like Google Analytics, to do that job for you. You also get a precise outlook of your SEO rankings factors, whether your keywords are working or not, how many monthly visitors you’re getting and from different channels, which marketing titbits are working for you, etc.
10. Influence of Video Marketing
With more and more video marketing strategies going viral in recent times, it would be completely insane to not indulge. Currently, small businesses and marketers are converging on YouTube channels. Marketable and highly shareable content on YouTube can engage your audience for a very long time.
Almost 75% of web traffic comes from videos, and leveraging your YouTube channel would be the best possible way to do it. With YouTube, you’re also getting the chances to monetize your channel, which can open options to a new revenue system. Self-hosting promotional YouTube videos, tutorials, entertaining Content is very significant for businesses these days.
11. PPC or Pay-Per-Click
PPC stands for Pay-Per-Click and is a very successful way to run your paid advertisements for driving up more leads and sales. If you’re missing out on PPC, it can seriously affect your business growth and opportunities. You may have heard of Google Ads, the most popular PPC platform that provides advertisers with the option to launch campaigns with a small amount of pay for each time someone’s clicking their ads. But, running a successful PPC campaign requires years of experience and research.
We would recommend you to have an expert and professional digital marketing agency to manage online marketing campaigns for you. Because while hiring a team of experts, it’ll be easier to get all your online marketing strategies for small business concerns to be managed under one roof.
12. Paid Ads
For small businesses, generating traffic can be challenging at the very beginning. That’s why you should set aside a little budget for running paid Campaigns too. As your money is involved, and in this case, it is spent on paid campaigns, it is recommended to test your marketing funnels on smaller audiences before spending your budget.
Facebook ads top over other platforms because of the reach it gets for you and it is remarkably easier to target an audience for your advertising campaigns. YouTube commercials are groundbreaking when it is time to converting your leads. Experts do recommend it over Google ads because of personalized and automating higher ROI for your company.
Online Marketing Doesn’t Happen Overnight!
Online Marketing is no magic strategy, and it doesn’t work overnight for businesses. The goal here is simple, to connect your business to the right customer base. So the most important thing to keep in mind here is, who’s the audience and how do they behave or act while making a decision? You can’t blindly put your whole effort into only organic marketing or paid campaigns. You’re going to need a little bit of both. Evaluation of your marketing efforts from time to time is also crucial. Getting familiar with different marketing channels and how Content works there differently is only a portion of online marketing strategies for small businesses as a whole, it takes a lot more to achieve goals.