It’s difficult for small businesses with limited resources to separate themselves from the competition and attract more customers. Competing against larger businesses with more people and resources sometimes feels like a battle between David and Goliath. Fortunately, David was victorious because he had a strategy and executed it. In this digital marketing for small businesses guide, we’ll cover what you can do to set yourself apart from your competition and grow your business.
1. Become the most knowledgeable person in your industry
The first step in building any strategy is to understand everything that will affect it to ensure the strategy you’re creating will be effective and impactful. You will get a better sense of what your priorities are and what are nice to have. The more you learn about your industry, the more you can use your knowledge to grow your business.
Understand your position
First of all, you want to understand offer and demand. Whether you have multiple products/services or just one product on offer, you need to know what’s your most important product or service. The one sold more and for which you can scale or increase your sales significantly.
Build buyer personas
Create your buyer personas. These are fictional representations of your ideal clients. Give them names, occupations, demographic information, interests, and stories. Use these personas to imagine how you can reach these people and convince them they need what you’re selling.
Learn as much as you can from your target audience and customers
Before marketing yourself, you should understand your industry and how to present your brand to acquire as many customers as possible. Conduct in-depth market research to identify where your target audience spends the most time online and how to reach them.
There are multiple places where they could be spending time. Social media platforms are a great way to start. You’ll find influencers in the industry, what platforms are most used, how people interact, useful feedback, and much more information. You can also research blogs to see who are the authoritative voices, what they are saying, and how to connect your brand with what is discussed. Use video platforms like YouTube and Twitch to see if people are also consuming video content about what they are passionate about. If your target audience is finding all of their information on YouTube, you’ll know how to reach them easily. Audio listening platforms for PodCasts are also a way to reach potential customers. Check out if your industry has been taken over by the podcast craze.
Adapt your voice to your audience and personas
When you conduct your online research, you might notice that your audience speaks in a particular way and uses specific terms. Use this language and vocabulary to communicate with them. It’s the best way to make them feel like you’re one of them and passionate about the industry in which you sell services or products.
Once you’re sure you’ve gained all the knowledge you need to succeed, you’re ready to start creating your marketing plan.
2. Set your objectives based on your resources
Before creating your strategy, set your objectives and consider the resources at your disposal to achieve those objectives. There are many things to consider. First, decide what you want to accomplish. Growing brand awareness, acquiring new customers, and getting more loyal customers. Choose the objective that will help your business succeed. Once you’ve chosen, it’s best to set a target and decide on metrics you can keep track of to see if what you are doing is working. There are different tools you can use to keep track of your data. Google Analytics will help you track visitors on your website for instance. Google Search Console can help you see what the people who land on your website are searching for online. By tracking the number of potential visitors searching for your brand’s name, you can measure your brand awareness.
For your resources, you want to figure out your budget, skills, time, and other resources to see how you can achieve your objective. If your goal is to acquire more customers, but you don’t have a consequential budget and have a lot of time, focusing on Search engine optimization (SEO) is the best solution. If you don’t have a lot of time. But you have a big budget, then you can leverage advertising.
3. Create the marketing strategy for your small business
Now that you have figured out what your resources and objectives are, it’s time to create a strategy to reach your goals. Stay realistic about what you can achieve and plan multiple actions so you don’t put all your eggs in the same basket. As mentioned above, your resources will dictate what you can do. If you’re operating with a limited budget but have a lot of time, you can take a more long-term approach and focus on SEO, which is a time-consuming approach. If you have a consequential budget and need instant results, ads like pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns are a great way to get direct results. We will cover some marketing actions later on in this guide.
Ensure you can reach profitability
Consider your budget and what your ideal customer acquisition cost should be. It’ll be helpful to compare your customer acquisition cost and customer lifetime value to see if your cost of acquisition is profitable in the long term or if it’s too high. This data is essential because it will determine your long-term success. If your business is in an industry where clients repeat orders many times (i.e. protein drinks, dog food, or subscription services) you can have a higher customer acquisition cost because you know customers will make up for that cost over time. On the other hand, if you’re in an industry where customers only place one order (i.e. fashion, books, video games e-commerce), you need to make sure your acquisition cost is lower than what you earn from one order.
4. Execute your marketing strategy
When you know what you want to do to reach your objective, you can start work on implementing your strategy. If you only have a few steps to conduct, you can execute it directly. But we usually recommend creating a roadmap for all the steps you need to take. The goal is to ensure you can execute your marketing efforts as smoothly as possible.
If you ever need help to go faster, do things you wouldn’t usually know how to, or get better results. You can always hire a freelance digital marketing professional to help you with your marketing efforts. On ComeUp, there are thousands of freelance professionals available at your fingertips.
5. Measure your results and optimize
A big part of running digital marketing campaigns is analyzing data and making simple but efficient changes to improve results. A skilled professional will significantly lower the costs from the beginning of the campaign a few months after it has started. So, you want to keep track of your results weekly and make adjustments based on the performance. Google Analytics and other data analysis tools are perfect to leverage data and ensure you’re not just guessing but making decisions based on actionable data.
Consider your customer acquisition cost and lifetime value to ensure your actions are profitable and provide real value for your business. If your actions are not profitable, you can optimize your marketing to improve performance. But if you’re having trouble reaching profitability, you may want to make other adjustments, like changing your action plan.
Digital marketing for small business: Actions
Small businesses can take many different digital marketing actions to grow.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
You’ve certainly heard about SEO in the past. It’s essential for all online and local businesses because it’s how people find your business on Google and other search platforms. SEO is more of a long-term investment. But it’s very profitable as it can bring millions of visitors to your website over the years. If you’re looking for sure value and have time, SEO is a digital marketing action you should prioritize. You can use content marketing to attract people to your blog or website through SEO. The more added value your content provides, the more you will delight visitors. This can create word of mouth and increase your visitors organically.
If you want to improve your SEO but don’t know how to get started, you can buy SEO services from SEO professionals on ComeUp. They will help you get the best results.
Advertising
Running ads for your small business will provide direct results. You can either target a local audience or a broader online audience. Advertising campaigns on Facebook are known to have a good return on investment. You only need to make sure they are profitable for you.
Email marketing
Never underestimate the value email marketing brings to a business. It’s the perfect tool to remarket your audience and keep them up-to-date with your latest news, special offers, and product drops. Leverage email marketing, and you’ll increase your customer retention and lifetime value significantly. An email marketing platform can be expensive, so conduct in-depth research to find the one that matches your needs the most for an affordable.
Include multiple steps of your client’s journey in your email marketing strategies to generate impactful results. From the discovery of your company to becoming a loyal customer, there are messages and emails your clients should receive. Find pain points and offer solutions like free shipping for orders above a certain amount. Or offer a discount on a second order to increase your retention rate. Measure your email marketing results with data and make changes based on the results.
Social media marketing
Social media marketing is essential for companies of all sizes. Some potential customers no longer look for a website directly online. They go through their social media to see if the brand matches what they want. It’s imperative to present your small business in the best light possible. You will also be able to stay in touch with existing clients.
Leverage content marketing to post impactful content that establishes you as an authoritative voice in your industry. The more you post delightful content, the more people will want to engage with your small business on social media.
Video marketing
It’s not as easy as it looks to create a viral video. It’s not as easy as it looks to create a viral video, but it can be life-changing for a business and give your small business exposure to millions of potential clients. It’s also another way to provide added value to users. Leverage content marketing and share insightful information to grow your audience using tools like an audio editor to enhance video quality. While viral videos are appealing, consistently increasing your audience and channels are far more efficient long-term. You can repost your content to social media channels like Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter to keep growing your audience and online exposure for your small business.
Influencer marketing
Similarly to viral videos, influencer marketing can propel a small business into the spotlight. There are different influencer marketing strategies you can follow. You can pay influencers to talk about your products. Or you can offer them free products instead. The key is to ensure the influencers you work with are passionate about the industry you are in. The more related their everyday video topics are to your business, the better the results will be. Take all the time you need to find the right people to talk about your products and company to their audience.
Digital marketing for small business: Leverage ComeUp
Starting digital marketing for your small business may seem daunting after reading this guide. There are so many things to do, and you might not have any experience doing these things. That’s where ComeUp comes in. With ComeUp, you can buy freelance services from professional digital marketing experts. All you need to do is search for the service you need, find the one you want, and place an order. The freelance professional offering the service will start working on it right away.
There are many advantages to using ComeUp. Not only will you save time, you will also achieve better results. Working with a professional freelancer unlocks expertise you don’t have access to. Experts know all the best practices, tools, and strategies to achieve the best results.
Conclusion: Start leveraging digital marketing to grow your small business
Now that you know how to use digital marketing to grow your small business, you can start your marketing efforts. Follow the steps we laid down above. Learn as much as possible about your industry to create effective and impactful digital marketing strategies.
Get help from professional freelance digital marketing experts to achieve the best results by buying digital marketing services on ComeUp. Try it today and start to grow your business significantly.
