Many small businesses approach online marketing in a makeshift manner. They do it because they are under the impression that all the best practices are powered by the tools reserved for enterprises with a big budget. If you run a small business or a startup, you should know that you have plenty of options to win the online marketing game.
There are some best practices you can implement without investing in pricy premium digital marketing tools. How do you decide what to do? Don’t worry – we decided to offer you a cheat sheet of sorts. Here are five ways small businesses can bring their online marketing game to another level.
Video is the Future
Did you ever wonder why YouTube and Instagram stories are popular? We also have TikTok, a social media platform based on the video format that became immensely popular lately. They all have something in common – their primary media is video. People love watching short and engaging videos. All you have to do to engage them with your products, services, or brand is to deliver a quality video.
There are dozens of tools to help you create videos to deliver your message. For instance, with a free screen recorder, you can create short and informative videos to onboard your new customers or deliver a vital piece of information to leads and convert them into customers.
You can share your videos on social media, via email, or embed them on your official website.
Use SEO to Fuel Your Content Strategy
SEO stands for search engine optimization. The field has become overly complex over the past few years, but it shouldn’t discourage you from using SEO to tip the scales of online marketing in your favor.
Start with keyword research. Unfortunately, we can’t cover the basics of keyword research now, but you can find out how to do it here. Once you have the list of the keywords you want to target, make sure to use them.
Make sure to incorporate them across your website, including page titles and text copy. If you have spare time on your hands, we encourage you to kickstart your website’s blog section. Use the keywords you’ve discovered as inspiration for your blog posts. Remember, SEO is a long game. It can take a couple of months before you see the results.
Build a Social Media Community
People like to hang out on social media. They use it to get informed, get in touch with friends, discuss topics important to them, and share posts, images, and videos.
All successful brands have a social media profile on at least one of the popular platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Discover where your potential customers like to hang out and create a profile to start building a social media community.
Now would be a good time to sit down and decide what brand persona you would like to build. Give your brand a personality that the audience can relate to and connect with. Finally, do manage your profile regularly. Make sure to regularly post and respond to messages and comments, as it will help you appear trustworthy and reliable.
Revisit Your Website
Your website is the central pillar that carries the weight of your entire online marketing effort. Whether they open your email or see your post on social media, your prospects will be redirected to your website once they click the link. There are two things you need to take care of.
First, you need to make sure that your website is lightning fast. It has to load fast on both desktop and mobile devices. While we are at it, check if your website is mobile-friendly. If not, do your best to make it responsive as soon as possible.
As the second thing, we have functionality. You don’t want to disrupt the browsing experience of your visitors. Use a navigation bar to help visitors navigate your website easily.
Leverage Paid Ads to Cut Through the Noise
Many businesses are using digital marketing strategies to some extent to appear higher in search results and get to their target customers. To get some well-deserved attention, you should consider investing in paid ads.
If your budget allows it to run a campaign whenever you have something special to offer to your customers. You can run paid ads on search engines and social media platforms. Paid ads deliver several perks. You’ll be able to use targeting, choose who sees your ads, pick the best time for the ad to be displayed, and set the budget for every campaign.
Since you know where your audience spends the most time online, we’ll let you decide whether you want to run paid ads on social media, search engines, or both.
Small businesses have plenty of opportunities to step up their online marketing game. To build a healthy foundation, they can use video as part of the content strategy, identify and incorporate relevant keywords, leverage social media, paid ads, and improve the website.
