As Digital Boost Ambassadors, we’re sharing our extensive knowledge about digital marketing, top tips and shortcuts with SMEs who are keen to sharpen up their digital marketing skills. We share the key things you should be considering as part of your digital marketing strategy, whether you’re new to digital, or need a fresh perspective.
What are the digital marketing channels that matter the most?
At the end of the day, it’s all about the numbers. And the numbers that matter the most are the ones that show your website’s traffic and revenue. The channels you need to focus on are the ones that drive the most traffic and revenue to your website.
Understanding your Google Analytics and where your website traffic is coming from is the first step. Are your social media channels driving the most traffic to your site, or do you have great online partners that generate a lot of referral traffic to you? It might be the regular blog posts you share in your monthly eNewsletter that are the most powerful way to get people to visit your website and reconnect with your brand.
Make a list of your top 5 channels and read on for how to your maximise what you’re doing well, or improve in areas you’d like to perform better.
How to use social media for your business to bring in more customers
Social media is a great way to promote your business and to bring in more customers. By being active on social media, you can interact with your followers and customers, build trust and get to know them better. Armed with this knowledge, and by actively listening to your customers you can tailor your content to their specific needs and interests.
Facebook is considered a key social media platform, with 2.8 billion users.
Instagram is primarily a photo-sharing app, with a bunch of different demographics, communities, and offers. It is one of the most popular social media platforms with over 1 billion active users a month.
For B2B brands, LinkedIn is your core platform for connecting with professional audiences (740 million users) and interacting with complementary brands. Twitter can also be useful for connecting with specific audiences and communities (media and tech professionals are typically high using Twitter users, and has over 190 million users).
If you need low-cost, low-effort digital advertising, social media channels are the way to go. You can run an ad campaign on any social media platform - you just need to provide the creative, copy, audience selection and budget.
Making email marketing work for small businesses
The best way to make email marketing work for a small business is to make sure you think about your audience and what they want to hear from you. The best way to do this is to make a list of the things that your audience is interested in hearing from you about and include them in every email you send. Think about interesting content you’ve shared recently on your social media channels, and on your website. Sharing blogs or case studies that you know will connect with your audience is a great place to start. Of the emails you receive from other companies, what do you like and not like about them? Replicate the things you enjoy and make sure not to repeat the mistakes of other companies who are getting it wrong!
A low cost mail service like Mailchimp (a web-based email distribution platform) or Campaign Monitor that provides services to create your own email list and branded emails, have a variety of pricing options to suit your business. We use Hubspot as a CRM and send emails from this and do so for many clients.
These platforms really hold your hand to create your own emails, whether it's a simple customer newsletter, or a client automation email flow once they’ve purchased their first product online from you.
Understanding the power of search engine optimisation (SEO)
SEO ensures your website will be ranked by Google, high enough to appear in search results when people are looking for the information you can provide. Providing content on your website that is rich in good useful information relating to your product or service, will set you up for SEO success.
It’s also a great idea that if you contract someone to make you a website, they understand the requirement of including meta tags and metadata as this is what Google will discover when looking for results for online searches. Duplicate content is a no no, as is metadata using little or no information about the information your website provides. The more people who click on organic results and bounce off your site when they don’t find the information they’re looking for, the worse your Google ranking will be. This can take a lot of time to fix.
The search results you will appear in, if you have optimised your website, means you’ll come up in a free list of results. Normally there will be several results above these with ‘ad’ next to them - they’re paid results and can become costly to compete with other organisations for this space.
There are tools you can use to check the SEO of your website, we recommend SEMrush. We also provide advice around website optimisation so do let us know if you’d like to chat.
Why blogging should be part of your marketing strategy
Blogging is a great way to interact with your customers and potential customers, and for you to show them that you’re an expert in your industry and that you have something valuable to say.
Writing great blogs will allow you to develop lasting relationships with your customers and prospects. Gaining trust is more difficult than establishing relationships as trust is built on relationships over time.
Why not blog? Share your expertise and build a reputation for creating valuable content that can help others or better explain why they need your products or services.
The SEO benefits to your website from blogging are not to be underestimated either - great quality content ensures your website ranks higher in Google searches than your competitors.
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