Small businesses are not small when they are online. With the power of digital marketing, small businesses can compete with large brands, create a distinctive online presence, and build a brand in the online world. It doesn’t matter which industry you serve; you can now compete with the best brands in the world and showcase your products and services on the same platforms they do. What’s better is that digital marketing is often affordable for small businesses.
Step 1 – Setting Goals
As a business, you need to plan before you start a digital marketing campaign. Understanding the process, setting time-bound goals, and achieving measurable objectives are important for small businesses. Experts rely on what they call SMART goals. It stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound goals. For example, a business goal could be to increase website traffic to 30,000 visitors per month by the 6th month. Or it could be to generate 30 leads per month or increase social media followers by 30% in 3 months.
Step 2 – Knowing the Audience
Once you have a goal set, you need to move on to the actual planning. This involves understanding your target audience. If you are a women’s clothing store, your target audience might be women aged between 25 and 35, or sometimes more detailed, such as working women aged 25-45 in Mumbai.
Step 3 – Setting Up the Website
The website is the first thing to set up. Your first point of contact for your business is always the website. Design a business website that meets your requirements and the quality standards of your industry. Ensure your website meets all quality guidelines, including responsiveness, mobile-friendliness, fast loading, and optimization for search engines (technical SEO). You may require images for the website during this phase, so be ready for photoshoots or collect stock photos. Create a structure for your website, including all the pages such as Privacy Policy, Terms of Usage, About Us, Products/Services, Contact Us, etc. Create content for the home page and other pages. While the main pages are sufficient at this stage, more can be added during the content creation phase.
Step 4 – Setting Up Social Media Accounts
During this phase, you will set up and optimize your social media accounts and profiles. Choose one or two social media platforms to create content on. Do not exceed more than two accounts as it will be difficult to maintain them. One is often sufficient. Optimize your social media account for your keywords. Each social media platform has its own optimization mechanisms—learn them or get a professional to do it for you. Once your account is set up, add content to your social media accounts. Start with the logo, your core services, an introduction, and follow it up with at least 10 posts. No one wants to visit an empty social media account, so make sure to add content.
Step 5 – Content Creation
Websites are content reservoirs for your audience. Provide your audience with entertaining and informative content every single day. For social media, provide 3-4 pieces of content in different forms per day. For websites, create a blog post or an article every single day. Don’t leave your audience without something to consume. Find trending content in your industry, and create content surrounding keywords people are searching for. To begin content creation, plan your content. For blog posts, start with keyword research and based on the keywords, create a content calendar for 3 months. Start creating one piece of content per day. For social media platforms, start creating content based on the blog posts you create and link to your blog posts. Also, create entertaining and trending content on social media that people may like. Create content in different forms—images, articles, carousels, videos, etc. Try a variety of content to see what performs well and continue creating more of the content that is consumed the most.
Step 6 – PPC and SMM
PPC (Pay-Per-Click) and SMM (Social Media Marketing) are paid marketing techniques where you pay search engines and social media websites to advertise your products/websites on them. Search engines and social media websites charge you per click (thus the name PPC) or by impressions, follows, likes, contacts, etc. Though your website has content and your social media is well set up, no one will know about your small business in the initial stages. Google will take time to crawl and rank your website, and ranking well in a sea of competition may take anywhere from a few weeks to a few years. Most small business owners do not have the time to wait a year—they want instant results, and PPC or SMM can give you a head start. PPC and SMM are best handled by professionals with experience on the platform. They have a steep learning curve, and your chances of losing money on the platform are high. With a professional, you will have a higher chance of getting results and improving your ROI.
Step 7 – Search Engine Optimization
When you create content, your website will start getting more attention and impressions from searches. However, they won’t rank as well as they are supposed to without proper SEO. Get a professional to optimize your website to rank better on search engines. You could also learn SEO by yourself if you are the only person handling your small business and want to save money. This will ensure that you know what you are paying for in the future if you ever choose to hire an SEO professional.
Step 8 – Start Collecting Email Addresses
For businesses in the startup phase and small businesses, email marketing has been known to provide an instant boost. While cold mail is frowned upon, it is still an effective marketing method for all businesses. Email marketing converts 2-3%, and the results are not to be passed off as negligible. Take advantage of email marketing from the beginning and email prospects using email marketing tools and websites. Websites like Mailchimp and AWeber can help you with email marketing and have a relatively low learning curve. They are also cost-effective for small businesses, especially for those on a tight budget. Both companies offer free packages to start and try their services, and the services can be scaled as your business grows.
While these steps can get you started, the extent to which you can take your online marketing efforts is limited only by your imagination. You can create dedicated campaigns for social media platforms based on offers, seasons, and more. Your PPC campaign may also be tailored regionally or focused on demographics. With digital marketing, your success can be monitored, tracked, and analyzed. This ensures you know where your budget is utilized and how efficiently your campaigns are performing. Track each campaign and do more of what is working while removing what is not. Over the course of a few weeks, you will have a clear idea of what is working, and you can improve on those techniques to increase revenue and ROI.
