To start with our today’s topic, I should say that there are a lot of techniques that can be helpful for your business. However, if you are a small business owner, you should not implement all techniques at the same time as it can lead to distracted attention and loss of control over your marketing activities. Thus, at the starting point, you have to identify the most suitable strategies for your business.
Analyzing many use cases of small businesses’ skyrocket growth, I can identify ten common tactics that may be helpful.
So, let’s start.
1. Video Content Creation for YouTube
One of the greatest online marketing strategies for small businesses is YouTube video marketing. Why? YouTube has been a rapidly developing social network for the past few years, therefore, it opens various opportunities for small business owners to get connected with the audience as much as possible. Over 400 hours of video content are uploaded to YouTube every minute. You need to create your YouTube video marketing strategy to promote your company and make its name remarkable.
YouTube’s algorithm serves to provide the most personalized content to its users. YouTube analyzes viewer behavior on videos watched, average time spent, click-through rates, engagement (likes, dislikes, comments), and other explicit feedback submissions among hundreds of statistics. Videos have been proved to be far more effective marketing tools than written content and text to speech software provides a cost efficient means of creating this content for YouTube.
Hence, it is clear that using YouTube for nurturing and boosting business is a great idea to go with.
Benefits of YouTube Video Marketing:
- YouTube’s algorithms provide the most personalized content to users
- Videos make people remember your brand easily
- Nowadays, people spend more time watching videos than reading content
2. Webinar Production
A webinar can be a highly effective digital marketing tool – signaling to your target audience that your company not only sells a product or service, but it is also an expert in its field and is confident about sharing that expertise. It should be noted that webinars provide immediate value as it attracts participants who agree to share their contact details in exchange for the helpful information you’ll be providing. This makes webinars an extremely effective lead-generation tool. Besides, webinars provide long-term value as you can post the recorded version as on-demand content on your website, thereby turning a live, one-time event into an ongoing, lead-generating offer.
Benefits of Webinar Production:
- Webinars provide immediate value as it attracts participants who agree to share their contact details in exchange
- You can post the recorded version as on-demand content on your website
3. SEO and SEM are Important
Search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) are the basis of online marketing for small businesses. SEO lets your business rank higher on the search engine result page (SERP). Search engine optimization is one of the most significant sources to attract users for many companies, especially for small businesses. It can bring up to 60% of the organic traffic to a website. A great point, that there’s plenty of room for a small business to rank at the top of the search results if a company invests in SEO and content marketing as a tactic to boost traffic. Check out how you can easily increase your sales with SEO.
Benefits of SEO and SEM:
- With good search optimization, your business may rank on the top of the first result page
- SEO can bring up to 60% of the organic traffic to a website
- You can be ahead of your competition if you use SEO and SEM as the online marketing strategy.
4. Press Releases Publications
Writing press releases is another great online marketing strategy for small businesses. By publishing press releases, you announce your new products or the existing product updates through various media sites. Cooperating with other blogs, newspapers, and other popular media sources, you can take your brand reach globally.
Benefits of Press Releases:
- Press releases give the privilege to reach the target audience easily
- It is a cost-effective method to create brand awareness
- A press release can attract investors, as well as it benefits you in the long run.
5. Email Marketing
Another fundamental online marketing strategy for small businesses includes email marketing. Usually your website visitors don’t instantly become leads and go for buying your service. Therefore, asking them for their contact or email can be a great way to interact with them later. A “lead magnet” together with knowledge of how to scrape google search results can be a great tool to get potential customers’ information. This is where you can approach personalized campaigns by offering the visitors useful information. There are some of the examples you can propose:
- Requesting a demo
- Contacting sales
- Downloading an ebook or guide
- Downloading your app
If the strategy works well, you can then get the chance to share your authenticity or reliability to the customers by serving them useful content by email.
Benefits of Email Marketing:
- It is low cost and easy to reach globally
- Immediate communication can help build customer relationships, your brand, and your credibility.
- It improves your visibility, sales, and value.
6. Pay Attention to Website Design
Your website undoubtedly says a lot about your company. Thus, you should always devote time or even money (if it takes) to improve your website. As the website is a presentation of products and services provided, it should be neat and understandable for your potential customers. Hence, this is one of the main points to improve, if you want to attract more customers.
I should mention that you may see your website design as a perfect one, but it is recommended to show it to professionals or some of your colleagues to find details to improve. Hiring a web design agency is also a good solution and investment. After all, investment is what it takes to grow business! So go for it in the first place.
Benefits of Great Website Design:
- Great website design gives the best first impression
- If your website navigates customers to the right page and delivers the right message, your conversion rate is higher
- Smart web design attracts more customers, thus more revenue is generated.
7. Engage Users With Contests and Giveaways
Customers like to get entertained rather than just reading the boring stuff. So holding contests and making giveaways is a great way to keep them entertained and involved in your brand development. Using this online marketing strategy, you can post unique deals for customers. Be sure to serve your promotion purpose from the customers in exchange for a free product or service. This strategy can help to convert regular followers to regular clients or buyers, as well as to boost your sales.
Benefits of Contests and Giveaways:
- It helps grow your network and generate new leads
- You can increase sales and subscribers through giveaways easily
- The fans and followers get attracted thereby increasing the engagement.
8. Make Relevant Content for Your Clients
According to research, 55% of marketers take blog content creation as the top priority. So, promoting your business through the right kind of content is a great way to increase sales. Make sure to create worthy stuff in your blogs or articles. Do not forget to create video interview recordings, podcasts, infographics, e-books, etc. Of course, your content should be unique and quality. Нou have to ensure that the topic is relevant and SEO optimized as good content is the only key to build trust with the target audience.
Benefits of Making Relevant Content:
- It creates loyalty and trust between customers and brand
- It helps to generate more valid traffic
- Content is easily shareable so you can reach more audience
9. Do Not Forget About Social Media
As mentioned above also, social media is managed actively by the people; you also can’t afford to be inactive on social media. Merely posting about a brand on social media and not staying active on it might not work for you. Be sure of providing valuable conversations with the people so that they can gain trust in you and your company. And as a result, your following links will be easily clickable by the followers from next time.
Benefits of Social Media Marketing:
- You will be able to track any new followers and thereby create more strategies to grow the business
- The more you engage with the audience, the more you’ll understand what they genuinely require
- Engagement with the target audience is directly proportional to how active you are on social networks like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.
10. Run Affiliate Program
Another important online strategy for marketing business is the affiliate program. It refers to encouraging and incentivizing influencers like bloggers, YouTubers, or other media content creators for posting your links on their channels or sites. This is another great online strategy for increasing sales. It has been found that over 50% of traffic on mobile devices comes from affiliate marketing. Also, 15%-30% of sales are generated through Affiliate programs for advertisers. All in all, you need to give a commission to the affiliates from the revenue that you generate through the sales because of posting referral links on their platform.
Benefits of Affiliate Programs:
- With collaborations and partnerships, earning profit becomes pretty much easier.
- People know that affiliated content is genuine and therefore they stay through it.
- It can be easily tracked like click-through views or rates of website view etc.
Conclusion
While more and more companies are spending more and more money on digital marketing, free methods are still incredibly effective. I described 10 digital marketing tactics that should be a good basis for your businesses. You can take advantage of the best free marketing tools to collaborate globally and compete against big businesses.
What digital marketing techniques work best for you?