Digital marketing is a complicated field with many different facets. It can be difficult for small businesses to know where to focus their efforts.
From your website to your social media channels to paid advertising, digital marketing can be a daunting prospect for many small businesses, so much so that they choose to do nothing at all.
If you have the budget for it, you should always try to engage with a professional digital marketing agency. At the very least, they can conduct some basic audits for your business and assess the digital platforms that are likely to yield the best return on investment (ROI).
Even if you have to do the work yourself, or in-house, an audit carried out by an agency can really help you to focus on the platforms that will deliver the best ROI and connect you with your target audience.
A digital marketing agency will review your current platforms including your website and social media channels and carry out some competitor analysis to uncover your areas of strength and potential gaps in the market.
From there, they can provide you with a digital marketing plan that can be the basis for your work moving forward.
What digital platforms should you focus on?
No matter where you choose to focus your efforts online, the one thing that is an absolute essential is a good website. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, but it does need to meet the needs of your prospective customers and do so in a way that is easy to access.
Choosing the right platform is an important step when you are starting out with a new website build. There are now a number of options available that can be built using templates to keep the cost down and these templates are constantly improving to meet the requirements of Google and other search engines.
Shopify and WordPress are two of the most common CMS platforms depending on the type of website you are looking to build and both have plugins that can be added on in order to help with things like search engine optimisation, page speed and schema markup.
Search engine optimisation (SEO)
An integral part of a website build is ensuring it is optimised for search engines. SEO involves optimising both the content on your website and technical elements in order to give you the best possible chance of ranking well on Google and other search engines.
SEO is another complicated practice and if you can, you should seek the help of a specialist agency, certainly to get you up and running. This is particularly true when building a new website as you want to make sure that all the technical elements are as strong as possible when it goes live including page speed, mobile-friendliness and schema markup.
Once launched, there are things you can do in-house to improve your SEO like creating high-quality content, getting backlinks from other relevant websites, and optimising your product and service pages to target the most relevant keywords for your business.
SEO is a long-term strategy that can continue to deliver a strong ROI without you needing to pay for that traffic once you establish strong ranking positions for high volume keywords.
Social Media
Social media has become a crucial digital marketing tactic for businesses large and small over the past decade with the emergence of more and more platforms. Facebook and Twitter were two of the original social media platforms that businesses really jumped on board with, however, today, they are joined by the likes of Instagram, TikTok, Whatsapp, Pinterest, Messenger, YouTube, Snapchat and more.
Knowing which of these platforms to invest in is probably the most important decision for your business. For most small businesses, it’s impossible to do them all well. That’s why it’s crucial to work out which platforms your audience is using and decide which ones will be the most relevant.
It is better to do one platform really well than try and manage six or seven and do a poor job on all of them.
Paid Advertising
Paid advertising is a way of driving visitors to your website quickly, however, for most small businesses, it is not a long term strategy due to the cost involved. That being said, if you can generate a really positive ROI from your online advertising, it could be a viable option over time.
Typically, however, online advertising is used to generate brand awareness and drive visitors to a website that doesn’t yet have a strong organic presence. It allows you to appear on page one of the search results without having to wait for your pages to organically rank there.
It can, however, be very expensive, especially if you are targeting keywords with a lot of competition or some strong competitors as it’s a case that the highest bid gets the best position on the page and therefore drives the most traffic.
Paid advertising should be used in conjunction with other tactics and for small businesses, it should be used for targeted campaigns in order to maximise your budget.
Most of the worlds’ biggest brands use a combination of these tactics in order to drive more traffic to their website and there is a lot you can learn from them. Betway Online Casino is a great example of a business that uses its digital marketing platforms to great effect, combining SEO, social media and content marketing with targeted paid campaigns in order to drive more traffic to its website, especially in emerging markets.
Lululemon is another business that is well known for its digital marketing tactics, maximising its outstanding rapport with its customers in order to drive further engagement online through community-sourced content.
Whilst you may not have the budget to copy these big brands, they can give you the inspiration for things that your business can be doing online, although maybe at a smaller scale.