Running a small business can be challenging at the best of times, but if you’re only beginning to bring yours online, the chances are that you’ll be feeling overwhelmed. As well as building a website and paying for promotion, there are lots of digital marketing techniques that you should be trying out. After all, the more you market your business online, the more people will visit your website, and every new visitor is a potential customer. Below, we’ve rounded up five of our favourite must-do digital marketing techniques that you cannot afford to miss out on this year.
Blogging
Content marketing is one of the best ways to promote your small business online and get more people to see your brand, but it’s often one of the most overlooked digital marketing techniques for small business owners. Perhaps it’s because blogging can seem like too much hard work, especially if you’re not a seasoned writer. But blogging really can transform your business – so get to work on a content marketing strategy that will drive traffic to your website today.
Social media
Do we really need to discuss the benefits of social media? Sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram allow you to connect and interact with your customers on a whole new level, so the sooner you get started on a social media campaign, the better. Build up your followers by posting engaging content and running competitions, and never leave your channels empty.
Search engine optimisation
We simply cannot overstate the benefits of SEO enough. If you’re ranking on the first page for terms that are relevant to your niche, you’ll be driving free organic traffic to your website every day, and you can use that traffic to convert visitors into customers. The truth is that SEO is a minefield, and it can be tough to master, so we recommend outsourcing to a company that offers SEO for small businesses. Not only does it work out cheaper than doing it on your own, but it gives you more time to focus on other aspects of your business, like some of the simpler digital marketing techniques that you can do on your own (aka social media and content writing).
Pay-per-click marketing
Paying for advertising on social media and on search engines may not be in your marketing budget, but you’d be surprised to learn how far $100 can stretch you to. If you don’t want to spend months waiting to rank on search engines or building an audience, then pay-per-click advertising is the way to go. It’s relatively inexpensive, allows you to target a very specific audience, and gives you total flexibility and control over how much you spend and where.
Guest blogging
Want to stand out from the crowd and get recognised by new audiences? Guest blogging is a great way to achieve this, as you’ll effectively be writing content that promotes your business and your products and services on another person’s website. An additional benefit to this, other than the fact that you’ll be able to position yourself as an authority figure within your niche, is the backlinks that you’ll achieve from doing so, which are useful when it comes to SEO.
For small business owners, there are so many ways that you can promote your products and services and reach out to new potential customers. Experiment with some of the techniques that we have mentioned in today’s article, and see which ones work best for your business.
About the Author
Max Greene is the Managing Director of Muffin Marketing, a marketing agency specialising in content marketing, social media marketing, and search engine optimisation.
