Digital Marketing Ideas for Small Business

No matter how cool a product or service you came up with, no one’s gonna discover its benefits without at least a little promotion. Any business needs a marketing strategy. You’re not going to get many sales unless you work on its representation and your product gets in front of people.

 

Thankfully, there was no better era for advertising a business than the one we’re witnessing today. Earlier you had to print out some flyers or put out an ad on a billboard to promote your product or service and make it visible. Today people don’t even need to leave their room to get acquainted with your brand and make a purchase.

 

Small businesses usually don’t have a specialized marketing team or much to invest in advertising. While good marketing is one of the main keys to success along with the quality of your product. Thanks to the internet, now there’s a wide variety of tools to advertise a small business available for everyone. The good news is, some of them are absolutely free. 

 

The first thing you should do is create your buyer persona. It will allow you to build at least some sort of marketing strategy. You need to define your target audience by building a portrait of your average potential customer. What demographic characteristics do they have? Why would your product be interesting and beneficial to them? Where can you reach them: offline or online, on what social media? Without having answers to these questions and at least a general tactic you’ll be working blindly and waste more time and money.  

 

As it was mentioned, there are free ways to promote your small business. I would like to outline both free and those requiring at least minimum investment. Here are some of the best ways to advertise a small business for free:

 

1. Create a Google My Business Account

If you are a local brick-and-mortar business, use Google to promote your business. Set up a business listing for your company on search engines. Google listing serves as a prominent promotional tool. This will allow your business to appear in Google Maps and search results. It means you’ll get more local brand recognition and eventually increase conversions.

 

To use that option you first need to verify your business on Google. Fill out your company name, contacts, website, social media links, hours of work, business address, and provide photos for better representation. Listings in the Google directory also give an opportunity for users to leave a review on your business. Use that to showcase your clients’ testimonials.

 

2. Create a website

Who thinks they don’t need a website? Every business needs a website! Though social media is striving to rank first, googling a business’s website is the first choice for almost any person. It’s the source of information for your potential clients. There they can learn what you’re selling, what your pricing is, find your clients’ testimonials, or find a way to contact you (should they have any product-related questions).

 

Your website is both the place where you can drive traffic from other resources and the source of constant organic promotion. A professional-looking website is a huge asset to your promotional strategy.

 

You don’t need to be an IT guy to create a website nowadays. Easy drag and drop website builders like WordPress, Tilda or Wix will help you quickly create a website for free.

 

Keep in mind the importance of a quality landing page. Read an article from our blog to learn about what a landing page is and how to create a well-converting one.

 

3. Optimize your website for search engines

SEO optimization of a website, roughly speaking, means making it appear in search results among the first. Even if you’re not an SEO expert yourself or don’t have one up your sleeve, there are still some things you can do to rank higher in search results:

• find keywords relevant to your business and use them in your headings and descriptions. You can use the Google keyword planner. If you’re not sure what to look for, first try googling phrases you think people might use to look for your type of product. Go through the search results to get an idea of what words other similar businesses are using to target the relevant audience; 
• write a company blog. You don’t necessarily need to be a professional writer to do that. Provide little guides related to your product to explain how to use what you’re selling. The essential point is using the keywords you dug up in your articles. Thus you increase the chance to become visible in search results; 
• fill in the alt and title for the images you’re using in your blog and landing pages. Thus they will appear in the images section of search engines expanding your reach.

 

4. Build Social media presence and interact with your audience on social media

The popularity of social media speaks for itself. Connecting with customers through social media channels is probably the most popular and cost-effective marketing tactic. It’s good practice to engage with your potential customers where they’re spending most of their time.

 

First of all, create a business page on Facebook, Instagram, maybe Twitter if relevant. LinkedIn is more specific to B2B businesses but still don’t ignore this one. It may be useful in terms of connecting with people in your sphere and joining professional discussions or finding employees.

 

Your pages should contain your business logo, contacts, business address, comprehensive description of your brand. Also, make sure to remain consistent throughout all your social media profiles. You should stick to one style, color scheme and tone of voice.

 

One more tip here: when it comes to success on social media, regularity is the key. Choose one schedule for your posting that will be in your power to follow.

 

5. Networking on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a great place for online networking. It’s social media for recruitment purposes and for professional audiences to network. There you can connect with potential customers, join communities relevant to your business, find business partners or employees, join discussions with like-minded people to share experience and learn some hacks from your sphere, including the marketing aspect.

 

6. Referral promotion

In the beginning, anyone you know can become your “affiliate”. Word of mouth recommendations are often the best advertisement. You can ask your friends, relatives, acquaintances, employees or anyone you know if they or someone they know might be interested in your type of product or service. This doesn’t guarantee great success but can be a great starting point for that matter. 

 

7. Influencer marketing

There’s an ever-growing interest in lifestyle bloggers. People are getting addicted to following them on social media. For this reason, influencer marketing is widely used to advertise a small business.

 

It doesn’t have to be too expensive. Micro-influencers are the best choice right now.  They usually have a small but loyal following that looks up to them and heeds their advice.

 

8. Use clients’ feedback

Ask customers to leave reviews on Google or your website. You can simply contact your customers through direct messages in social media profiles in case they’ve made a purchase or interacted with your profile there.

In addition, you can send out sample products in return for feedback. Just be perceptive to all kinds of comments both positive and negative. Positive feedback can be displayed on your website or social media. Negative feedback, if justified, will help you grow.

 

9. Run a contest or a giveaway

Giveaways are a popular way to grow your following and increase your engagement on Instagram. Here’re what you should do to run a giveaway:

• Select the prize. Here’s the reason a giveaway can backfire on you: if you choose the wrong kind of prize. If you’re giving away a MacBook, it’s going to attract all sorts of people wrong for your business. You might get lots of new followers, high engagement, Instagram algorithms will boost your posts to the top. But after the contest is over, you’ll see a steep drop which will harm your reputation on the platform. It’s important to take appropriateness into consideration. Are you selling kidswear? Offer a romper or a winter suit.
  Also, your prize should be of value to users. Meaning it should be worth doing what you’re asking in exchange.
• Define the conditions. It’s what participants will need to do to enter the contest. You can ask them to like a few of your last posts, comment with some emoji or a special phrase, follow an account, or maybe proceed to your website to fill in the lead generation form. Then you’ll be able to generate a contact list for future retargeting campaigns. 
• Set the deadline and rules. Can you ship the prize only to people in your city or country? Inform about it in advance. Determine the age limits if necessary. As for the deadline, build on how long it can take to complete the action. For example, in the case of a creative task like taking a picture or making a video, it can take up to 2 weeks. 
• Choose the contest hashtag. First of all, check that it’s not used by anyone, even by you - the hashtag should be specific to each campaign. This will help you see the participants and evaluate engagement rate in case the task was connected with user-generated content. Make sure the hashtag is easy to spell and recognize.

 

10. Download gates

Download gates tools are based on follow-to-download strategy. You need to offer some prize in exchange for some action. It’s like a giveaway in terms of the objectives but powered by special download gates software. They help you create a landing page the link to which can be placed anywhere where your main audience is.

 

On that landing page, users are usually offered to follow/like/share/leave contact information and after a few steps they get the desired: a discount, a free trial, a downloadable material, or an album release.

 

Check out this article to learn more about how download gates work and the list of the best ones to choose from both free and paid options.

 

11. Guest posting

One of the effective ways to increase your reach is guest posting. Guest posting is basically when you write a post or an article on somebody’s social media profile or website. This allows you to both raise your brand awareness and build backlinks to your website.

 

A backlink is a link leading to your website that was placed on another person or brand’s website. For backlinks you should choose resources with good authority. Backlinks will be a great asset for your SEO.

 

You can write an article tackling the burning question from your industry or describing the benefits of your type of product. Besides promotional purposes it should bring informative value.

 

Here are the options that will require investment:

12. Pay per click search ads

In a PPC model you pay for each time someone clicks on your ad. Google is the most popular search engine that gets lots of traffic and which you can choose for your first PPC ads to advertise your small business.

 

Here you will need to find the right keywords that you can rank for. Such an ad will appear at the top of the search results when someone types in your keywords. They should be relevant to your product and highly-targeted so as to bring you the best click-through rate.

 

13. Social media advertising

If you feel like just being present on social media platforms and promoting your business organically is not enough, you can implement social media marketing. Facebook, for example, with its 2.90 billion active users monthly is the perfect platform to showcase your product. Facebook ads have advanced targeting options that will help you show your ads to the relevant audience. In addition, Facebook ads can be placed both on Facebook and Instagram.

 

You can follow our step-by-step guide on how to create an advertising account and launch your first campaign with the help of Facebook ads.

 

14. Email marketing

Email marketing is still a powerful way to maintain a strong relationship with your customer base. When your customer base is too big to address each client directly, you can launch an email or SMS campaign. Email marketing is probably one of the most effective ways to reach out to your target audience.

 

For running an email campaign you need to have a contact list. It can be your real clients that have already bought from you. You can send out new promotional offers, an update to your product range, offer them coupons for a discount.

 

To reach potential clients with emails you can create a lead generation form on your landing page and collect users’ contacts. For example, by offering them something in return like a subscription to your newsletter. As the first step you can introduce your offer to new leads. You can also use the download gates tool for generating a contact list of prospects that we talked about earlier.

 

15. Offline trade shows

Consider exhibiting at trade shows to promote your product on the local level. Yes, taking part in trade shows usually requires an entry fee. Along with online networking, trade shows are a great way to make valuable connections.

 

Do your research to find an event specific to your industry, prepare the presentation of your product and be ready to pitch your product to the participants. 

 

Conclusion

In order to survive and grow you need to be aware and implement online marketing strategies for small businesses. Whether you do it with or without money, promoting a small business online is essential to get customers and sales.