Good marketing strategies for small businesses are absolutely crucial. This is because not only does good marketing bring in new business, but it keeps the existing customer base engaged and in touch with what’s going on. And in this era, there is no better alternative than digital marketing. Everything from personalized marketing to pinpoint accuracy when it comes to targeting, digital marketing for small businesses can really change the way the business interacts with the world and can help it grow from an SME to a considerable business enterprise. For this, we’ll be looking at seven essential digital marketing strategies for small businesses that can make all the difference in the world.
Here’s the thing: most small business digital marketing is limited to messages and emails, and that’s really not good. We’re here to change the way digital marketing works for small businesses; everything from local SEO to customized email marketing campaigns, here are seven essential digital marketing strategies for small businesses designed to take your SME to the next level.
7 essential digital marketing strategies for small businesses
Let us list the seven essential digital marketing strategies for small businesses, and then we’ll delve deeper into each of them, and see how your small business can benefit from exponential growth with these digital marketing strategies.
- SEO (including local SEO)
- Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
- Social media marketing
- Content marketing
- Personalised email marketing
- Google My Business (GMB)
- Influencer marketing
Let’s get up-close and personal with each of these marketing strategies and learn more of the role they can play in elevating your small business.
SEO (local SEO, too!)
The first and most important of them all: SEO! Without it, you might as well put an advert out in the local paper and call it a day. SEO is search engine optimization; for Google, your business is as good as your SEO, and people like to look at things on Google. For instance, if you run a local souvenir shop, and tourists come in all the time, well, Google and SEO are your best friends. Simply put, SEO will ensure that whenever somebody searches for anything related to your niche gets shown you as the first result. And believe us, people don’t like going to the second result; the trust on Google is strong on this one. So, lead generation potential is amazing when you have good SEO on your side.
Local SEO: Local SEO is like normal SEO on steroids, only those steroids work within the gym. As the name implies, with local SEO, you specify where you want to be promoted within a specific locale, and with some best local SEO practices, you will be promoted on searches occurring within that specified locale. Talk about leads that double.
PPC (pay-per-click) advertising
Advertising is expensive; nobody said otherwise. Plus, with a TV advert, you don’t know whether people like it or want to pull their hair out in frustration. So, its money not well spent. PPC gives you all three that your small business needs to succeed: target relevant audiences, generate concrete leads and save money. How? Well, as the name implies, PPC works on the pay-per-click advertisement model, where you only pay for the clicks that you receive on your advert that led to a business lead being generated. PPC works with targeted audiences to ensure that every click generates a lead, and that is the exact click that you pay for; not for simply showing or displaying your advert, which isn’t very cost-effective. And since small businesses are all about cost-effectiveness and ensuring that marketing costs stay down, PPC or pay-per-click is the best digital marketing strategy that a small business can have, doing it favors all the way.
Social media marketing
Small businesses and social media marketing go hand in hand. Why? Because large corporations are out of touch with the average social media user? Could be. But the real reason? Its all about the engagement and visibility. You see, a big brand or business is everywhere. Supermarket shelves, TV adverts, you name it. For a small business, getting a tight-knit community to continue engaging with your social media handle and keeping the community engaged is what makes social media marketing such a great digital marketing strategy for small businesses. Since they don’t have the resources to engage their audience through other mediums, social media marketing can become their voice, their medium to keep the base engaged. This not only is good for the aforementioned purposes but is also a viable method to generate business leads and thus, allows small businesses to continue generate revenue from social media as well.
Content marketing
Content marketing, in its basic form, is you creating relevancy and engagement for your brand using any sort of content: from blogs or articles to short videos and snippets of upcoming projects. In the same vein as social media marketing, content marketing does the same for small businesses, except that it is gets way more engagement than conventional social media marketing. Captivating your audience and capturing their attention with the right strategy and the right medium is crucial: for instance, YouTube Shorts and TikTok have a great deal of potential when it comes to content marketing, since engagement is at an all time high for these platforms, and small businesses have an edge on these platforms since they get more coverage. Content marketing is also a great way to generate leads as well, so for small businesses, you’re looking at a clear win-win digital marketing strategy, guaranteed to give small businesses a boost provided the right strategy be implemented.
Personalised email marketing
You might have heard people say, ‘email marketing is dead’. And yeah, email marketing is dead. If you want to pursue it using those old techniques of ‘Hello Mr John Doe. Would you be interested’. That email marketing is dead, for sure. However, the new version is something that people resonate with, and the best part is, that its perfect for small businesses. Personalised email marketing adds a touch of personalisaton, obviously, geared towards the intended recipient. For one, small businesses do not send mass emails; their clientele list is limited, which makes this the perfect tool to use. As a digital marketing strategy for small businesses, personalized emails represent the absolute best that small businesses can achieve, provided you have the right strategy for it. With this digital marketing strategy, you create for your small business the type of engagement that other strategies simply cant; and that’s the power of email marketing and personalization combined.
Google My Business (GMB)
While many people like to bunch GMB up with SEO, Google My Business is fast becoming a separate entity for itself. And the results for that are incredible, especially when done in tandem with local SEO. GMB works as a guide for local businesses within an area; small businesses are bound to benefit from an optimisation of GMB. Again the best strategies will ensure that GMB works to the favour of your small business; in this case, GMB lists the best-optimized businesses on the top of its search engine result pages, which means lots of traffic. Lots of traffic means lots of business leads. So, optimising your GMB is imperative as a digital marketing strategy in growing your small business into a big one.
Influencer marketing
Last on this list for essential digital marketing strategies for small businesses is influencer marketing, which is a newer form of marketing involving a concept similar to endorsements. It might be relatively new, but the results are already incredible, and they have sort of set a precedent for how the world now views celebrity endorsements. You see, influencer marketing takes an individual with a considerable following on a social platform, and asks them to endorse a brand or service. This influencer will then create content around the endorsement and will make sure that their community interacts with the endorsement message and presents it in a rather fun, catchy method. This works because of late, streaming platforms like Twitch and YouTube have had their fair share of people with just obscene amounts of followers, and it’s the small businesses that are taking the most advantage of this digital marketing strategy, So why shouldn’t you?
When we say growth, we mean business: Purpose Path
Stop listening to people or companies promising insane amounts of leads with their tried and tested strategies. You know what’s tried and tested? Real growth. Numbers. Numbers don’t lie. So, what does Purpose Path have to do with all this? Well, real growth, that’s what. A track record of excellence and delivering the results that matter the most. What we don’t indulge in is bullshit. What we do like for businesses is growth.
If you like these digital marketing strategies and want these for your small business, here’s something that should get the ball rolling. Purpose Path is here to do all that for your small business, and then some. Influencer marketing? Delivered excellent results. Content marketing? Been there, done that. Social media marketing? Just check the track record and be prepared to take your business to the next level. Digital marketing is basketball and we’re Michael Jordan.
