Whether it is traditional marketing or digital marketing strategies for small business, your aim is to develop mutually beneficial relationships with prospects, leads, and customers.
With proper digital marketing, you can create awareness and engagement both before and after the sale. In this guide, learn the core strategies of digital marketing that will be critical to your small business growth today, tomorrow, and for years to come.
Email Marketing for Small Business Owners
Email is hands-down the most effective way to move prospects towards conversion. When done properly, it can be your ticket to loyal customers and repeat sales. This is because Email Marketing can be used for branding, engagement, acquisition, retention, direct sales, reactivation, generating traffic, and getting referrals, and thereby makes it an important part of your beginner’s guide to digital marketing for small business.
So, what are the type of emails you can use in email marketing? Here are three different types:
- Transactional – which are sent out by your automated system ( like order or return confirmation, password reminders, etc)
- Relational – are used to nurture leads (like welcome mail, Newsletters, Blog articles, etc)
- Promotional – used for generating sales (promotional contents, offers, sale announcements, etc)
Campaigns That Should Be In Your Digital Marketing Plan for Small Business
Introductory Campaign: Sent them automated introductory mail as soon as the user subscribes. introduce them to your brand and tell them what they can expect.
Engagement Campaign: Send your subscribers relevant offer mails once they take a specific action. Send engaging and tactical content with clear Call-to-actions.
Segment Campaign: Send relevant emails to your subscribers by segmenting them on the basis of interest, demography, location etc. The goal here is to send engaging and relevant content to the right people.
Re-engagement Campaign: Your email list probably has plenty of subscribers who are inactive. This type of campaign is run to get then re-excited about you and your brand. It could be by reminding them of their benefits or tell them what they have missed.
The email marketing campaigns for your business can be the most effective when you coordinate it with your content and advertising campaigns. Your goal should be to educate new subscribers, nurture relationships with your prospects and quickly convert them.
Check out our complete guide to Best Email Marketing Practices for Small Businesses and reap the benefits.
Pro-tip: Try Teleduce from Corefactors and get access to rich email templates for different industries, get a high rate of deliverability, bring and analyze all important metrics in one place, and so on.
Content Marketing Strategy for Small Business
Are you churning out content but not getting good results? This is because the content itself doesn't drive website traffic and business sales. Perfect content that works isn’t about you, your brand, or even your objectives.
It’s about providing the right information to your prospects at exactly the right time. Now every prospect goes through three phases before converting into a customer.
Awareness: Your prospect must first be aware that there is a problem for which you can provide a solution to them. At this stage, you need to provide content with a low barrier to entry, because at this stage, they are just looking for useful information. You can design the following content type for this stage.
- Blog post
- Social media post
- Infographics
- Images
- Newsletters
- Audio / Video Podcast
Evaluation: At this stage, you convert your problem aware prospects into leads with the help of lead magnets. These are free content that you offer to prospects when they submit their contact information. This type of content includes
- Educational Resources like eBooks, Case Study, White Paper, etc.
- Useful Resources like Checklist, etc.
- Software Downloads
- Discount/Coupon Clubs
- Quizzes/Surveys
- Webinars/Events
Conversion: Its point of sales time, so what type of content should you provide your leads to make an informed decision? Well, it could be in the form of
- Demos or Free Trials
- Customer Stories
- Comparison or Specification Sheets
- Webinars or Events
Elements to Incorporate in Social Media Strategy
You and your customers both live in a social world. They are on the worldwide social web, they share their experiences and opinions related to you, your brand, and your industry. So you need to create a strategic social digital media plan for a small business that will help you get in front of prospects and will help you to keep up with the conversations taking place online. Here are the four important stages of your social media strategy.
Social Listening: To create a successful social strategy, you need to start with your target audience and learn the following things:
- Understand the public perception of your brand.
- Identify the key subjects or topics that you need to be talking about.
- Be aware of your industry, learn where it’s going and how it’s being perceived.
- Perform customer research.
- Conduct competitive research.
Influencing: Once you understand the trending topics, adding an authority voice is social media is your next step. At this stage, you should
- Increase engagement with your brand by providing quality content.
- Start conversations with your followers around the topics related to your business.
- Build awareness of your products and offers
- Direct and increase traffic to your site.
Social Networking: Whether you’re just getting started, growing, or expanding into new markets, Social networking is important for all businesses. With proper interaction, you want to make deep and lasting relationships, both with your followers and potential partners.
The process of social networking is pretty simple. Just like you share your content ( blog, offers, etc) with your followers, you should also share content from your peers and partners if you think they may be useful to them. Just make sure you engage with people one-on-one, both asking and answering questions.
Selling on Social Media: Once you have a strong network, start putting your offers in front of people and begin converting them. So what kind of offers can you create on social media platforms:
- Bring traffic to your landing pages
- Generate leads to grow your email list.
- You can try to upsell and cross-sell to existing customers
- Put relevant ads to increase buyers frequency.
Search Engine Optimization Strategy
Search marketing can help boost your website's traffic, build visitor's trust, and supports other digital marketing practices too. This is why it is considered among key performance indicators in digital marketing. SEO can be divided into
- Focus on the technical details of your website
- Create well-optimized content, build links, and boost social shares.
SEO is an on-going process. Thousands of websites are constantly struggling for the #1 spot in various os search engines (particularly Google) for their target keywords. This means your content needs to be constantly updated, finessed, and promoted to
rise in the search engine result pages (SERPs) thereby securing your top-ranking spot.
So Should Your Search Marketing Strategy Include:
Mobile Optimization: A lot of people conduct searches from their mobile devices. That means your Website must be easily accessible from phones and tablets as well as computers.
Structural Content: For success, you need to build a better page than anyone else on the web. So, research what’s already ranking for your target keyword and build content which is 10x better than other pages.
White Hat Search: The days of keyword stuffing are long gone. Google wants to provide a superior experience for their users, so they abort websites that use grey hat or black hat SEO tactics.
Concentrate Not Just on Google: Your business isn't limited to optimizing for Google, you can also focus on Google Maps or iTunes. It may be hard to rise up on Google, but Amazon, Yelp, or Pinterest are less complex and easier to understand.
SEO or Search marketing doesn’t happen overnight. You need to integrate it with every aspect of your marketing, from customer research to content creation to customer value optimization. Your simple strategy here is to just start where you are, and with time, you’ll see improvements in your page rank and traffic.
Digital Advertising Plan
Wondering how you can easily and affordably get people’s attention, bring them to your websites, and convert them to customers? Simple, with Digital Advertising, which is an essential part of Digital marketing guide for small businesses.
Getting Organic traffic is tough. And you can lose it easily if Google changes its algorithm, or even if you simply change the URL of your landing page. With paid traffic, you have full control of your traffic flow and once you acquire them, you can build loyalty and optimize your customers’ value.
The top sources of paid traffic are Facebook, Google, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Twitter. But being a small business, you should probably start with Facebook and Google. According to Business Insider, Facebook and Google drive 80% of referral traffic, which is more than all the other platforms combined.
So, how do you create a high performing digital advertising campaign?
- Your offer is also the starting point for your ad campaign. So, get it right, and everything else will usually fall into place.
- Use clear and compelling ad copy with an emotional hook. It should be intriguing and persuasive without relying on hype.
- Use relevant and awesome visual creatives.
- Use similar images and color and maintain a theme.
- Set the ads for the right target audience.
- Bring them to your landing pages and convert them. These landing pages should be impressive. Check our guide on effective Landing Page Design Principles and design the best landing pages that convert.
Pro-tip: You can also benefit by using other effective marketing methods like Missed Call Services, SMS marketing, IVR solutions and merge them in your ads to get the best results.
Conclusion
To implement, effectively manage and benefit from the above discussed digital marketing strategies for your small business, you need an integrated sales and marketing tool like Teleduce.
Design Campaigns skillfully, capture leads, nurture them and convert them easily with the help of Teleduce. Get your free trial of Teleduce today!