If you are a small business owner and looking to implement online business tactics then you are in the right place. This Digital Marketing for Small Business Guide will help you start generating traffic, leads and sales to your business.
We all know so many businesses are struggling and going down these days due to Covid-19. Only a few businesses are thriving even in these difficult times.
Most of the businesses that are succeeding even in these difficult time have Digital Marketing as backbone of their businesses.
So it is very much essential to implement online marketing strategies into your business right now. This is the reason Digital marketing is booming and now it is at it's best according to Google Trends.
If you just look at the graph above that shows the previous 1-year history of Digital Marketing. This clearly shows that all the businesses are slowly moving towards implementing Digital Marketing tactics into their businesses.
With fast growing mobile technology and cheaper data prices are huge contributors to rapid growth of Digital Marketing.
Recently, Bloomberg shared an article on this exact topic on Bloomberg Businessweek. Especially emphasizing the importance of Digital Marketing for Small Business.
In second quarter of 2020 online sales has increased by 30%.
It seems people are now clearly comfortable buying stuff online. So there is no excuses why not to start selling online.
So now you are convinced, but what next? How to proceed?
Follow these exact step by step process to succeed online.
In online space you have plenty of options to get visitors and sale to your business. But none of them work if you don't plan your journey right way.
So the very first thing you need to do is define your main objective.
Not all businesses are equal so we cannot use every single digital marketing strategy into every business model.
To make this clear
Let's say you are selling shoes before and you want to sell them online now. So your main objective is to sell shoes. Is that really possible that people can buy shoes online and get it delivered to their doorstep?
Yes, right?
So now you can simply create an online eCommerce store and start driving visitors to your store. This would work really well.
Whereas if you a car showroom owner and want to sell them online, then it is much more difficult to sell cars online than selling shoes.
So for this specific you need to implement completely different strategies to succeed.
For this reason you must define your business objective correctly. Otherwise don't start online.
If you have any difficulty syncing between online marketing tactics and to your business goal, you can always contact us for help.
So now let's stop here. You know what your goals and objectives are.
It's time to get into stuff you badly needed to start your online store.
There are some things you must need before starting selling online.
These are more basic and core things you need to start online. If you are a technical person a knows anything about the website and building websites then you can build your own website/online store with WordPress. Otherwise, you should approach a Digital Marketing agency like ours to build a website for you.
So how much it will cost you to start online?
For a domain name it costs $12 per year and for hosting it costs anywhere between $50 to $100. Choosing a hosting account it a little tricky because there are many people promoting false hosting providers just because they get more affiliate commissions. So don't fall for those.
When it comes to the website you can build your own website or you can hire an agency or outsource from Upwork. There are a ton of good developers out there who can build a beautiful website for you and costs around $200 to $500 depends on no of pages and experience they have.
One last important thing you need is an Email marketing solution such as Mailchimp.
Can you guess how much it costs?
$0
Yes, Zero dollars to get started with it. Of course, there are some limitations to it such as, you can only add 2000 contacts to your email lists and can send 10,000 emails per month.
But if you get 2000 members into your list means you are already doing so much better and you'll have no problems upgrading to the next level.
So, Mailchimp is the best way to start collecting emails in the beginning.
As I said earlier not all businesses are equal. In other terms you can't treat every disease with same medicine.
So what are the different types of marketing/online advertising options available?
Here is the list:
Simply means that if someone searches for your service on Google-like search engines your website/webpages should appear on top of the organic results.
It sounds simple but very complicated when looking into details of it.
Google considers 200+ ranking factors to rank your website on top of search engine results pages(SERP). But it is not always possible to fulfill all the requirements. For example, if you take a website that is 10 years and ranking for one of your keywords and done a good job satisfying the need of searcher then it extremely difficult to outrank that website.
And in that case, you cannot control the age of your website so you are already down a point there. In that case, we will start looking into optimizing the remaining areas of the improvement.
Here are the few Google ranking factors:
Although it is very difficult to rank websites on Google especially for very competitive keywords you must consider this as a long term goal to succeed.
It usually takes around 6 months to 1 year to start seeing results so patience is the key to succeed.
As the name said you are going to pay for driving visitors to your website. This is the fastest way to get customers. See if you are looking for free ways to drive traffic then you need to invest your time and if you choose to invest some money then you can start getting customers within hours.
So how it works?
Let's say someone searches for your services on Google then your website link will be placed at the top of the Google SERP. Here is an example of how an ad looks like.
There few major companies in this PPC advertising such as Google, Bing, Facebook, etc. As you can see in this screenshot there are two types of ads, Shopping ads, and Search ads. Besides these types, there are few more ad types such as Banner ads, Video ads, etc.
PPC always doesn't have to be in the same way such as when someone clicks your ad then only you will get charged but also on CPM (Cost per 1000 impressions) based i.e. only when 1000 people see your ad then you will get charged irrespective of clicks you get.
Of course these days even PPC has huge competition. So you need to plan your PPC campaign the right way.
Social media one of the best ways to drive a huge amount of traffic to your website. If you plan it the right way you can drive 1000's of highly targeted visitors to your website.
The good thing about social media is that you can do it in both ways paid and freeways. If you choose freeways you need to spend little time getting some traction.
The big networks such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok are extremely cheap to get very laser targeted visitors. So there is no excuse not to promote your services/products on social media.
One very easy way to get instant traffic to your website is with an Influencer marketing strategy. This means that you need to find some page or group and pay them to post your ad on their page or group. Influencer marketing is extremely cheap and easy to start.
These are just three main ways to drive traffic ways to drive visitors to your website. But there are so many other types of sources such as YouTube marketing, Pinterest, Quora, etc are also can drive a good amount of quality traffic.
Now you are getting some visitors to your website. But if you don't have good marketing flow to convert those visitors into paying customers you can end up being loosing all those potential customers.
So what we should look for to convert them?
These are a few major types of tactics to convert the website visitors into paying customers. So make sure you don't neglect them.
No business is going to sustain any longer if you are just sending traffic and not looking into more details of what's happening after.
So you need some kind of an application that tracks all the activity on your website, such as how many visitors on the website, how many converted, how many left the website, why they are leaving the website, what browser they are using, what OS they are using, their age, gender, etc. Luckily Google has a free tool for this called Google Analytics. Installation is very simple, you can do it in just 5 minutes and start tracking all the visitors.
Once you gather some data on Google Analytics you should start seeing the overall performance of your campaigns and user behaviors.
If you are able to properly analyze that data and able to satisfy the customers you can really see fast growth in your business.
It is very difficult to find the right set of winning campaigns that suits your business. But if you are bale to find one that means you are already succeeded. Because all you have to do is just make multiple of that strategy that is working for you that will eventually multiplies with customers and sales.
So once you find something is working for you, don't just sit and look. Try to duplicate it, try to make a good version of the existing one. This is the only way to get better and better at online business. Every successful story you see on the internet are started small just like the strategy that I explained and they just duplicated it multiple times.
So, you have a clear plan now, to get your business online and start making sales.
But, what to do next?
Take action!
You don't have any excuse not to start implementing Digital Marketing strategies into your business.
It is cheap, easy, measurable, and profitable to start.
All these years you may or may not consider selling online. But this time, it is a must to have an online presence and to survive the race. Because more and more people are buying stuff online. As in the Bloomberg article with this pandemic online sales are increased by 30% with increased revenue of $210 billion dollars.
If you need any help you always contact us and we are always happy to help you.