Digital marketing for small firms is more than about rushing out a website and covering the bases with scattershot PPC advertising. While the drive to build a brand, boost traffic, and generate sales will be high, any company from a sole trader to a boutique artisan firm, up to a high-growth businesses all need a solid digital marketing strategy to grow their brand.
This is why here are some of my tops tips to quickly boost your digital marketing efforts…
1 – Work to a strategy, not ad hoc marketing ideas
The strategy, at its simplest, should be to use best practices to find what works and refine those brand-building efforts. It is acceptable, within budget, to try quirky new ideas and see what the result is, but digital marketing should all be done to a strategy with key business goals in mind, and solid metrics as the end result.
That strategy should link all digital marketing elements, from the company website to email campaigns, advertising and media or social media marketing. Each element should focus on achieving those key, practical, business goals.
2 – Place an emphasis on email marketing
While marketing trends come and go, email remains the most reliable and affordable method of reaching prospects and customers. Email gives you the space to create compelling messages and to offer a series of calls to action, something that is tricky with narrower-focus advertising or social media marketing.
Email also has a long history of marketing success, with plenty of best practices for startups and small firms to follow. And for B2B, email remains the essential form of communication for getting your marketing messages in view of decision-makers and buyers.
Make sure you invest in all the right software for this. This should include a landing page builder, email service provider, signature manager, and email verifier.
3 – Map out customer interactions and create a journey
Whatever your marketing plans, the primary method to ensure success is to ensure key messages hit prospects and customers at the right points in their customer journey. Early engagements should highlight the value proposition or key benefits of a product. As customers enter your funnel, marketing can focus on meeting their needs or solving their problems, with later-stage efforts using promotions or other efforts to seal a deal.
4 – Adapt your marketing through solid metrics
Every element of a digital marketing strategy should have a metric as well as a business objective. That can be as simple as “a 5% response rate to marketing emails” or “a 25% increase in sales through our ‘save 10% coupon’.”
Measuring the results of each effort, and looking to see how you can improve the next one are all key ways to improve the effect and impact of your marketing, and create repeatable workflows. Make sure you choose these KPIs early on when you create your strategy and work towards meeting them. While gathering data, don’t just rely on website analytics. Also take advantage of data from heat maps, website recordings, and customer service software.
5 – Make every marketing step refined and desirable
With each iteration of a marketing effort, look to improve the message through punchier text, higher quality, and more direct social media posts, or better quality videos that look professional, no matter how small the business.
Keep messaging fresh and timely, to avoid sending out the same old emails or phrases. And check the results against your goals to see what exceeds expectations and what simply doesn’t work. Focus on bringing every marketing effort up to the highest standards, and keep pushing through marketing and sales teams to drive the business forward.
6 – Look at new ways to market your brand
Having stated that email remains the key way to share your marketing messages, there is nothing wrong with trying new avenues. Few would have considered TikTok a couple of years ago, but already the video clip social media service is outpacing many other social media platforms as a way to get your message across, especially to more dynamic demographics and for brands with hands-on products.
Influencer marketing and other efforts are also worth exploring, even for traditional firms. There are many agencies that can take the stress of finding an appropriate influencer to work with your brand or products.
Keep an eye out for the latest strategies and changes in the digital sphere. It is constantly evolving. What works today, might not tomorrow and the brands that adapt don’t just survive, but thrive and generate the highest profits.
Conclusion
Successful marketing is about finding the messages that appeal to your specific business audience or consumers that make your products and brand stand out. Achieving this should be an iterative approach, based on learning as the company grows and sales improve. Any negative marketing effort shouldn’t be considered a failure but a lesson to learn from, helping improve how you do things in the future.