Introduction To Digital Marketing For Small Businesses

So, You decided to stray from the everyday norm and start your own business. Congratulations! Unfortunately, getting started is only have the battle. To become successful and see the financial success and freedom you are seeking, you need customers. 

Today we will be taking a bird’s eye view of how you can implement digital marketing for your business today and reap the massive rewards tomorrow.

What is digital marketing?

To sum it all up, digital marketing refers to the action of obtaining customers through an electronic device or over the internet. These methods include:

• Content marketing – Creating content like blogs and videos and putting it out into the world.
• Search engine marketing – Search engine marketing consists of pay per click advertising (PPC) and Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Display Advertising – Display advertising is primarily pictures and text. You will see these ads around the internet on people’s websites and blogs.
• Mobile Marketing – Mobile marketing has one goal, to reach your audience on their mobile devices via email, SMS, and messaging apps.
• Social Media Marketing – Social media marketing allows you to create advertisements and have them posted on your audience’s timeline or newsfeed.
• Email Marketing – Email marketing gives you the ability to speak directly to your audience via email.
• Influencer Marketing – Influencer marketing allows you to get your message in front of another audience by partnering with people/brands that have the audience you would like to target.
• Affiliate Marketing – Affiliate marketing is the process of promoting another person’s product or service for a commission when the sale is complete.
• Video Marketing – Video marketing allows you to get in front of your audience and make a more personal connection. You can create video content for any type of business and is a beautiful addition to your marketing strategy.
• Audio Marketing – Audio marketing gives you the ability to advertise to people on Spotify, Apple Music, and Pandora.

As time continues to move, and we see more advancements in technology, the digital marketing landscape continues to grow. It is not limited to the items listed above. However, the list above should help you get the gist and a little understanding of what digital marketing is.

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Digital Marketing Your Small Business For Free

 There are many great free resources available for you to utilize within your business when it comes to digital marketing. Suppose you have some free time at your disposal. In that case, I recommend embracing one or a few of these activities into your business strategy:

Blogging

Blogging allows people to find your website through searches made on places like google, yahoo, and bing. It is a great tool that anyone can deploy and integrate into their current strategy. 

Blogging is when you write about subjects you specialize in or topics that are related to your business. When people search for information, google then displays articles such as yours for people to read and answer their questions. 

Being shown on google search results can be extremely helpful when it comes to new customers finding your business online.

Some examples of implementing this for different industries are:

Baking – Create a blog online to share tasty recipes and talk about ways to take your baking game to the next level.

Beard Products – create a blog where you share different beard styling/grooming tips.

Athletic Shoe Brand – Create a blog talking bout different hiking trails around the world and where you take your shoes.

Gyms – Create a blog talking about innovative new workouts with different machines or guided meal plans that taste great and help with physical performance.

Veterinarian – Create a blog that helps people understand how to care for their pets and keep them healthy.

Snow Boarding – create a blog about tips and tricks for people to get better at the sport and get more joy out of it.

Hopefully, you get the point here; you can create a blog for just about any industry or topic related to your business. 

Benefits of Blogging:

1. More Potential Customers- blogging allows people to discover your website more often when searching for topics in your industry. Think back on how you search for your information on the internet.
2. Improve Brand Reputation- When you genuinely add value to your customers upfront, you will become a more reputable brand in the eye of your customer.
3. Create Trust- This goes hand in hand with brand reputation. If you help your customers before they are your customer, there will be more trust that you are the better choice.
4. Share Your Expertise- Blogging is a great way to share what you know with the world.
5. Become An Authority In Your Industry- By showing that you are an expert within your industry, you become an authority figure that people turn to for information.

People tend to trust blogs as a credible information source when searching online. Roughly 29% of consumers trust blogs they come across online. Check out the image below relating to the various forms of information channels and their perceived trust levels by the public.

Image Source: fitsmallbusiness.com

Email marketing

Email marketing has been around for 49 years. It isn’t a new concept by any means. However, email marketing is still a tremendous tool that you should leverage to help your business grow and succeed! 

Some significant benefits of email marketing are:

1. Personalized content – send emails to your subscribers that they want to read.
2. Generate More Sales – within the emails that you send to your email list subscribers. You can promote products or services that may be a good fit for them and encourage them to purchase.
3. Generate More Traffic To Your Website – when you create new content on your website, you can let your audience know with email updates. Include a call to action within that email to come back to the site and read the latest material you have posted.
4. Communicate With Your Audience – Email marketing allows you to communicate directly with your audience, whether for a vital platform update or product changes.
5. You Own Your Email And Contact Lists – With platforms like social media, you don’t own anything that has been acquired by your brand. From followers to content your brand produced, the platform you are using owns everything. For example, if you have 500,000 followers on Facebook, and for some reason, your account gets banned, you have now lost all of the followers you worked so hard to obtain. With email marketing, you don’t have to worry about this, you and your brand own all of the email subscribers. See how powerful this can be?

Social Media

It’s essential to be where your audience is, and in this case, social media happens to be that place. Here are some of the best platforms out there for your business:

• Facebook – Facebook has more than 1 Billion active users daily. Your customers are here, and you should be too.
• Instagram – Instagram is a great platform to utilize if your audience is primarily a younger crowd. Give your audience an inside look and show them what your brand is all about rather than just telling them.
• Twitter – Twitter is a powerful tool when it comes to being able to communicate directly with your customers and building your brand’s awareness. 
• Linkedin – Linkedin is the place to be when you are trying to expand your professional network. If you are trying to become more recognized among other businesses, this is your place to be.
• Youtube – Youtube is a top-rated platform designed to create helpful, educational videos. It is a fantastic way to turn your blog content into a video format (vlog). Video content also makes a more personal connection with your audience.
• Reddit – Reddit is a centralized hub for forums. People come here to join communities where they can talk about topics of interest with like-minded people. You can find conversations about nearly any subject, which makes it a great place to weigh in on conversations your audience is having.
• Pinterest – Pinterest is one of the top social media platforms out there for small businesses, depending on your industry and how photogenic it is. Suppose you are a photographer, baker, home decorator, or within similar industries that can produce great photogenic content that can be easily shared.
• Quora – Quora is a platform where people freely ask questions, and other users can go and answer their questions. Suppose you can add value to people asking questions in your realm of expertise. In that case, it can add credibility to your name and business, which could result in a new customer.

Check out this great article by OptinMonster for a more details on the best social media platforms you should use within your business

Facebook Groups

Facebook groups are a place where like-minded people get together and get to speak freely about the topics they love.

As a business owner, you should highly consider Creating your own Facebook group. Creating a Facebook group is a great way to keep the conversation flowing and share your content with people who want to see it. 

Here are some of the benefits of creating your Facebook group:

You have a direct connection to customers – The people who join your group and participate are likely going to be your best, most loyal customers. When people are thinking and talking about your business on purpose, it shows a genuine interest in what you are doing.

Create a long-lasting relationship with customers – By creating a community that helps you and your customers to communicate directly regularly, shows that you care about them.

You will increase your organic reach – Facebook’s algorithm prioritizes the content within your Facebook group that has high engagement. The more you and your group interact on posts within your group, the more often the content will reach the newsfeed for people to see. 

Guest Blogging

Once you are proficient in your blogging skills and feel confident to put your message out there for the world to see, guest blogging is the next place for you to look. 

Guest blogging is where you write content on topics and post them on influential industry blogs such as Medium, Huffington Post, Forbes, Entrepreneur, and INC.

Doing this can benefit you and your business in many ways, such as:

• Giving you instant exposure to targeted traffic – If you post where your audience is looking, you are bound to attract some of their attention.
• Expand your network – If you contribute to other authors/ influencers who are active on the same platform, you then position yourself to connect with like-minded producers.
• Improve your online authority – You appear as an authoritative figure within the subject you’re writing about when you produce value-packed content that appears on industry-leading blogs.
• Assist in growing brand awareness – Influential industry leaders have the eyeball that you want. By getting your name published in front of their audiences, the more your potential audience grows!
• Improve your content marketing skills – The more you practice getting your content out into the world for people to see, the better you will get. Your brand’s growth will be a direct result of your efforts. Practice makes progress!
• Grow your backlinks – More people will want to link back to you and your content after seeing your work posted on a credible source.
• Helps grow your social media following – When people like your content, they are likely to tell their friends who might like your content as well.

Free digital marketing strategies are great and do work! It will take time and consistency to reap the rewards of your efforts. If applied the right way, your efforts will reap the rewards for years to come.

How could you apply some of these free marketing strategies to your business today?

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Should You Outsource Your Small Businesses Digital Marketing?

With everything we covered in this article, it’s needless to say that there is much work that can go into bringing your business online for the world to see. 

The question to ponder is whether you should outsource these efforts to specialists who know how to achieve success for your business or take the time to learn how to do everything on your own.

Suppose you have some free time on your hands and are willing to invest that time in learning how to do everything yourself, that’s great! Understanding how to be digitally proficient is a great way to go, especially if you can quickly learn and implement it. Check out the free and paid resources above; they are a fantastic way to get the ball rolling!

However, if you’re like most active business owners, your time is precious. It’s the one thing that you will never recover! If you are in this boat, partnering with a specialist who understands your industry just as well as you do is your best bet when it comes to going digital.

Finding the right specialists to partner with can be a long and strenuous process when you are first starting. It’s tough to know what you will get as far as the quality of service goes. Partnering with the wrong people is not only a massive waste of your precious time and money; it could sometimes even lead to the downfall of your business.

Luckily for you, Connections Allies does all the heavy lifting to make the process of finding digital marketing specialists for your particular industry simple. We make it easy to find industry-leading specialists with a proven track record of success within your business and the proof to back it up. 

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