Marketing

Looking for Fresh Ways to Grow? Check Out These Digital Marketing Tips!

Do you feel like you’re doing everything you can to market your small business, but aren’t seeing the results you want? If so, you’re not alone. Many small business owners struggle to find the right tools and strategies for marketing their companies online.

We understand that you wear a lot of hats. You’re responsible for marketing your business, generating leads, closing sales, and delivering top-notch customer service—just to mention a few of your daily duties. It’s a lot to handle!

But don’t worry – we’ve got you covered. In this blog post, we’ll share some of the best digital marketing tips and tools for small businesses. Implement even a few of these ideas and you’ll start seeing results!

Start With a Digital Marketing Strategy

If you start your digital marketing efforts by throwing spaghetti against the wall to see what might stick, you are wasting your time. The truth is, we don’t have to guess at marketing. We can execute marketing strategies with confidence, especially when we utilize the many helpful digital marketing tools available today. These marketing tools provide crucial statistics, actionable data, and real-time insights into your customer’s behavior that can (and should) inform your marketing strategy.

So what exactly do we mean by strategy? Basically, we mean that your digital marketing efforts will not work unless you have a plan. Make a plan and then work the plan. This includes defining your goals, describing your customer personas, brainstorming content ideas, and sharing that content on the right platforms.

Define Your Digital Marketing Goals:

We do marketing to grow our businesses, but we cannot be sure that our efforts are actually working without specific goals in mind. Spend time with your team setting specific metrics and KPIs along with dates you want to see progress.

Keep in mind that short-term marketing goals such as PPC advertising have the potential to produce ROI quicker than a long-term marketing strategy such as SEO. For help knowing realistic time frames for your goals, be sure to consult with an experienced marketing team!

Know Your Ideal Customer

We often preach the importance of persona development on this blog. But it’s always worth repeating: create useful and meaningful content that helps your customers achieve their goals. In order to do this, you have to spend time getting to know them on a deeper level.

Demographics are a great start. But drill down beyond age, life stage, and average income to discover your customer’s pain points and how your product or service can help them overcome those to achieve their goals. A thorough understanding of your customer will help you immensely when you move to the next step.

Read More: What’s a Marketing Persona and Why it Matters

Brainstorm Content Ideas

Brainstorming content ideas can be fun or stressful depending on the information you have to inform your decisions. We talk with a lot of business owners who have grown frustrated with the whole content marketing process because they have run out of ideas to blog about. Usually, when this happens, a change in perspective is all that’s needed.

Here are a few tried and true tips that can help you never run out of content ideas for your marketing strategy.

• Keyword Research — Come up with a list of keywords that are related to your product or service and begin doing keyword research to understand what kinds of questions and keyword phrases people are using to research your product or service. You can do basic keyword research simply by Googling things for yourself and reviewing the “people also ask” questions for ideas. However, using a digital marketing tool like Semrush or Ahrefs will give you more exact results.
• Ask Your Team — Whether your business is large or small, spend time asking your team members about the questions they’re getting from customers. You may find that your sales team and customer support reps will be a wellspring of ideas for you. Most often, the questions will center around how much your products and services cost, so don’t shy away from creating content about pricing because that is what your customers are searching!
• Social Listening — This is just a fancy way of saying, ”pay attention to what your customers are asking on social media.” Use a tool like Hootsuite to search for keywords related to your product or service and start engaging in discussions with prospects online. LinkedIn and Twitter are great places to start.

Once you have a long list of content ideas, assign the tasks, set the due dates, and start publishing content! The obvious first place to start is blogging because it’s the most accessible way to create and share content. But don’t stop there! Marketing videos are extremely popular, powerful, and important for reaching a wider audience with your messages.

Read More: 9 Social Media Tools to Make Marketing Your Business Easier

Create Content

When sharing digital content, you have several choices. As mentioned above, start with a blog. It’s simply the easiest and most accessible way to share information that will get traction and produce leads for your business. Research shows that the average word count of blog posts on page one of the SERP is between 1500 and 2000 words.

Now before you panic at the long word count, keep these things in mind:

• Writers are widely available and easy to hire at affordable prices. You can leverage a writing service like Textbroker or find any number of freelance writers eager to take your jobs on sites like Fiverr and Upwork.
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) has greatly expanded capabilities to create acceptable first drafts that you can then edit or rework to fit your brand voice. Jasper.ai and Rytr are two popular choices for AI writing assistance.

That word count may seem high, but you may also be surprised how easy it is to hammer out a high word count around topics you’re passionate about! Not only that, you will be glad you put in the work when it’s time to create social media posts!

One of the best ways to generate social media content is repurposing blog content. You can create social media content from each blog post section to generate more conversations (and traffic back to your blog!) with your customers.

As mentioned above, don’t get tunnel vision regarding content marketing. Prioritize video content in your content marketing calendar to avoid missing opportunities to connect with new leads across multiple social media platforms.

Read More: The Main Reason Why Brand Video Works So Well in any Marketing Strategy

Share Your Digital Marketing Content

And now comes the fun part! You put the finishing touches on that 2000-word post, click publish, and wait for the traffic to roll in… right?

Not exactly.

Simply clicking publish isn’t enough. You need to have a strategy for sharing and promoting your digital marketing content online. This can include search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click advertising (PPC), inbound marketing campaigns, email newsletters, organic social media engagement, and more.

This is where we come in. Our digital marketing team is helping businesses like yours get their important messages in front of even more people using strategic digital marketing tactics that get results. We can help with everything you need, from ensuring proper branding is in place to website improvements that increase your SEO results or paid advertising plans that get in front of the demographics that matter most to you.

If you want to talk more about the tips and tools for digital marketing success, please schedule a meeting with us today! We’d love to help you create awesome digital marketing content that produces ROI for your business!