As a small-medium business owner, taking advantage of digital marketing is key to success. We live in an age where practically everyone is online – including your customers.
That being said, here are 5 digital marketing tips that can be implemented in ANY business:
- Share content on your social channels
Posting regular content to your social media pages is a great way to increase your brand awareness, drive traffic to your website and even increase sales.Many small businesses choose to create their content themselves. If this suits you, using a content calendar is a good way to organise and manage the topics you’re going to post about. Tools such as Hootsuite and Buffer are great for this.
Content can be time consuming – especially when you’ve got a gazillion other things to do in your business – so, outsourcing it to a freelancer or agency is recommended to guarantee there’s always a steady stream of content being posted.
The biggest tip with creating content for your business is to provide value to you audience as well as promoting your services and offers. Your prospects don’t care about how amazing you claim you are – they want to know HOW your business can provide a solution to their problem.
- Collaborate with other businesses
Teaming up with other businesses is a great way to reach an extended audience of people that might be interested in what you can offer them. If anything – it gets your name out there to a new audience that might not have heard of you before.You could collaborate by creating a joint giveaway or creating some form of social content such as a joint blog, video interview or Q & A post. When picking a business to collaborate with, you’ll want to choose one with a similar customer base to your business, but one that doesn’t directly conflict with your business.
For example, if you’re a financial advisor, you could collaborate with a mortgage advisor. Both of you have a very similar customer-base but offer different products / services within your own market niche.
- Create a free lead magnet
While social media is a great way to get your business out there, you can never control the changes the main platforms implement and on a regular basis, which can affect your marketing reach. Case in point – Instagram is forever changing their algorithm making it even harder for businesses to grow their accounts organically, forcing many to run paid ads just to reach the right people.This is where the importance of building your own data list comes in. Having your own email data list means you’re in control of the communication you have with your prospects and customers so you’re not fully reliant on social media.
Using a lead magnet is a great way to build your email list. This simply means providing your audience with something of high value such as an in-depth guide, free webinar, online event, cheat sheet etc. in return for the users’ name and email address.
- Run competitions and giveaways
Competitions and giveaways are a great way to attract attention to your business, increase engagement and build your following by giving something away for free in return for a follow / post share, etc. This is also another way you good collaborate with another business.Giveaways and competitions don’t even have to be related to your business; they can be purely something fun to get attention online.
- Run targeted social media ads
If you’ve got a marketing budget to spend, running ads is a great way to get your business in front of the right people. Organic content can take a while to have a big impact but running targeted ads can provide a much better return on investment.Simply establish which platform your potential customers use the most then create an advert to reach them. The amount you spend on ads really depends on your business, the market competition and the goal of your ad (increase brand awareness, build a lead list, convert people into customers, etc.) If you’re planning on spending large amounts of money on social ads, it’s worth speaking to a social ad expert first to ensure you’re doing things properly.
Bonus tip:
If you rely on customers and clients to find out more about you, sign up or buy from you via your website, make sure your website is set up to clearly provide the relevant information it needs. You can have the best marketing strategy in place but if you your customers can’t work out how to get hold of you or find out your services easily from your website, it’s pretty much a waste of time and money.