One of the biggest ways to find success as a small business in the modern marketplace is to have a good digital marketing strategy. It can be a fast track to quick wins and growing your brand online, which is where the majority of your potential customers/clients/readers will spend their time in 2019. As such, try to keep a few of the following points in mind when starting out any digital marketing campaign for small businesses. As even small successes can turn into long-term wins in almost no time at all.
Competitor Research
It sounds simple, but if there is a business doing extremely well in your niche market, then replicating that success should be one of your main targets. Or at the very least put forward a strong line of competition to try and remove their dominance. This is where good competitor research needs to come into play.
Competitors will likely be doing one or two things really well if they dominate in your niche, it’s very rare any business does everything well. Identifying this area of opportunity and acting on it, then, should be your priority first and foremost. Once this has had the desired effect, then it becomes possible to move beyond this and start trying to compete against the areas they do well in also.
For example, say in a scenario that your competitor is extremely good at creating content and social sharing. They have a big social audience, everyone loves their content on these platforms and it’s the source of their success. The weakness here, then, is obviously not as much traffic to their website and perhaps poor search results via search engines such as Google. Excelling in search, then, should be your first point of attack as this is that theoretical company’s weakness.
It’s a simple strategy, but one which could be very effective. Once you have good traffic via the web and good search positions, then it will be more possible to compete with the competitor on social. Even if you don’t, creating valuable content is important so you can compete with on that level at least.
SEO
As mentioned above, appearing well in search results can be one of the best ways to achieve success in the early stages of your digital marketing campaigns. Especially as a new company. Chances are, with the right strategy, you can turn no website traffic into much more.
The real value of SEO for local business is to target niche keywords, which can attract traffic. This may be at lower levels than your competitors to begin with, but it’s all about starting to gain a presence on Google and evolving from there. You can’t go after keywords with a high volume from day one, it’s all about putting your first foot forward before running to catch up with everyone else in your industry. So, instead of targeting keywords with thousands of searches per month – when using tools such as Google Keyword Planner – target something that is in the hundreds instead.
Furthermore, don’t undervalue Google My Business as a tool for small business, especially if the traffic you want to attract is largely on a local basis. Optimising your GMB page with your address, services, pictures and other such details can really boost your web presence on a local level. Especially if the title of your business includes the keyword you most want to be searched for. It’s not exactly something Google advocates, but it does work.
At the very least, one of the things which you need to try and rank for as quickly as possible is your own brand. Not ranking for your brand can really detract the value from branded search and so it is vital to rank for this as quickly as possible.
PPC
This won’t always be financially viable as a small business, but sometimes a cleverly run paid campaign can put you above the competition – literally!
For a small business, PPC is particularly tempting if you don’t yet rank for anything naturally with the help of SEO (which can be a much more long-winded form of digital marketing success). And the act of picking out a few keywords, setting a budget and putting it live seems simple enough to be easy. But, not knowing what you’re doing can quickly turn into a loss of money with no real return. Which is why putting together a strategy for this part of digital marketing is vital.
First and foremost, picking keywords isn’t always that simple. More importantly, picking the wrong keywords can ruin your campaign before it even gets a chance to really start. The biggest errors are choosing keywords with no search volume, that are too competitive or are simply not relevant for your business. This can lead you to spend too much money or none at all, so you may never even know where you’ve gone wrong before throwing in the PPC towel. Smart keyword research is ensuring all of these factors aren’t an issue, while matching keywords to your budget in a sensible manner. If you can’t pay $20 per click in the long run, pick a more attainable $2 per click keyword and eventually you might be able to afford the bigger click.
When it comes to paid, it’s also important to consider the many ways in which you can narrow down your target audience. Particularly, the factor of geography. You can target a specific area rather than everyone, meaning that the success parameters for your PPC campaigns aren’t necessarily as difficult to achieve on a local level.
PPC can be quite difficult – so, keep in mind some simple tips and you should be okay!
On the whole, there are a number of ways you can develop your digital marketing strategy in order to work for small business – all without knowing a great deal technically or having to break the bank. Keep these few simple steps in mind and you should be able to achieve some good successes online for your small business.
Richard Meadow is a writer that works on topics in relation to employment, business operations and Property Management Manchester. He is always interested in new subjects and articles to read about and enjoys writing about the researched subjects.