digital marketing tips for small businesses

12 Digital Marketing Tips From Successful Entrepreneurs

We all know that running a small business isn’t easy. But it can be lucrative for entrepreneurs to make a living through digital efforts.

Entrepreneurship is a stressful, exhausting, and downright thankless job. You never know if the next paycheck will come in and if the one after that will come at all. When things get tough, it’s hard to imagine finding a way to turn it around. There’s nothing more frustrating than being stuck in a situation that seems impossible to break out of. 

But that’s not the case for every entrepreneur. Some of them are incredibly successful; others are broke. There’s no need to be stuck in one category or the other. Here are a handful of digital marketing tips from some of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world to help you reach your goals.

Over the past four years, they’ve created and built multiple 6 figure businesses around their brands using digital marketing strategies.

1 – Find the right audience for your product or service

target audience brand building

It’s not always easy to find the right audience for your product or service. With so many online products, websites and services available, how can you determine what they are? Is there an objective way to define the audience for your business? If you don’t know whom you are marketing to, it’s impossible to know whether your marketing is working, let alone how to improve it. So, what do you need to do to ensure that your marketing strategy is effective?

There is no one size fits all solution for this. You need to understand your target audience, what your product or service does, and why it is needed. Then you need to research and analyze the market to find your ideal audience. To do this, you should first understand the purpose of marketing and its different aspects.

Defining the audience

When defining your target audience, you must consider your potential customers. These are people who might purchase your product or service. You need to determine who they are and what their needs are. This requires research to get a clear idea of your audience’s problems, the pain points they are experiencing, and the solutions you offer. You should also understand your audience’s value of your product or service.

Once you have the basics sorted, it’s time to get down to business. Start by creating a list of what your audience wants or needs. Consider these points carefully. You need to look at your product or service in the context of these points.

2 – Use the power of social media

Social media is a powerful tool that you can use to grow your business.

The power of social media is not limited to creating a Facebook group and creating an Instagram page; social media is about leveraging your reach to get your products, services, and ideas out there.

There are many ways to use social media for your business; here are some ways to start using social media.

Promote your business on social media

Promoting your business on social media is vital to getting new customers.

Create a Facebook page for your business. On your Facebook page, you can post content related to your business, post events, promote special offers and even advertise your business on Facebook ads.

You can also create an Instagram account for your business and post content. You can use this platform to showcase your products and sell your products. You can also use Twitter to promote your business. Here, you can share links, images, videos, and other content related to your business.

Engage your customers

Engaging your customers through social media is an effective way to interact with them. You can ask questions, share news, and give updates on your company. This helps you create a personal connection with your customers.

You can create a group specific to your products or services on Facebook. You can share information and news within the group and encourage your customers to join. You can also create an event on Facebook. These events can be about anything that your customers might enjoy. They can include live performances, meetups, giveaways, etc. You can also invite your customers to participate in polls, surveys, and games on Facebook. These surveys can help you gather feedback and improve your business.

You can tweet and retweet news, links, articles, and other relevant content on Twitter. This gives your followers a chance to learn about your products or services. You can also retweet and like posts by other people, companies, and organizations. This can help your company build up credibility and trust.

Leverage social media for digital marketing

Social media has become a powerful tool for brands and companies.

The growth of social media has allowed businesses to reach out to their audience in new ways. It allows you to promote your products and services in new ways.

Companies have started using social media to get their message out there. It allows them to connect with their customers in a personal way. It allows them to promote their brand, products, and services. As a result, companies can increase sales and grow their business. Social media is one of the best tools to market your business online.

3 – Build an email list

email marketing services infographic

It helps in generating leads for your business. If you are just starting up a new business, it will help you reach out to potential customers and prospects. It will save you money by reducing the cost of sending mass mailers. And finally, it will help you build a relationship with your existing clients and customers.

It will also allow you to create a list of email addresses for people to sign up for your newsletter. In case of a sale, you can send them promotional offers. The best part of this list is that once you build a good relationship with your customers, you will get to know them personally. It will help you create brand loyalty.

You can use a free service like Aweber to build such a list. Other services are available, but most people find Aweber the easiest and most effective.

You will need to provide your name, email address, and some information about your company. This will include the type of product or service you are offering.

When someone subscribes to your list, you will be able to send them information about your products or services. If they buy from you, you can contact them later via email.

You can use various methods to generate leads and customers. But building an email list is one of the best ways to go about it.

4 – Drive traffic to your site

The key to digital marketing success is knowing what kind of audience you want to reach, what content they want to consume, and how they consume it. Digital marketing allows you to do all this cost-effectively.

Digital marketing includes various activities such as online advertising, web design, search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, pay-per-click (PPC), social media marketing, email marketing, content distribution and many others. These attract more traffic to your site and boost its overall performance. Digital marketing is a great way to make money online, but it can also be tricky to start. So, let’s dive into the world of digital marketing.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization (SEO) improves a website’s visibility on organic (non-paid) search engine results pages. SEO refers to the measures taken to improve the ranking of a website in search engines.

There are several types of optimization. On-page SEO is the process of optimizing the HTML tags, title, description, image, alt tags, keywords, etc. off-page SEO refers to the measures taken to improve the website’s backlinks. It is the practice of getting more inbound links from quality websites.

Keywords: Using the right keywords when planning your digital marketing strategy is essential. A keyword is a word people type into a search box to find a particular topic. The higher a keyword ranks in Google, the more popular it is. Keywords should be used naturally so that it doesn’t look spammy.

Content Marketing

Creating and publishing content has always been a mainstay of marketing. But in the digital age, it’s a much smarter move than just creating something and waiting for someone to find you. The rise of mobile technology has allowed content marketing to explode in popularity.

A well-written blog post can be highly engaging, and you can use it to promote your company in various ways.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the best ways to keep in touch with your customers. It’s also great to drive traffic to your website and build relationships with your audience. When done right, it can help you get more leads and sales.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is one of the most affordable and effective ways to promote your business. You can start by sharing valuable posts on your social networks. You can also include links to your site to help increase your traffic.

PPC

Pay per click is another excellent way to get traffic to your site. You simply bid for the words and phrases relevant to your site.

Google Adwords and Bing Ads are the most popular PPC services. However, there are other options available to you.

5 – Create a great user experience

user experience

User experience is an essential aspect of any website, app or platform. As such, it is an essential part of digital marketing strategy. A good user experience means having a website or platform that is easy to navigate, loads quickly and is user-friendly. However, when it comes to mobile devices, a great user experience is even more important than on desktop devices. 

Many people access websites or apps on their smartphones or tablets, so creating a great user experience optimized for their smaller screens is essential. There are a few things to consider when creating a great user experience:

Keep it simple

The less complex your website or app is, the easier it is for users to navigate. The less navigation they have to do, the more likely they will use your service or download your app.

Provide quick access to critical information

People using mobile devices look for quick answers to their questions or problems. So you need to ensure that the content you provide is easily accessible. For example, when a user is looking for a solution to a problem, they should be able to find it right away.

Optimize for different screen sizes

When it comes to digital marketing, there are two distinct groups of users. One group comprises desktop computer users, while the other comprises mobile users. While a lot of websites and apps are designed to work on both platforms, it’s essential to make sure that the design of your website or app is optimized for each type of device. This can be done by:

  • Ensuring that the text and images are large enough to be seen clearly on small screens.
  • Providing enough space between elements on a page or within an app to avoid unnecessary scrolling.
  • Make sure the navigation links are large and easy to tap on.

Consider accessibility

Digital marketing is all about connecting people with businesses, and ensuring that your website or app is accessible to the broadest possible audience is very important. For those with disabilities, a great user experience means ensuring they can access their content easily.

Provide a seamless user experience

Mobile users are now more connected to the internet than desktop users. As such, ensuring that a website or app can integrate seamlessly with social media and other services is vital. You can integrate your website or app with popular platforms and services.

6 – Use video

Because video content has a powerful emotional effect on customers, according to research, people remember 65% more information when it is presented in a video than when it is presented in the text. Moreover, videos have the potential to help build loyalty and create brand advocates.

Video content is also ideal for conveying specific and relevant messages to consumers. For example, a restaurant can provide a cooking demonstration for a meal designed to showcase its most popular dishes. A clothing store can give a product demonstration that showcases the best styles for fall or spring.

Video content makes it easy to connect with your audience through social media. Videos are great ways to engage with your audience, whether a Facebook live stream, Instagram Stories, Snapchat, or Periscope. By showing a video of your customer service agent, you can address questions and concerns from consumers who may not be able to speak to you directly. You can also provide a visual demonstration of a product feature or an event.

Moreover, people can share video content easily. When someone shares your video, it’s easier for them to share it with their friends, which leads to more exposure for your brand. Video can also be embedded on other websites, increasing the number of views. And when consumers link to your website via a video, it shows up on their Google search results, leading to increased organic traffic.

7 – Get started with content marketing

types of content marketing and branding

Content marketing has gained fame and name due to its effectiveness, ease of use, and cost-effectiveness. If used correctly, it gives you the right message at the right time, with the right target audience. Content marketing allows you to attract and retain a target audience by providing them with valuable information.

Digital marketing plays a vital role in the success of a business; however, without a proper content marketing strategy, it can be challenging to achieve your goals. When users find your brand on the internet, they get attracted to the content you provide. This gives them an impression that your brand is trustworthy and knowledgeable.

The following points will help you gain more knowledge about content marketing and its advantages to your brand.

Benefits of Content Marketing

  • Allows you to communicate with your customers.
  • Keeps your customers engaged with the content that you are providing to them.
  • It provides the necessary information for the user to decide on which product to purchase.
  • It helps you establish a connection with the customer.
  • Generates trust with the customers and encourages them to do business with you.
  • Increases brand awareness.
  • It makes it easier to retain the customer.
  • Improves SEO ranking.
  • Provides valuable insights to the users.
  • Improves conversion.
  • It helps in gaining a competitive edge over other brands.

8 – Understand SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) improves the visibility of websites or web pages in search engine results – primarily Google. When someone does a web search, they type in keywords or phrases and hit the enter button. The web search engine looks at its index of information and finds the most relevant sites to show its visitors, and the site that ranks highest on the list gets the click through, i.e. the visitor. 

Search engines can recognize keywords by the words themselves but can also read the context of how the words are used. For instance, searching “SEO expert in New York City” will give much better results than searching for a specific word (i.e. “SEO”). 

When looking for information on a subject, a web searcher will type in a phrase or keyword, and only those sites on the web will appear relevant. The site has to be optimized so that the search engine will recognize it as a high-quality site related to the user’s topic. If a search is performed on a popular search engine (such as Google), the sites listed above the paid advertisements are the ones that appear in the search. 

Since Google makes billions of dollars annually from ads, it will show the ads above the organic (non-paid) links. To pay for ads, the site owner must pay Google a fee.

There are two significant components of search engine optimization: on-site optimization (OSO) and off-site optimization (OSO). On-site means optimizing the page itself, whereas off-site is optimizing the website’s back-end, including links pointing back to the site and back-links. In essence, both elements make the site easier to find by search engine spiders.

Several techniques are available to web admins for increasing the number of backlinks that point back to their sites. These methods include guest posting, blog commenting, forum posting, and article submissions.

A critical aspect of off-site SEO is link building. This involves building backlinks through other websites. Backlinks signal to the search engines that the other site is a high-quality website and should be listed in the search results. Links are the foundation of any SEO campaign. While most of the links in the search engine results are paid links (ads), this is not always the case. 

Backlinks, when done correctly, are a natural part of a search engine campaign. The goal of link building is to have quality; relevant sites link to yours. Google places a significant emphasis on the value of backlinks. One thing that search engines don’t like is unnatural links.

Unnatural links come from spammers and link farms. In the eyes of the search engine, this is a spammy practice and will cause the link to be ignored.

SEO is a long-term strategy that takes months to years to accomplish. However, some techniques can improve your SEO in a matter of days. This includes adding meta tags and keywords, changing the site’s structure, improving page titles, and creating a sitemap. 

A sitemap is a method of showing the structure of a website and is also a powerful SEO tool. The pages in the sitemap are categorized and include a description and URL of each page. Using this, the search engine spiders can quickly crawl the entire site.

9 – Find the best keywords for your products and services

digital marketing tips keyword research seo

To be successful in your business, it is vital to use the right marketing tools to attract your audience. Your product or service needs to be well defined to gain maximum attention.

There are many different ways to define your product or service, but sometimes it can be challenging. One way of defining your product or service is by using a simple keyword or sentence that explains what your product or service is about.

The keyword or sentence you use to define your product or service will depend on the type of products or services you provide. For example, if you provide an online shop where you sell clothing, a simple core keyword such as “clothing” could work for you. However, if you offer a web design company, the best option would be to use a long phrase such as “professional web design”“.

Using the above example, you can easily find your products or services. Using this method, you can also ensure that your potential clients know what they get when they buy from your store.

So if you want to find out what keywords and phrases work for you, try using the below options to help you define your product or service.

  • Try the dictionary
  • Read customer reviews
  • Ask your customers
  • Google your keywords
  • Check if your competitors use the exact words
  • List your benefits

Once you have found the best keywords for your products or services, you should create a landing page explaining your product or service. It is crucial that your potential clients can understand what your product or service is about.

10 – Optimize your website

Digital marketing is not a science but an art of marketing. And a great marketing campaign requires a well-designed website to convey the message most effectively. As a result, it is imperative to optimize your website. Optimizing your website involves many aspects like speed, usability, SEO etc. To ensure your website is well optimized, we’ve prepared a short article on it, so read on.

Speed of your website

The speed of your website has a massive impact on the user experience. When you optimize your website, it should be loaded fast. Google’s speed test is the most reliable tool to test the speed of your site. There’s an alternative version of their speed testing tool called GTmetrix. They provide a detailed analysis of your site’s performance on different parameters.

Usability of your website

After analyzing the speed of your website, you should also consider its usability. Usability means the ease of use of a website. A good user experience is significant for a website. It is essential to focus on the quality of your website’s web design and content to make it user-friendly.

SEO of your website

A good SEO-optimized website increases its chances of ranking in search results and helps to attract the targeted audience. To ensure your website gets a good ranking in search results, you should have a clean and well-structured website. In addition, you should use keywords in your website’s title, meta description and URL. If you’re using WordPress as your CMS, tons of plugins and resources are available to help you optimize your website for search engines.

To get your website ranked high in search results, you should optimize it by checking its speed and usability. Then you can use keywords to make your website SEO-friendly.

11 – Make the most of PPC

pay per click terminology

PPC (Pay Per Click) is the process of buying traffic using pay-per-click advertising on search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and more.

If you think about it, the best way to get people interested in your business is to give them a reason to visit your website and stay there longer than they should. It is the top way to attract more traffic to your site.

PPC ads are paid based on how much you want to spend. The more you spend, the more traffic you get.

Here are some tips to make your money work for you:

  1. Make sure you have a unique keyword phrase. Your ad should appear for that keyword phrase if someone searches for a particular word. Don’t use keywords everyone uses because no one will click on your ad.
  2. Choose your ads carefully. Look at what your competitors are doing. Find out their ads’ keywords, and learn from their mistakes.
  3. Make sure you target the right audience. You don’t want to waste money by targeting too broad an audience or only appealing to people in one part of the world.
  4. Try adding keywords to your URL’s end to get higher placement. For example, if you are selling books, add “book” at the end of the URL.
  5. Consider using pay-per-click affiliate programs. This is a great way to make extra income.
  6. Look for companies that do PPC and see what they are doing. Try to learn from their mistakes and improve your campaigns.
  7. Be patient. You don’t want to start spending money and then find that the traffic isn’t coming in. Take the time to learn and grow into this new type of marketing; eventually, it will start to pay off.
  8. Learn about the tools and methods you are using. You need to understand them to learn more about making them work.
  9. Ask for feedback. You can always ask others about their experience. They may have been on the same journey as you, and they can help you avoid their mistakes.

PPC is a great way to boost your SEO results and generate leads. Learn how to make the most of PPC for digital marketing.

12 – Don’t forget to optimize your social media presence

Social media marketing is now the new way of doing business. It is one of the best ways to reach your potential clients directly. This article will provide tips to ensure your social media presence is optimized for your brand.

Recently, social media has become very important for every business to market themselves. Social media marketing is a strategy that allows you to promote your business on different social networks. It is a very effective way to advertise your product or service. And it helps you create a good image for your brand.

Several social media sites can help you promote your business. These include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. Each social network has its unique features and benefits.

You should use different social media networks to promote your business. This way, you will get more exposure. For example, you can post your hotel photo on Instagram if you are running a hotel. This can help you generate more traffic to your hotel.

It’s also a good idea to engage your customers on social media. You can send them a tweet to say thank you for their support or mention them by name. Or, you can ask a question to the community and wait for the answers.

Here are some tips on how to optimize your social media presence for digital marketing:

Set a goal

Before starting anything, you must decide what you want to achieve. What are you trying to accomplish with your social media? Are you looking to increase your traffic or expand your audience? Think about your target audience and what they like.

For example, if you are a travel agency, you may want to post information about your trips. Your target audience would be people who are interested in travelling.

Set a strategy

Next, you need to set a strategy for your business. Think about where you want your customers to go. Where do you want them to go once they have visited your website? Do you want them to share a link on social media? Or do you want them to call you directly?

Decide what your goals are for your social media marketing strategy. Then think about what you want to get out of the campaign. If you want to increase your traffic, you can post more frequently. You can also post more detailed information about your products and services.

Create a Facebook fan page

Create a Facebook fan page for your business. People can easily find your Facebook page from your business profile. It’s easy to share your page on your timeline.

Build relationships with your followers

Engage with your followers. You can send them a tweet or a message on Instagram. Or, you can start a conversation. For example, you can ask a question to your followers and wait for their replies.

Conclusion

The best entrepreneurs know that marketing is like food, exercise, and relationships. You have to find the right balance and know when to make the change. If your marketing efforts are lacking, you’ll lose traffic and visitors. You’ll lose sales and, ultimately, revenue. 

On the other hand, too much marketing will leave you feeling distracted, and your audience will begin to ignore you. You must maintain the same energy, focus, and hustle to keep growing while balancing your marketing efforts to get the desired results.

This article was originally published at Dallasdesignco.com, by author Tabitha Kristen.
Original article >>

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