As of January 2021, there were over 1.8 billion live websites registered online. Each of these sites uses its own digital marketing ideas to create a strategy for its audience.
Regardless of your business, promoting your brand is key to establishing a customer base. For this reason, you need to develop an effective digital marketing strategy that will help enhance your presence online.
But why is this so important? And what are the necessary steps to achieving your strategy?
Using your personal touch and these seven tips, you can begin creating a digital marketing strategy for yourself. Discover why your small business should use these steps by following along with this guide.
- Optimize Your Site
First, when developing your website, you need to make it human and search engine friendly. This means making it functional for customers to use and search engines like Google to rank.
Easy navigation, clearly stated calls-to-action, and contact pages are a must. Without these elements, most users will likely lose interest in your page and cause your rankings to slip.
For optimal search engine exposure, you should select keywords relevant to your industry. This includes low-competition terms that are relevant to your audience’s search queries. In general, using SEO tactics benefits your site image.
Finally, your site needs to be mobile-friendly. Sites that are hard to read and difficult to navigate are poorly ranked by Google and frustrating for users to engage with.
- Focus on Local Search Marketing
For small businesses, local search marketing is key to enhancing your exposure. If executed well, local consumers can find your business upon searching relevant local search terms. These terms normally include an industry followed by the term ‘near me.’
Before customers can find you, you need to establish credibility with search engines. To do this, simply set up a Google My Business account outlining your contact information. Your name, address, and phone number are crucial to establishing authority.
After you have established trust with search engines, you can then begin reaching customers. When first starting your site, it is recommended that you use professional services to help create and manage your local SEO.
- Monitor Your Online Presence
Regardless of your industry, you need to understand how your customers view your business. For this reason, tracking your digital presence is as important as finding digital marketing ideas for small businesses.
Monitoring your business online means tracking every interaction customers have with your brand. This may include:
- Responding to customer questions/comments
- Engaging in conversations
- Understanding the cause of customer complaints
Managing audience interactions helps ensure that your reputation remains up to your standards. Without proper management, a customer may spread their poor experience with others — further hurting your business’ image.
- Be Active on Networking Sites
Outside of social media platforms and your company site, you should develop an image on networking sites. One of the most noteworthy sites for all businesses is LinkedIn.
LinkedIn is a professional space that helps you connect with other small businesses to further brand awareness. Their service helps you create and manage your professional profile. Also, you can engage with other businesses and customers on a personal basis.
As a whole, this helps to grow your professional network — something that all businesses can benefit from.
- Personalize Your Content
No matter what industry you’re in, your customer’s primary interests stem from their needs. For this reason, you should focus a lot of your digital marketing efforts on creating a personalized experience.
To begin, you need to develop user personas to understand what your audience’s needs, pain points, and interests are. Once discovered, you can then use these elements to better structure your content to them.
This step varies for each site’s type of audience.
Other digital marketing areas that you can personalize include remarketing and email promotions. Reviewing site data will help you determine which pages your audience has previously engaged with and where to begin when remarketing.
In general, consumers are likely to return to your site if approached by content specifically catered to them. Using display ads is a great way to approach consumers who previously engaged with your site in a non-intrusive and personalized way.
- Don’t Neglect Graphic Design
A user’s first impression of your site is usually surrounding its visual design. Lacking in this aspect may cause your site to underperform in many ways, such as desired site traffic.
When working with your digital team, you need to incorporate visually appealing graphic design along with high-quality text. These creative elements work together to create an ideal experience for the user while guiding them through your site.
During the formation of ad development, you should ensure that the designs are kept simple. Essentially, these ads are a way to inform users of your business without seeming invasive.
Creating designs with attractive colors or text unique to your brand is one way to showcase your company’s story. A good ad will help draw customers to your site by providing them value while upholding a visually aesthetic appearance.
- Use Heatmapping
Installing heatmapping software on your site is a great way to gain insight into your customers’ journies. For example, when analyzing heatmapping data, you can see where on your site customers lost interest and left the page.
This information can tell you which aspects are less captivating and which areas need adjustments. Also, heatmapping will reveal patterns about your customer’s shopping habits.
Using this knowledge, you can then adjust your site to fit customer preferences. Overall, heatmapping enhances your customers’ experiences by creating a site tailored to their needs and purchasing behaviors.
Effectively Implementing Digital Marketing Ideas
Beating out local competition and sparking your target audience’s interest has never been easier. Using these seven digital marketing ideas, you can begin crafting a digital marketing strategy for your small business that you can be proud of.
Digital marketing is only one part of gaining customer recognition. For more information on how to market your business, feel free to explore the business or SEO sections of our site.
