Digital Marketing Tips for Small Businesses After Quarter 1
The first quarter of the year is over and I hope we all achieved or went above our projected marks. Did you grow in the short term since 2019? If the answer is no; that could be in part because of your marketing efforts especially digital marketing. What is digital marketing? Let’s review!
First things first…
To run a business, and a successful one at that, you must have a
digital marketing
strategy that will put you over the top of your competitors. Look at what you did well in 2017 and what you did not. A colleague of mine said, “use data to leverage your marketing.” Look at the who, what, where, and when for determining how you will market your business. Focus on your target market and utilize your data and technology for optimal results.
Secondly , technology is changing ever so often; but do not abandon the major social media platforms you have used for the past few years. Twitter, Instagram, and especially Facebook are achieving at high levels and they are great ways to market! If you use any of these platforms, assess your results, and if they work.. keep with it! Compare your conversion rates, click-through rates, and cost per click. How do they compare to competitors or industry averages? Furthermore.. how do they add to your cost per customer acquisition?
Email Marketing is very useful if you can use it correctly; you do not want to infiltrate customers or future customer’s inbox with to much material. If that happens, most likely, it will be deleted. My opinion is that one email a week at the most can be enough to keep your customers engaged. An email a week shows that as a company you are engaged with your clients. I suggest using Active Campaign. Here at GrowthLab we use this platform for more than email marketing. If you are starting out with E-mail marketing try A/B testing to your client list. Half will receive one form of the email and the other will receive a different layout.
The biggest tool in marketing that has grown the most and keep growing in the coming years is Mobile marketing, 80% of all internet use will come from mobile in the next few years. Another staggering statistic is that 60% of internet usage is through a mobile device. Considering a mobile app would have customers within fingers reach of your content and aspects of your business.
Social Media and Mobile marketing are great to use but do not shy away from email marketing. Almost everyone still uses e-mail everyday! The last part of digital marketing is how you can make or break your social media plan.
Content, Content, Content
The biggest part of marketing is CONTENT. In previous years and in different times, it was all about how much content is being posted without truly taking the time to define it down to what is RELEVANT for your company. Take a look at Gary Vaynerchuck, this guy is the content king. He posts very often getting in the double digits per day on the social media platforms he uses. The reason it works for him is because of who he targets but also the message he wants to spread. A lot of it is business help but also self motivation and very much surrounds each person. I follow him most of his videos I can relate to.I believe almost everyone can get some message or theme that helps them in one of his many posts a day. Even with a high content rate it works.. As a small business, I would advise to not follow this route of posting very frequently. You have to take a little bit of time to find the content that you feel will get the most return — the content that connects best with your audience. There are some platforms that can automatically filter and fetch relevant articles and post them for you on a schedule. My favorite is Content Studio. It gives you more time to work on some other key parts of your business, but remember, content and more importantly, relevant content is probably the biggest part of marketing.
There is no magic potion or magic fairy with the right answer to digital marketing. Finding what works to receive possible leads that may turn into clients is the key. Most times plugging in and out of different techniques will be beneficial. Technology and automation’s can help tremendously if you use it correctly. However, At the end of the day you must find what works best for your business and market to the right mix so the ROI pays off.
GrowthLab, a Finance-as-a-Service (FaaS) company serving founders and management teams with full-service Financial Planning & Analysis, Monthly Accounting, Virtual CFO, HR-People Advisory, and Business Tax.