When it comes to objectives and focus, online marketing strategies are identical to conventional marketing tactics. Both types seek to raise brand recognition and assist companies in locating new clients online.
There are numerous channels available for online marketing, or digital marketing as it is more commonly called, that cover every facet of online advertising, from content development to distribution and sales.
You’ll discover the top 5 online marketing tactics in this piece that small businesses may employ to increase their online presence.
Strategies for Small Businesses to Use Online
- Search Engine Marketing
- Mobile Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Local SEO Strategy
1. Search Engine Marketing
The first internet marketing tactic you can employ is search engine marketing (SEM), which has two main parts. PSA and SEO (search engine optimization) (Paid Search Advertising).
Simply put, SEO will assist you in obtaining more free organic visits from search engines, but paid search advertising may be able to bring you hits from search traffic, but at a cost.
The whole range of Search Engine Marketing tools and strategies are represented in the following diagram.
How do you intend to use SEM? Your clear objective with SEM is to increase traffic from search engines, whether organically or through carefully planned and targeted PPC advertising.
Training in Digital Marketing
It’s crucial to consider factors like your page titles, descriptions, web page speed, style, and structure, as well as external links, the freshness of your content, ALT language for photos, and many more.
- Tools: There are various SEO and PPC best practises you may adhere to. While each best practise is crucial on its own, applying many best practises at once will result in greater outcomes.
- Tip: Google and other search engines won’t take your website adjustments into account right away if you make them to boost SEO.
- You must be patient and keep an eye on your pages’ rating changes using Google Analytics Reports.
2. Mobile Marketing
Typically, social media marketing or content marketing would be the next online marketing technique for small businesses following search engine marketing, but the rise in smartphone searches has made mobile marketing more crucial.
According to Google, mobile marketing is a need for any organisation and is not an option. This argument is reinforced by the following recent data on mobile usage:
- What are your mobile marketing objectives? to give your consumers the greatest experience possible when utilising their mobile devices to browse your website.
- How can you get the “best experience possible”? A mobile-friendly version of your website is first and foremost required to ensure that it functions properly and looks decent when viewed through a mobile browser.
- Tools: To begin, use the Google mobile-friendly test tool to see if your website is mobile-friendly.
3. Content Marketing
Every digital marketing campaign is built around content marketing. The next phase is to take all necessary steps to produce content that rocks once you have a solid foundation (that’s search engine marketing) and a good distribution platform that can meet all your users’ needs (that’s mobile marketing).
The key factor in generating repeat visitors, comments, social media shares, and most crucially, sales, is content.
What do you want content marketing to achieve? Simply said, your objective is to provide high-quality material that readers will want to read while also attempting to persuade readers to become clients or carry out a call-to-action process (register to a newsletter, follow on social media, vote for a poll, etc.).
How: Try to consider how the specific content will assist your readers or consumers before even beginning to create it, whether it be an article, a video, or a picture.
- Don’t merely produce content for the purpose of adhering to a timetable or to fulfil your need to have something to share online.
- This method of flooding search engines with content to deceive them used to work in the past, but it is no longer effective.
- Less published pages with higher-quality material are more crucial than many published pages with inferior content.
4. Social Media Marketing
The logical next marketing tactic for your company is social media marketing. As a result of the prior method, you were able to gather some excellent content. At this point, you should spread the word, and the best way to accomplish that is through an effective social media marketing strategy.
What are your social media marketing objectives? Your social media marketing efforts should have two objectives.
In order for your content and brand to receive as much attention as possible, your first goal should be to acquire as many targeted followers as you can. Your second goal should be to attract visitors from social networks who will eventually become clients.
- How: You should have a strong online presence across all major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest) by regularly providing relevant material and interacting with users who have an interest in your website, products, or brand.
- Running campaigns on multiple networks at once is a time-consuming and difficult procedure, but it is the way modern web marketing for small businesses operates, therefore you must follow it as well.
- The good news is that social media traffic does convert (contrary to early assumptions made a few years ago that visitors from social media don’t become customers), and if you don’t have the time or expertise to manage your social media presence, there are professionals who can do it for you (see our SEO packages for small businesses for more details).
5. Local SEO Strategy
Since small businesses are the focus of our discussion, I believed it was more suitable to highlight local SEO as a separate approach because it is crucial for them.Every business with a physical address needs to implement local SEO strategies. Local SEO may help you get more consumers online regardless of your industry—whether you’re a florist, mechanic, doctor, or retailer.What is the purpose of local SEO? Getting good rankings for local searches is the overarching objective of local SEO.
You want your website to appear in the top results when consumers search for long-tail keywords that also include a location (for instance, “divorce lawyers in las vegas”).
How: As with any other subject relating to SEO, there is no simple answer to that.
To avoid being penalised by Google for attempting to game its algorithm, you can optimise your website for local SEO by adhering to its best practises.
What additional methods, for instance, exist in addition to social media, mobile devices, and search engines to enhance website traffic for small businesses? Here are some suggestions that proved successful for some of my clients, to be more precise:
- Direct advertising on other websites: In addition to running PPC campaigns on Facebook and Google Ads, you may try to “rent” advertising space on related websites on a monthly basis.
- You may quickly locate relevant websites in your niche that offer advertising, then get in touch with the webmasters to learn their costs. You can assess the results and ROI with good tracking, and it will be less expensive than PPC.
- Guest posting on popular websites is a good strategy to boost your online reputation while also gaining traffic from other websites (and not only for links). The advantages are much greater if the website where you are guest posting has a strong social media presence.
Key Lessons
If small firms use tried-and-true methods, they can expand online. The first consideration when creating a website should be search engine optimization. Once you’ve gotten this down, you’ll need to improve your delivery methods by going mobile. After that, you should review your content strategy to make sure that it still makes sense and is relevant.
