Digital marketing is quickly becoming the most effective form of marketing for most businesses – but especially for small to medium sized businesses.
With the increase in reliance on technology for many different aspects of life – especially for business, and also for entertaining – it makes sense that companies should be connecting with target audiences and customers digitally more than anything else. Consider the fact that more than half of the global population uses social media, and that there are more than 3 billion searches made on Google every day. A London-based IT company, TechQuarters, discussed how they rely on digital marketing. The managed IT support London SMBs get from TechQuarters – which is their primary service as a business – wouldn’t be half as successful if it weren’t for a well-planned digital marketing strategy that enabled them to connect with the right audiences.
For any small business looking to get started with digital marketing, below are 5 tips for a successful strategy.
1-Define Objectives
The most important step with digital marketing is to first define your objectives and goals. If you don’t outline all of your goals, everything you do going forward will be undirected and efforts could end up clashing, or be completely redundant. Are you looking to generate more leads? Do you want to raise brand awareness? Are you looking for business partnerships? These are all very important questions to ask in a business in order to find out whether digital marketing is right for your goals, and knowing what your goals are helps you plan your efforts.
2-Social Media Presence
Social media and digital marketing go hand-in-hand – some might say that digital marketing is inseparable from social media. As mentioned already, social media is used by around 4 billion people across the world – roughly half of all people alive. Whatever your target audience is, the odds are they will be on one of the many social media platforms out there. This is precisely why building a strong social media presence is important. A strong social media presence includes having a well filled-out profile for your business, and performing lots of engagement – social media algorithms favour users that are active on their site, and so regular engagement helps your brand get seen by more users.
3-Optimize Website (for all platforms)
If you’re considering digital marketing, that probably means you have a website. If you have a website, it will be the primary source of information available to customers and target audiences. Therefore, your website needs to have an excellent user interface – it should be easy to navigate, easy to read, and it should have a high-quality aesthetic. What is more, a website needs to be optimized not only for the web, but for mobile. Smartphones are becoming the primary way people browse the internet (fewer young people are buying and using laptops and PCs), and so if your website looks bad on mobile, it could detract a large part of your audience.
4-Invest in long-term SEO
Search engines are the way in which most people navigate the world wide web. If you have a question, or are interested in learning more about something but don’t know where you start, you use a search engine to find relevant results. This is precisely how many people find brands and websites that they eventually give their business to.
All good digital marketing strategies should include search engine optimization (SEO). The great thing about SEO is that it is relatively low-cost and continues to reap benefits in the long-term.
5-Consider short-term PPC
Another way of making search engine users find your brand is by using PPC advertising. Pay-per-click is where you put up an add, and every time a user clicks on the ad, you are charged (more or less depending on the keywords you targeting). Of course, PPC is less desirable than SEO because of the cost, but PPC does offer immediate results, and is worth considering in the early days, while you’re waiting for your SEO investments to pay back.