Entering the world of digital marketing can be quite overwhelming for small businesses and start-ups. There are just too many choices and it is bound to be confusing for a newbie. Further, considering you own a small business, it can be assumed that you don’t have a huge chest full of wealth that you can splurge on your digital marketing campaign. So budget crunch can be another roadblock that can appear to be a roadblock for launching a successful digital marketing campaign for your small business. However, all of this doesn’t need to be so overwhelming. Once you narrow it down a little , creating a digital marketing strategy for your small business will no longer appear to be a humongous task. Here are some guidelines for you to create a successful digital media campaign for your small business.
Understand Digital Marketing
Before you jump into this vast sea of digital marketing understand its basics. Does your company need digital marketing? Who are your target audiences? Do you have a goal for your marketing campaigns? On which platforms do you want to advertise on? What are the digital marketing trends for the current year or the upcoming years. These are the basic questions that you need to have answers too before you delve deeper in your marketing campaigns.
Build and Optimize Your Website
The first step towards creating a successful digital marketing campaign is to create and optimize a website for your brand or business. These are the things that you must keep in mind while building and optimizing your website
- Choose the right web developer who can furnish a quality website within your budget
- Focus on your SEO. Paid ads on Google or other search engines are fine but it is very important that your website ranks organically on a search engine. SEO can play a very important role in driving traffic to your website as well aid in building your brand image
- Make your website mobile friendly. Most people access the internet through mobile these days. Hence you must ensure that people have a seamless experience while going through your website on their phones
Review Your Website
Building your website is not a one time job. There are things to do after your build your website.
- Make sure to keep your website updated with regular content
- Have independent UX audit at regular intervals
- Keep up with the latest trends and algorithms
- Try to have a guest input section later on, preferably a guest blog.
Email and Text Marketing
Despite the increasing popularity of social media marketing , email and text marketing still remain reliable platforms to get significant return on investment. However, there are certain things one must keep in mind before starting text and email marketing. Be sure of your target audience. Try to focus on customers who have visited your website, bought or availed your service or may have interest to do so. Secondly, do not be too frequent in sending your texts and emails and structure them properly so that they do not appear to be spammy.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing has become an indispensible part of digital marketing. With an increasing number of people engaging with social media, every passing day, it is important that your business is well seen on social media. However, one needs to come up with strategies that will help in ensuring highest rate of conversion and maximum return on investment. If you are an E-commerce website and you specialise in selling consumer goods like dresses, jewellery , wedding cakes and so on the Pinterest is a great platform for you to focus on. People visit Pinterest to get inspired and it actually guarantees more conversion as opposed to platforms like facebook as far as e-shopping is considered. Instagram is a great platform is great if your target audience is mostly youth. It is great to have your presence across all or most social media platforms. But try to focus more on those which you feel will maximise conversion.
Secondly you need to decide on your campaign objectives. If you are a new business, the main objectives of your campaigns should be increasing your brand awareness. As you grow, then try to move your audience down the sales funnel.
Analyse
It is not enough to simply launch a marketing and advertising campaign but one has to monitor it closely too to see how are they performing. Use Google analytics and other social media analytics to understand which kind of content is working for you and which type aren’t. There is no one shot formula that will guarantee success. It’s all about trial and error. Split test campaigns on social media to see which is giving more returns. Try out different demographics while targeting audience. Try out different contents while advertising. Monitor these campaigns through your analytics and then gradually you will be figure out the strategy that works for you the most .
Identify Your Gaps and Work on Them
Understand that digital marketing is an extremely dynamic field, the rules of which keep changing everyday. This means you need to engage with it and keep up with it regularly. Once you do that you will be able to identify the gaps in your digital marketing campaigns. Is your website up to date? Does it have enough content? Are your social media campaigns working alright? Are you keeping up with the latest algorithms? Is your SEO optimized? These are the questions that you need to be asking yourself regularly. And if you are being able to identify the gaps in your marketing strategy, you need to start working on them. Consider outsourcing some of the jobs to experts. For example you might want to hire a social media marketing expert of you want to optimize your social media marketing.
Digital marketing can indeed be quite overwhelming since it’s comparatively new yet it seems indispensible in today’s world. But instead of being apprehensive just be adventurous enough to try and experiment till you get it right.
Mary Jones is the co-founder & editor-in-chief at TopMyGrades, which focuses on Content Marketing Strategy for clients from the Education industry in the US, Canada & UK. Mary has conducted a series of webinars for AssignmentEssayHelp on online tutoring.She has extensive content editing experience and has worked with MSNBC, NewsCred& Scripted. She has also authored blogs on Lifehack.org, Wn.com, Medium.com, Minds.com and many more digital publications.