Get your site notoced with online marketing
These days, having a strong online presence is no longer optional for small businesses — it’s a necessity. Popular online marketing strategies can help you reach a wider audience, engage with your customers, and ultimately grow your business in ways that traditional marketing can’t match.
With that in mind, here are a few tips to consider when planning online marketing for your business:
1. Plan Your Online Marketing Strategically
As marketing is everything that leads to sales, it generally takes longer to develop. So marketing strategies need to go beyond day-to-day sales tactics. That means:
- Identifying your target audience
- Choosing the right channels and tactics
- Consistently tracking and analyzing your results
- Being patient
Beware this common catch: sales rely on traffic and trust, but building those takes time. Paid ads can be a fast alternative, and a typical Cost-Per-Click (CPC) of £1-£2 may seem cheap. However, paid traffic can quickly get addictive and expensive, as the average website needs over 100 such visitors to make a sale. Unless your profit margin on each sale can cover a Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) of £100 to £200, numbers like that can easily spiral into trouble.
2. Stay Flexible to Succeed
One of the greatest advantages of digital marketing is its flexibility. Unlike traditional marketing campaigns that are set in stone, digital strategies can be quickly adapted and refined based on real-time data and insights. This allows small businesses to stay agile and responsive in an ever-changing online landscape.
Everyone wants free (or cheap), easy and stable marketing. Sadly, it doesn’t work that way. Anything cheap and easy soon becomes the new baseline for competition, and any channel that gets popular will try to monetise that. Remember — if you aren’t paying, you’re the product, not the customer. So you will need to adapt.
For instance, social media channels make money from content you write for free. So Facebook posts used to be a good way to promote your website. Now, those reach barely 0.5% of your audience unless you pay.
That doesn’t mean you have to chase every trend, but you do need to figure out which channels your target market prefers and how to stand out on those. It also makes sense to keep your valuable content on your own site (i.e. your blog), where you can link to it from other channels, rather than putting hours of work into a fleeting social media post.
3. Measure Your Online Marketing Success
Stats are essential for effective online marketing
You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Digital marketing provides a wealth of data and metrics that can help you gauge the success of your efforts. By regularly monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) like website traffic, conversion rates, customer acquisition cost (CAC) and social media engagement, you can make data-driven decisions to optimize your strategy and maximize your ROI.
Here’s the secret to making stats work for you: trends are what really matter. Don’t obsess about short-term ups and downs that last less than a month. Very few such short-lived events can cause lasting damage to a business — unless stressing over them prompts you to make rash decisions. You can’t control your audience or your competitors, so just accept that and focus on the bigger picture and things you can control.
Most popular analytics systems rely on third-party cookies. So to use those on your own site, you’ll need Cookie and Privacy policies, and a compliant consent-tracking system. I recommend CookieYes for this, as it’s easy to manage and affordable even for the sole traders and micro businesses I serve.
4. Invest for Success
Markets tend to reward persistent investment in quality. While all investments involve risk, the less you invest in quality, the higher your risk of failure.
For instance, every business website has to compete with about two billion others to get visitors (aka traffic), who can then be converted into customers. Professional web design, SEO and copywriting attract more traffic, build more trust and persuade more visitors to buy. So many firms invest heavily in those, specifically to stay ahead of those who don’t — because it works.
Whilst every business varies, many invest at least 10% of their target turnover in such professional marketing strategies to grow, or half that to maintain their market position. Otherwise, they slowly lose out to competitors until they become a zombie business, unable to afford the marketing they need to recover.
5. Build Relationships
Ultimately, digital marketing is all about building relationships with your target audience. By providing valuable content, engaging with your followers, and delivering exceptional customer experiences, you can foster loyalty and trust. A cost-effective review management system can turn that into valuable advocacy that will help your small business thrive for years to come.
Note: The small fee I may get if you buy from external links in this post doesn’t affect my recommendations.
