Small Business Growing too Fast with Digital Marketing
As entrepreneurs, our shared dream is to consistently proclaim small business growing too fast! Growing a business is much different now than in older times. Back in the days when people started businesses, especially small businesses, they went door to door, giving business cards hand to hand or putting a name on a billboard inside a busy street. But now all sizes of businesses have a greater focus on growing digitally.
Digital marketing has proven to be a way of getting more customers for many businesses. In this blog, we are going to answer some of the most frequently asked questions regarding the fastest-growing small businesses with the help of digital marketing. We will also cover the cost of digital marketing and the easiest-to-implement digital marketing strategies for small businesses. Let us dive deep into it.
Why is digital marketing important for small businesses?
Digital marketing gives small businesses the tools they need to succeed in the digital age, reach a larger audience, build their brand, engage customers, and get results at a lower cost. It evens the playing field so they can compete with bigger companies and grow their business in a smart way.
Experts say that digital marketing for small businesses can change the way people act, interact, and live. When the Internet got accessible to more people, many entrepreneurs looked at it as an opportunity to reach more customers. And that was the beginning of digital marketing.
Starting from email marketing to now the age of app marketing online has evolved to be a more successful way of reaching potential customers. According to a WpForum blog, “71% of people believe they’ll get a better deal online”. That shouts the importance of your business’s online presence.
And to supplement this truth of online dominance across industries, another Zippia research suggests that “81% of shoppers choose to research a business online before making a purchase”. This means if your business does not have a clear and loud online presence, it can hurt the growth rate of your business more than anything else.
How to do digital marketing for small businesses?
With all the hype going around digital marketing, it can be confusing for businesses to know exactly how to do digital marketing for themselves. But with a deeper breath and a calm mind, when you look at digital marketing, it is a pretty simple idea.
The world of digital marketing is always changing and growing. We’ve seen how quickly it can change over the years. Even though there are a lot of new marketing trends, it may not be possible for your small business to use all of them. It needs stability, trying new things, and changing.
To get the best results, you should keep learning and improving your methods based on what your target audience tells you and what you learn from them.
To sum up, here are the main steps for small businesses to do digital marketing:
- Set clear goals.
- Know who you want to reach.
- Create a business website.
- Optimize your site for search engines.
- Utilize content marketing to generate valuable content.
- Use social media sites effectively.
- Create email marketing strategies.
- Consider paying for ads to reach more people.
- Track and analyze how well your internet marketing is doing.
- Engage with your audience while offering great customer service.
There are seemingly dozens of ways a small business can boost its credibility, growth, and profitability with digital marketing. It is never one-size-fits-all; rather, it is a creative way of identifying the problems of your customers and answering their questions online.
How does a small business grow too fast with a Marketing Team?
Marketing is a crucial part of your business plan. As a small business, it might feel hard to do everything single-handedly. This is where the marketing team comes in. A marketing team that consists of expert marketing professionals such as social media marketers, search engine optimization experts, and content marketers can enhance the online visibility of a business.
Marketing consists of different parts, including branding, market research, marketing strategy, advertising and promotion, conversion tracking, customer relationship management, etc. A team capable of performing these tasks when needed helps a business reach out with its products and services to its potential customers.
It is important to have a definite marketing goal and adapt to a holistic approach to reach it. The goal should be SMART. It should be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. When making strategies and planning a campaign, a marketing team helps a small business find out its core capabilities and weaknesses. By emphasizing these capabilities and working on the weaknesses, the marketing team leads the business to fast growth.
How much does digital marketing cost for small businesses?
Most small business owners believe that digital marketing is expensive. But it is not true for every business. For example, if you are an online business that just started rolling, your marketing expenses should be resonating with your business goals.
The cost of digital marketing has 3 key indicators:
Channels
As we mentioned earlier, digital marketing is a combination of smaller marketing campaigns such as email marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization, content marketing, etc. The more ways you want to try, the more money you need to expend on your digital marketing.
Demographics
There are some more factors that will determine the cost of digital marketing for your business. Demographics is one of them. If your business wants to target and reach a very specific group of customers, you might need a bigger budget to achieve that.
Timespan
It also depends on how aggressive you are with your campaigns. Organic reach is always more valuable than paid reach. But when you have set an aggressive goal for your small business, you might need to expand your ad budget, which will increase the cost of digital marketing.
As it might sound confusing and you expect to get a hint with exact numbers in place, we have listed different digital marketing services with minimum expenses below.
Digital Marketing Service/ Channels | Expected Minimum Cost |
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) | $500 per month |
Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC) | $2000 per month |
Content Marketing | $1500 per month |
Social Media Marketing | $2000 per month |
Email Marketing | $300 per month |
Affiliate Marketing | Depends on the commission rates |
Influencer Marketing | Depends on the influencer |
Display Advertising | Depends on the keywords |
Video Marketing | $1000 per month |
This pricing list is an approximate estimation of the average minimum cost. Remember that you might not need to utilize all the channels together as a small business. Finding out the most effective channels and strategies can reduce the ROI for your digital marketing expenses.
The Proven List of Small Business Digital Marketing Strategies
Creating a digital marketing strategy is important before you get started. As a small business owner, it will help you save money and time. It can also increase the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
Below is a list of the top 5 proven digital marketing strategies for small businesses.
1. Social media marketing:
Social media is often the most effective channel for digital marketing. According to a new report, “The USA has 302.35 million social media users as of 2023”. You can find more customers and directly interact with them on social media. That is what makes it an important part of your online marketing. Social media marketing is divided mainly into two different parts: organic and paid.
Organic:
Organic social media marketing is a great way to get people to know about your brand, communicate with your audience, and build customer loyalty through real and meaningful interactions. But without paid ads or strategic optimization, organic social media efforts may not reach as many people or have as much of an effect as they could.
Paid:
Paid social media marketing lets you reach a particular audience and get more exposure by using paid advertising. This lets businesses reach a larger audience, drive traffic to their websites, generate leads, and meet specific campaign goals. It adds to what you’re already doing and can help you get results faster and have better control over who you’re reaching and how well your campaign is doing.
2. SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Search engine optimization is a way of optimizing your website for better exposure and higher SERP (search engine result pages) positions. People will become more aware of your position online if they keep seeing your brand name on the first page of SERP. SEO has two aspects of it: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
On-page SEO :
On-page SEO is the process of optimizing each web page to make it rank higher in search engines and get more genuine traffic. It includes methods like optimizing meta tags, using relevant keywords, making high-quality content, making pages load faster, and improving the user experience. On-page SEO is a key part of making your website more visible and easy for search engines to find, which leads to better rankings and more traffic from search engines.
Off-page SEO :
Off-page SEO refers to the things you do outside of your website to help it rank higher in search engines and get more people to see it. It mostly involves building high-quality backlinks from authoritative and relevant websites and increasing your brand’s online visibility through social media engagement, influencer marketing, online reviews, and content promotion. Off-page SEO helps search engines figure out how trustworthy and popular your website is. This boosts your site’s ranks and brings in more organic traffic.
3. Pay-Per-Click Advertising:
PPC ads are one of the most important digital marketing strategies now. It is a way to get people to visit websites. An advertiser pays a writer when someone clicks on their ad. Pay-per-click is usually associated with search engines that are at the top of the list. There are different kinds of PPC advertising options available. Two of the most popular types of PPC ads are Search Ads and Display ads.
Search Ads
Search advertising, which is also called paid search advertising or search engine marketing, is a method of marketing in which digital ads are placed in search engine results. When someone hits on one of the ads that search advertising campaigns run, the company pays a small fee.
Display ads
Display ads are graphic ads that show up on different websites, apps, and social media channels that are part of the ad network. They use pictures, videos, or interactive parts to get people’s attention and promote your goods or services. Display ads let you reach more people and make your business more visible by using targeting options like demographics, hobbies, and website placements. This increases the chances of engagement and conversions.
4. Content Marketing:
Next comes content marketing. It is one of the most effective ways to reach more audiences by producing helpful content that solves their problems. Content marketing is publishing content on digital properties like websites, blogs, and social media in order to build an audience, demonstrate expertise, and encourage people to visit a brand’s website without being paid to do so. It consists of written content and visual content.
Written Content
This includes blog posts, articles, ebooks, whitepapers, case studies, and newsletters, among other types of written content. Written content is flexible and can be used to educate, inform, entertain, or convert the audience. It is frequently published on websites, blogs, and social media outlets to attract and engage users, create thought leadership, and drive organic traffic to a brand’s online presence.
Visual Content
Images, infographics, videos, animations, and interactive media are all types of visual content. It is highly engaging and can effectively convey information, elicit emotions, and enhance the narrative. Visual content gets shared frequently on social media sites, video-sharing sites, and sites like Instagram and Pinterest that focus on images. It helps get people’s attention, raises the brand’s profile, and gets words across in a visually appealing way.
5. Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is one of the newest ways to market online, but it is becoming more and more popular as a way for businesses to reach more people. Influencers are people on social media who a lot of people follow and look up to for living opinions and who have a big impact on a lot of people. A HubSpot report said that “72% of marketers used Instagram for influencer campaigns in 2022.” We can track two main types of influencer marketing options: social media influencer marketing and content creator or blogger influencer marketing.
Social Media Influencer Marketing:
The idea behind social media influencer marketing is to team up with popular users of social media sites like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter in order to spread the word about a product or service. Influencers create paid content including product reviews, endorsements, tutorials, and sponsored posts for brands to reach their target audience. Social media influencers can get their fans interested, build trust, spread the word about a brand, and increase sales.
Content Creator or Blogger Influencer Marketing:
Collaborating with content creators, bloggers, or vloggers who already have a sizable following and extensive knowledge in a particular field is an integral aspect of influencer marketing. Brands work with these influencers to create sponsored content, like guest blog posts, sponsored pieces, product placements, or mentions of the brand in their content. This builds the credibility of the brand and sends targeted traffic to the brand’s website or landing pages.
These are some of the most effective digital marketing strategies that you can try for your small business. While there are always more options available, it is important to evaluate your business goals to choose the best strategy.
Digital Marketing Tools for Small Businesses
As we have already discussed how digital marketing can help a business grow fast, with different channels, costs, and effective strategies, now it is time to get started. Digital marketing is a skill, and it takes time to develop it. You can begin the learning process with some simple digital marketing tools.
As the popularity of digital marketing grows, many tools are also being built by successful marketers to help beginners. Here are our top 5 picks for the best digital marketing tools of 2023 that you might give a try.
1. Semrush
Semrush is one of the best tools for digital marketing, if not the best. Even though SEO experts use this tool the most, social media marketers, content marketers, and ad experts can also benefit from it. When it comes to optimizing your website and developing content, Semrush gives vital insights to help you make informed decisions.
2. Buzzsumo
BuzzSumo is mostly used to track and observe mentions and trends. It has a lot of great tools, like a content analyzer that helps you find the best content on the web and a content ideas creator that can come up with great content ideas for your websites.
3. Canva
Canva is a very easy-to-use and helpful tool that you can use to make eye-catching social media posts to promote services and products. Besides social media, you can also make flyers, posters, banners, and videos with it. It’s a tool that does everything you need for visual content.
4. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is probably the easiest tracking tool to set up and use. It gives you a lot of ways to set up and look at information about the people who visit your website. You can use Google Analytics to figure out everything from which parts of your site need to be fixed to which pages are the most popular.
5. HubSpot Marketing Hub
HubSpot MarketHub takes care of everything, including our emails, ads, and social media. It can be used to make customized workflows and automate repetitive marketing jobs. Hubspot Marketing Hub is great for any small business Growing too Fast and wants to take its marketing automation to the next level.
Need Help?
We’re getting close to the end. Now it’s up to you to get started with digital marketing. We hope that the information in this blog helps you reach your business goals. To stay ahead in the game, you must first figure out where you are and what you should do right now.
The helpful digital marketers on our team can be your best running mates. Get your free audit today to find out how your business is doing and what its real possibilities are. Thanks for reading and don’t forget to share this blog with your friends.
FAQ
How to start digital marketing for a small business?
Small Business Growing too fast follows these steps to start internet marketing today:
- Set definite goals.
- Identify your target group.
- Make a professional webpage.
- Implement basic SEO tactics.
- Create a plan for marketing your work.
- Use ads on social media.
- Make an email list and sell through email.
- Think about pay-per-click ads.
What are the 7 Cs of digital marketing?
The 7 c’s of digital marketing are:
customer, content, context, community, convenience, cohesion, conversion.
How do I choose the right digital marketing tool for my business?
To choose the best Internet marketing tool for your business:
- Set clear goals.
- Check your finances.
- Look into tools and compare them.
- Read the comments and reviews.
- Think about scalability and interaction.
- Evaluate user-friendliness.
- Ask for suggestions.
- Use free trials and demos when you can.