The internet has presented small businesses with many benefits, especially with the yearly increase in internet users.
Any online small business owner who wishes to get more customers to his business has to leverage this advantage of the internet because the customers you need are searching daily for what they need on the internet and are looking for a better and trusted option.
Throughout my online marketing journey, I have tried many online marketing strategies. Some were trash as they didn’t bring results, while others were the real deal.
If you don’t want to waste your money on marketing, keep reading because this post will teach you which marketing strategies are best for you.
As a small online business owner who wishes to grow your business, leveraging the remarkable marketing strategies I will share in this post will give your business a massive turnaround if you have not practiced them in your marketing strategy.
Even if you have been practicing some of them, I will introduce you to more strategies or ways to harness better opportunities from the ones you have been adapting to or practicing.
HERE ARE 4 ONLINE MARKETING STRATEGIES TO TAKE YOUR BUSINESS TO THE NEXT LEVEL OR GROW THAT BUSINESS OF YOUR DREAM
It is no doubt that online marketing is better than the traditional way of marketing as it presents you with lots of benefits like high return on investment, easy-to-track customer behavior, and so on.
The benefits of online marketing can be enjoyed in full when you adapt to these best strategies. These strategies include:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Email Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Content Marketing
Search Engine Optimization Strategy
Search engine optimization is making your website appear on the first page of SERP so that your customers can see it when they search for the services you render. It could also mean the process you follow to maximize your opportunity to get traffic from search engines.
Search Engine Optimization, if done correctly, enables your website to show up whether the prospect searches for related or the same services or products that you offer.
According to research by brightedge, SEO drives 1,000%+ more traffic than organic social media; 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine, and 53.3% of all website traffic comes from organic search.
HOW SMALL BUSINESSES CAN IMPLEMENT SEO
You can take full charge of this strategy by adequately implementing the top three SEO strategies, namely
- Website optimization strategy
- Regular content posting strategy
- Link building strategy
SEO aims to make Google recognize the value and relevance of what you have to offer so it favors your brand when searchers search for specific or related keywords.
The most powerful way to bring traffic to your brand is through SEO. It is not paid and enhances your business’s online presence in the long run, unlike advertising, which offers quick results and seems to have dominated as a brand’s primary way of being seen by prospects.
Although SEO is cheaper, it demands some investments, especially in the effort.
It would be best to approach it by getting smart about keyword planning. With less budget, you can start with less common and more specific keywords, also known as long tail keywords.
Let the big names in the industry fight for the more common keywords; therefore, go for the less common ones, which are usually less competitive.
Know your buyer personas so you can publish content with information that resonates with your audience and what they require at each stage of their journey.
Most buyers will purchase from who they already know or believe is an authority. Therefore, giving the buyers what they require at each stage of their buying journey will give you better chances than your competitors.
Anyone who has been reading your content from the beginning of their buying journey will most likely buy from you when they want to make a purchase.
Email Marketing Strategy
Email marketing has come a long way. Although invented in the 1970s, email is still one of the most prominent and most used communication and marketing channels. According to HubSpot, there are 4 billion daily email users, and 77% of marketers saw an increase in email engagement in 2022.
With too many tools and software available today, marketers enjoy creativity and provide an enjoyable experience for customers without things getting too complicated.
Email marketing boast of a higher return on investment than any other marketing strategy.
According to data from Emarsys, 81% of SMBs still rely on email as their primary customer acquisition channel and 80% for retention.
An ideal email marketing campaign demands planning engaging and informative content combined with action and time-based triggers.
Therefore, you will need a strategy that consistently converts to get good results.
HOW SMALL BUSINESSES CAN IMPLEMENT EMAIL MARKETING
Email marketing is almost solely based on automation. So unlike other marketing strategies like social media, you do not need someone dedicated to it every day.
With the right automation tools, you only have to write and plan the nurturing flow and let the software work for itself.
Consider the buyers’ journey and anticipate the lead’s move from the awareness/interest stage to the purchase decision stage.
You have to employ a series of email marketing tactics in other to be able to measure your marketing tactics, so you can tweak, measure, improve, and continue to provide an excellent experience for subscribers.
Don’t just write several emails and send them sporadically throughout the year.
Plan your emails and send them when relevant, and put into place some critical strategies like:
- Personalizing your emails
- Optimizing your subject lines
- Always provide value with your emails
- Optimizing your calls-to-action
- Send more targeted content using segmentation
- Send emails at the best time
- A/B testing your email content
Use the above email marketing strategies to improve your campaign and make them a powerful marketing asset.
Social Media Marketing Strategy
Social media has been increasingly favoring small business that has embraced it. This is because the number of social media users increases daily with the increasing number of internet and phone users.
According to Hootsuite’s Digital Trends Report, Over 4.74 billion people across the world use social media, and Over 93% of internet users are social media users.
Generation z has also made it an excellent place for businesses to meet their prospective customers. Social media lets you see what customers are searching for and how they type in the search terms.
Social media lets your business quickly share information and updates about products and services.
Social media marketing is great for sharing and boosting your business visibility. Your business is on those networks to build relationships like everyone there.
It allows you to reach new customers, build relationships with existing customers, and increase brand awareness and recognition.
HOW SMALL BUSINESSES CAN IMPLEMENT SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
Social media demands constant interactions and the following of trends.
You should be available to answer questions and interact with your followers and others who share similar interests as your business.
That makes it essential always to have someone dedicated to this role. If you can’t handle it, you can employ someone to do that or outsource it to a professional or a social media marketing agency.
Again you have to be very strategic here too. If you lack the team or financial strength to follow up, investing in tools that automate and aggregate social interaction can be a great solution.
Some essential strategies to put in place include:
- Choosing the platforms where your audience are
- Deciding what kind of social media presence fits your brand
- Be authentic to who or what your brand stands for
- Poll your audience to see what they want to see more of
- Share customer stories and what your products mean to them
Content Marketing Strategy
Content marketing involves the creation and distribution of quality content.
It is part of a great Search Engine Optimization strategy but involves more than just knowing the right keywords your buyers’ personas use at each stage of their journey.
It is more of building your brand’s identity, personality, and authority in the industry. And this goes with producing relevant, attractive, and helpful content.
As mentioned under the SEO strategy, you should have a proper keyword planning strategy. Following up on the right keyword with valuable and relevant content for your targeted audience will make them most likely to buy from you.
Content marketing is not just about the information but also about the timing and presentation of the information. You need to know the what, when, and how to present your content.
According to contentmarketinginstitute, 89% of B2B content marketers use short articles/posts, making them the top type of content used.
With the proper content marketing strategy, you can plan and share content that directly talks to your audience. Effective content marketing strategies, when implemented, enable small businesses to build trust and authority with their customers online.
HOW SMALL BUSINESSES CAN IMPLEMENT CONTENT MARKETING.
As a small business, consistency and frequency are essential to leveraging content marketing as an online strategy.
If you are posting on your blog, try to have at least one blog post a week on a particular day of the week. For example, say, post every Tuesday.
For social media posts, you can post once daily to a few times each week. As time passes, you can scale up and post more frequently. Remember to refrain from bombarding your followers with excessive content.
Your primary objective should be to maintain honesty and provide reliable, beneficial information.
Essential strategies to put in place include:
- Define Your Objectives
- Know Your Performance Indicators
- Identify Target Audience & Media Channels
- Create a Timetable
- Develop and Disseminate Content to Your Audience.
Creating quality content is crucial to establishing expertise and keeping your business in prospective customers’ minds.
When your brand establishes itself as an expert in a particular field, it leaves an indelible impression on your audience.
Therefore, your customers will remember you whenever they want to buy.
Measure and Analyze Your Performance Indicators
Measuring your performance metrics as a business owner is a must-do; most digital marketing agencies understand this better than small business owners.
You don’t have to continue implementing each strategy you feel should work better for your business without measuring progress.
While creating a proper online marketing strategy is a large part of growing your online presence and building strong brand awareness, no tactic currently available is completely fail-proof, especially when you do not get it right at some points.
Suppose you want to make a progressive impact through your marketing efforts. In that case, you need to measure the success of the strategies you have been implementing, analyze them properly, and develop ways to meet your market needs better.
Essential online marketing key performance indicators to focus on
Let’s look at the fundamental marketing key performance indicators to focus on as a small business based on the four strategies we discussed earlier.
That is because each marketing strategy has its peculiar indicators. For example, the number of keyword rankings is for SEO marketing, while the number of delivered emails is for email marketing.
SEO metrics
- Sales and Leads Conversions
- Return on Investment (ROI)
- Organic Visibility
- Organic Sessions
- Branded vs. Non-Branded Traffic
- Keyword Rankings
- Google Business Profile Metrics
- Backlinks
- Organic Click Through Rate
- User Engagement
Email marketing
- Number of delivered emails
- Click through Rate
- Conversion Rate
- Bounce Rate
- List Growth Rate
- Email Sharing/Forwarding Rate
- Overall ROI
- Open Rate
- Unsubscribe Rate
Social media marketing
- Likes
- Engagement rate
- Audience growth rate
- Click through rate
- Comments
- Social shares
- Profile visit
- Impressions
- Conversion rate
Content marketing
- Organic website traffic
- Article views
- Social shares
- Audience engagement
- Inbound links
- Followers/subscribers
- Referrals
- Average time on site
- SEO ranking for keywords
- Conversion rate
- Length of sales cycle
- New sales
Improving Your Online Marketing Techniques
As a small business owner, you will always have to give room for improvements.
When you must have implemented the marketing strategies we discussed above, seen the results from them, and run your AB test for better results on the right KPIs, the best thing to do at this stage is to improve your marketing strategies in the areas of weaknesses.
Improving your online marketing strategies enable you to grow your business and reach your ideal customers.
You don’t have to be head bent on using a particular strategy or set of strategies because what you have to do is what works/ brings positive results and not what pleases you.
In conclusion, the four marketing strategies discussed above have been tested and proven to give incredible results.
All you have to do now is to start implementing them, running AB tastes to see which works best for you, and improving on them for better marketing results.
Contacting a digital marketing agency like THRIVING SMART LLC to help you with any of the above marketing strategies where you can’t do it yourself or needs better results will be a good step, as they will employ professional hands to give you a massive turnaround.
I wish you all the best in your marketing endeavors; meet you at the top.
Remember to contact me for answers to your questions wherever you need clarifications or add whatever you feel I missed here.