Small business owners are overwhelmed with dozens of responsibilities each day. Sales, accounting or managing the day-to-day operations, keeping up with the continual flow of work is exhausting. With limited time, one aspect of a business that often gets pushed to the side is marketing.
The key is to focus your marketing efforts where they can make the biggest impact -- the digital space. While it may not be feasible to try to compete in every aspect of the digital marketing, there are important areas where a small business can still gain an advantage over its larger competitors.
Mobile Responsive Website Design. If your website isn’t optimized for mobile platforms, then you are probably missing the mark with a good chunk of your customers. Smartphones are becoming the primary access device for web browsing worldwide so it’s important to offer a seamless user experience between both mobile and desktop.
Geotargeting for Mobile: Facebook offers the ability to serve targeted, hyperlocal mobile ads to your customer demographic. The best part of this service is that ad delivery is based on location. Since consumers are consistently utilizing mobile devices, this offers a unique way to reach potential customers in specific geographic areas who otherwise might not have found their way to your website.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO). There are a few key steps any local business can take to improve its rank in local search:
localize your website by including the city, country or region name naturally throughout your site.
Citation Building: A local citation is any mention of your business on the web; it is any combination of your company name, phone number, address, zip or postal code, and website address. Citations in SEO are a key factor in improving your local search results.
Claim your Google My Business page to help your business display on important Google Services such as Local Search, Maps and Google+ pages.
Quality backlinks from local newspapers, bloggers and business associations, as well as citations, can all help improve your search visibility.
4. Video Content. Creating engaging video content for platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat can help you effectively reach customers while building brand awareness. When creating videos, it’s important to consider how and where you will be posting them. With the rising popularity of the “story” feature on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, vertically shot videos have become more the norm to fit these formats.
5. Influencer Marketing. Continuing to rise throughout 2018, influencer marketing when done properly, can increase your brand or business’ awareness, loyalty, foster organic conversations on social media and boost your sales! You don’t need to do everything to be successful with Influencer Marketing. Start with a couple of basic steps
Focus on Influencers that actually connect to your customer base or the prospective customers you’re trying to reach. Give influencers some creative freedom so they can be authentic in what they do for you.
Focus on Platforms where you customers are. You don’t need to be everywhere.
Ultimately with everything you do, you should know if you are actually getting results and how much it all costs to get these results. Measure key metrics with programs like Google Analytics. Learn to adjust what you are doing based on what the data tells you about the effectiveness and efficiency of your efforts.
You may not have the time or resources to explore every digital marketing strategy, but at a minimum, make the time to place your digital marketing focus on these 5 key areas to compete effectively as a small business in the digital space.