7 Highly Profitable Digital Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

Henry Ford once have said “Stopping advertising to save money is like stopping your watch to save time”

How does that sound to you?

Small businesses are usually run on a tight budget or with a limited marketing budget, which makes it really difficult for small businesses to spend money on marketing. It is always a question that comes up which is how can you keep your businesses competitive with other larger companies in the fast-growing digital marketing industry?

Before giving you the strategy advice about the most important marketing strategies to small businesses, we suggest that you should do some of your target research about your competitors, your market share, and what are the marketing strategies that your competitors focus on.

One of the most important things is that you must know where your target consumers are looking to get the information, where they get information about your product’s niche. By knowing that you then can start to draw your marketing strategies.

At reading here we suggest that you already have a friendly website design for your small business. Beautiful web design with relevant information, easy to read is critical to interact with your customers at the beginning.

Instagram is a wide online platform to run small or bigger businesses. And now we would like to share with you the top marketing strategies for small businesses together with some valuable advice on how to combine them to grow your business. Visit Sides Media site to check all their growth services available for Instagram.

1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

As you know, one of the obvious factors to growing a business is to get people to know about your products and services. And the good news is.

According to research from Salesforce, 87% of shoppers now begin product searching online. In other words, there is a huge amount of potential customers currently looking for you. And the question now is how to get the customer to find you on the internet? Eventually, there are two options for you: the first option is you can purchase the traffic by paying for online ads and the second option is the other way around. If you don’t want to spend the money on search engine ads such as Google, Bing.. so this below information is for you.

Sourcing: Freepik

So if you want to do the free option, you need to know how to do Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is the process of optimizing your website structure, landing pages, contents, sitemap.. to make it easier for the search engines “bot” to crawl and find you. By understanding the way that search engines work, you can make relevant changes to your site and develop content that focuses on relevant keywords, it will help for you webpages to get a high ranking on search engines or even the first page of the search engine. The higher you rank on Google, the more opportunities you will have to have more potential customers click to your site and more chances to lead them ultimately choose to buy your products.

What is the first step with SEO, how do you know which part of the website you need to improve? The best way to do it first is having an SEO audit. The SEO audit will check through all factors of your on-page SEO and off-page SEO and support you on creating the SEO strategies for your website. You can conduct an SEO audit by yourself or hire an experienced SEO agency if the information I have listed above is new to you, we highly recommend you should look for an SEO agency to support you for all the works.

There is no such free lunch, depending on your budgets, the SEO agency can give you the best option for your ability. The good thing here is you don’t have to hire an SEO agency forever for your businesses. The ideal choice is you can just hire the SEO agency for about 3 to 6 months after your web page is well-optimized and high ranking, you can easily maintain the SEO webpage yourself and concentrate on other marketing factors.

2. Content Marketing

Content marketing is the most important factor in marketing strategies for small businesses. Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing high-quality content that is relevant to your target audience, bringing value to your reader, and ultimately leading your potential customer to find the trust in your brand and make the purchase decision. To make the most of your content marketing, you have to understand what is the information your potential customers are looking for, how your content turns to be helpful for them, stay true to your brand and design your website and have all relevant information about products/services that they are looking for.

There is one problem: content marketing can be a seriously hard work task.

According to Zazzle Media, 60% of small businesses struggle to produce content consistently, 62% don’t know how to measure the ROI of their campaign and 65% find it a very challenging task to produce engaging content to their audience.

Compared to the paid marketing strategies for small businesses, content marketing focuses on the long-term instead of short-term.

One piece of content can go a long way. A blog post can be shared across many different platforms of social media, featured in your email newsletter, or turned into a well-informed infographic.

Perhaps the coolest thing about content marketing is that it gives you the opportunity to target specific elements of your audience, no matter which part of the buying processing they are into, you can always narrow and turn them into your potential buyers.

Along the way, relationships get stronger and bonds in the form of you and your customers. And the next thing you know, you’ve earned brand advocates on your brands, which later turns to help to expand your audience further and raise your brand awareness.

Last but not least, content marketing provides an attractive ROI (return on investment) for your brand because you can continue to share and develop content for such a long period of time after the original piece is published.

3. PPC Advertising

Pay-per-click marketing is a type of advertising marketing where marketers can advertise businesses ad when people search for relevant products or services.

Just like how it is named, Pay-per-click marketing means you pay every time someone clicks to your ad content. The bid for the advertisement can affect your position, but you only pay when your ad is clicked by an online user. Simple as that!

The PPC ads mostly appear in the search results. There are three main types of pay-per-click marketing ads which are:

• Text Ads
• Display Ads
• Shopping Ads

And the most common PPC ad format appears on popular search engines such as Google, Bing, or Amazon. As an advertiser or a marketer, you have the opportunity to position your brand, product, or service front and center in the form of an ad that targets a specific keyword to the audience.

If you are wondering how PPC ads work on the search engine, here is the answer.

While there are multiple platforms for pay-per-click marketing, most marketers or advertisers use Google Ads (formerly known as Google AdWords ) for their PPC marketing campaigns.

A simple explanation of this process looks like this:

1. Through “keyword discovery”, you learn about the keyword volume, keyword bid, and current keyword trending. By knowing that you can know which keyword you should focus on to display for your ads.
2. You create a search result ad relevant to your keyword search above that will be visible to your users when they search for your range of products/services.
3. A potential customer searches for one of those keywords see your ads on the search engine and clicks on it.

With a small budget, It’s easier for you to go with a keyword list which is relevant and narrow on your products/services niches, or as known as competitive long-tail keywords. And with the keyword search trends always changing, it’s important to continue to expand and refine your keywords list overtime to make sure you’re getting the best possible ROI for your ad campaigns.

But if no one on your team has experience in working on Google Ads campaign, we advise that you don’t try to handle this yourself. PPC ads cost money every time someone clicks on them, which means that if you don’t know how to display ads well, your money can all go away without any conversion. There are always many PPC marketing agencies that can be able to handle and support you depending on your budget.

4. Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is the way of connecting your brand with social media influencers, who bring your business to their followers. Usually, these social media influencers are people with a big number of social following. These influencers work even more effectively when they are in your niche market.

At a small business, using a celebrity for your marketing strategy could be way more expensive for your budget. The goal is to find and engage those mid-level influencers who have the perfect balance of influence and reach to your target audience. The influencer with an average follower (micro-influencer) with the follower ranges from 3 to 100k followers could be ideal at the beginning of your marketing campaign. They know their post content, they know their niche, but most importantly, they know their audience and they’re not going to post about food products or soft drinks brands if their audience is interested in the sporting… This makes the recommendations of working with micro-influencers not only perfect and authentic, but it’s heading to a particular market, which is the most effective way for small businesses trying to reach a target audience.

Sourcing: Unflash

The use of micro-influencers not only makes more economic sense for small businesses, but it is also a more productive way to grow your business and attract more customers. According to a survey from Adweek, micro-influencers are proven to generate 60% more engagement than the average celebrity influencer, do you know that’s 22 times more average weekly conversations on every post!

Remember, you don’t need to spend a fortune to get into influencer marketing. Simply, narrow down your search to a local micro-influencer, as long as they are in your niche of your target customers.

5. Social Media Marketing

Since the booming of social media and the fast rapid growth of the internet. Marketing on many different types of social media channels to reach and engage your target audience is a must-do marketing strategy nowadays.

According to the research of Forbes, it’s so important to know that 97% of marketers are using social media and 78% of salespeople outsell their people just by using social media for their business.

One of the first steps in developing an effective social media marketing strategy for your small business is considering and choosing which channels to spend your time and efforts on. You need to consider which social media platforms your target audience hangs out most often and which social media channels give you the advantages that can help you reach and engage your target customers. Your budget will be decided by which social media platforms you choose to spend on. You don’t need to go with all of them, just the ones that are most effective at reaching your target audience.

We give you an example as below for you to visualize

Before you start creating a business account for every social media platform listed above, take a deep breath, and develop a strategic social media marketing plan. Either alone or with the help of the industry experts, consider the user demographics, user behavior, and user expectations for each social media channel. Then choose which platforms make the most sense for your business based on the ones your ideal customers most commonly use and like the most.

Let’s take an example, if you sell trendy shoes to young adults, LinkedIn may not be the right match for you. Your ideal customers use LinkedIn for professional networking and building network careers, but they use Instagram for exploring trending, get the inspiration. It’s easy to see now which channel you should invest time and energy on.

6. Email Marketing

I tell you one fun fact now:

Do you know that small business owners often assume that small business email marketing isn’t working and email marketing just for the big guys only?

• And the truth is:
• They’re wrong!

One of the biggest mistakes that many small businesses make with email marketing is not getting started with investing in building the customer’s email list at an early stage. Customers usually provide their emails to brands they trust and it takes not always easy to have customer email information. For small businesses, using email marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing strategies. According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing is frequently cited as the most lucrative form of digital marketing boasting an ROI of 4300 percent return on investment (ROI) for businesses in the United States.

The reason is that email marketing is super easy to manage, you have totally full control and allows you to connect straight with your customers.

We can summarize your small business in email marketing strategy in 4 easy steps as below:

1. Building your customer email list.
2. Decide and choose which emails you want to send
3. Create and design the email content
4. Send and analyze the performance to improve your future marketing campaigns

There are some popular email marketing tools that can support your works such as Aweber, Campaigner, Constant Contact, or Get Respond. These services let businesses send out email outreach and daily campaigns, check the messages before they are sent to the receiver, combine the emails with social media efforts, and track the performance of these campaigns. A free plan is available for all these tools and also additional services start at $10/month to 100$/month.

To sum up, as a small business you’re marketing spending won’t be high to support costly marketing strategies and email marketing is the best solution to help you:

• Introduce your new products and services.
• Generate your first sales.
• Bring a successful customer relationship with your business.
• Create lifetime value to your customers

7. Google My Business

If you are just starting or have been hanging for a while in digital marketing you may have heard the term “local SEO”. And every small business, whether it’s a store, shop, restaurants, or any place of services where customers can interact with your business, this is when you should have a Google My Business listing.

But honestly, what is that?

A while ago, my colleague was looking to book a reservation with his girlfriend at a new restaurant in town. Even though my colleague knew where it was but he couldn’t find it in Google maps, unfortunately, he decided to book the different one. How would you feel if you are the business owner of this restaurant?

This scenario could easily happen to you and your business.

Here’s the point, if you own a local business, whether small or a big business and haven’t claimed your Google My Business listing at this point then you are probably about to lose your business.

Your potential customers will be looking for your products or services on their mobile phone or on a desktop, and one of the first places to show up when they’re looking for something that is the Google search control. The best and easiest way for local businesses to show up in a Google search is to claim and use all the features of your Google My Business listing.

The great news is that qualified businesses can claim their listing for FREE. Sound greats?

There are easy steps by steps instructed by Google to support you to create your account at Google My Business page.

Make sure you take the time to design and optimize your Google My Business listing. It’s an awesome and free tool to get more people in the door and buy your products or services with you.

Let’s wrap it up 

The easiest way to begin your marketing strategy is to list all the digital assets you have including websites, digital marketing tools, and all your social media platform channels.

Next, determine where you might build on your assets such as more social media pages or trying out a PPC or marketing campaign. Consider your spending budget and decide where you wish to invest money and refer to your analytics webmaster tools to check which channels you are most likely to see the best ROI and suitable the most for your potential customers.

As you are reading here, I wish you the best of luck for your future digital marketing campaign.