Does your business have a digital presence? If customers are searching for your products or services online, will they find it? Small businesses without an online presence are at a disadvantage, especially if they are not utilizing the digital marketing opportunities available.
The rise of technology at a rapid rate has led to the large-scale use of digital and social media platforms to communicate and share experiences, stories and everyday life with others. Small business owners and entrepreneurs are taking advantage of this easy way to engage with their audiences, and you are losing out if you are not building an online presence.
Digital Marketing for Small Businesses Today
Small businesses today have the ability to reach audiences anywhere in the world, more importantly, they can reach customers who actually want to buy their products and services. While a lot of businesses are present on social media platforms, most are not utilizing these media platforms properly and an even greater number are not conducting digital marketing.
Having a website and being on a social or digital media platform is one thing, conducting marketing campaigns on these platforms is another thing. The type of content you put out should fit into a consistent branding for your business’s online marketing efforts, so when you create a campaign, the content doesn’t seem strange to your audience.
Why You Should Implement A Digital Marketing Strategy
Creating a digital marketing strategy for your business should be the first step in developing your business’s online presence. While you can reach your target audience by creating content on your website and posting on social media and other channels, you will not see real gains unless you have a digital marketing plan, are tracking your digital marketing activity, and making adjustments where needed.
Strategically implementing activities geared at building an online presence by creating and publishing content your customers want to see will build brand awareness, increase customer engagement and make your brand more trustworthy in the eyes of your customers. Building this relationship with them makes it easy to introduce your products and increase your revenue.
If you want to see a real increase in your revenue, investing in paid digital marketing and social media marketing strategies are the way to go. You can optimize and run ads on Google’s search engine and multiple social networks.
Most Popular Digital and Social Media Platforms
There are quite a few digital and social media platforms for small businesses and entrepreneurs to utilize for their digital marketing needs, but not all are suitable for every industry. Research each platform and understand which one will work best for your product or service. In your discovery, you should create an avatar (a profile of your ideal customer) and decide on which platform you would find that customer and what type of content to create to appeal to that customer.
Website
Yes, a website is a digital marketing platform because you can create marketing campaigns that send leads to your website and you can also optimize your website to make it easy for customers to find you.
Using Google ads, search and social media platforms to send customers to your website’s landing page or products page can significantly increase your reach and profits. Any page on your website can be used as a marketing tool for different purposes. Some customers want to get a holistic overview of your business, and an about page or home page would be useful for this.
A website that is designed well, is easy to use and is optimized for search engines will convert well when you create ads, and is an integral part of any marketing strategy.
Google My Business is an often overlooked but useful platform in building your online presence. Google is the largest search engine with over 3.5 billion searches per day. It makes sense to create and optimize your Google My Business profile, so that when a potential customer searches for your product or service, your business’s profile will pop up on the sidebar or at the top of the page in the search results.
Google also allows you to create and run Google PPC ads which helps you to generate consistent leads when customers are ready to purchase your products and services. Google PPC ads are powerful. A well-executed Google Ad campaign will significantly increase your traffic and leads and you only pay when someone clicks on your ad.
Google’s power is endless as it allows you to send traffic to your website at a larger scale than only search engine optimization (SEO) would. It is advised to create a landing page for your Google ads to increase conversions. This will significantly increase your existing traffic.
Facebook has over 2.8 billion active users and is one of the most popular social media platforms today. One of the main benefits of using Facebook for digital marketing is that it provides detailed audience creation that allows you to refine your audience from the demographics to behavior and more. This gives you the power to decide who sees your ad to increase its conversion.
Being aware of Facebook advertising techniques gives entrepreneurs and small business owners amazing power and control over their audience reach. It is one that every business and social media management team should be using to build their businesses.
Instagram is a photo and video sharing social media platform that is owned by Facebook. It is one of the most popular and fastest-growing social media apps in the world. With over 1 billion active users, Instagram is a fun and easy way to connect with your audience.
Instagram has a higher engagement rate compared to some other platforms like Facebook and it is user-friendly. The design of content displayed on your news feed is another way to enhance the customer journey. Instagram shows multiple images/videos on your profile at once and users create different designs and patterns with their feed. This is a great way to develop and enhance your brand.
One of the things that makes Instagram a useful platform for small business owners is its hashtags feature. This allows you to use specific hashtags with your posts so users following these hashtags will find your posts easily. You can geotag images to make it easier for users to find location-specific content, tag other accounts and even enhance your images with filters.
From a digital marketing perspective, these features allow you to fine-tune your marketing campaign to make them more effective and reduces the possibility of putting your content and ads in front of the wrong people. With the addition of shoppable posts, your ads can even convert right on the app.
It is amazing what you can communicate using 280 characters. Despite having fewer active users than its major competitors, Twitter has managed to remain a strong and relevant social media platform over the years because of its unique way to allow users to follow trending topics and engage with anyone, anywhere in the world.
Users can follow their favorite people and like and comment on their posts. Hashtags were introduced to us by Twitter and it even tells you what is trending among users in specific geographic locations and worldwide. By using this data, creating a digital marketing campaign has never been easier.
Linkedin, Pinterest, Youtube and Snapchat are other popular platforms where your target customers are likely to be. Linkedin is for the professionals, Pinterest is for visually-rich content and Youtube and Snapchat utilizes videos. They all allow you to create ads in unique ways. Youtube plays ads for at least five seconds and gives the user the option to skip after that. SInce your best copy should be in the first few lines, that is enough time to grab the user’s attention.
The platforms you choose should be based on where your core demographic is located.
How to Communicate with Your Followers and Build Engagement on Social Media
Depending on the industry you are in, each of these platforms provide a unique audience which allows you to communicate with your followers and find new ones. They give you the opportunity to develop your brand tone in order to speak to your audience in a way they can relate to.
Creating an online presence is crucial in these times as many businesses are seeking more control over their audience reach. Understand what your followers respond to; what gets the most engagement. A good digital marketing company will perform social listening and an audit before they develop any digital marketing campaigns for your business.
The ability to develop detailed digital marketing campaigns gives traditional marketing methods a kick. WIth more power and control, you stay on top of your advertising dollar and get a greater return on investment.
Now that you know what your digital marketing power is, go and optimize or build a new website, go and use Instagram stories to highlight your unique services, do a live stream for a quick Q & A, provide customer service via your inbox, but most importantly, get a marketing campaign created by an experienced team of digital marketers who will show real results for your bottom line.
Send evlos digital a message if you are ready to take your business to the next level.
