Any digital marketer will tell you that search engine optimization (SEO) is critical to your company’s growth. High-quality content has been shown to increase blog traffic by as much as 2000%.
It is challenging to determine which digital marketing methods will generate the most leads, and the best ones will be determined by your company’s needs as well as your brand. So, how do you know which leads will be of the highest quality? The positive thing is that digital marketing is a whole world of opportunities, with each avenue bringing you a new way to generate leads and drum up sales.
If your small business’s digital marketing strategy isn’t generating the leads and sales that you want, then keep reading for the ultimate guide on what to do next!
What Are The Parts Of Small Business Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing refers to a wide range of marketing strategies and technologies that are used to reach customers via the internet. It has revolutionized the marketing industry as a form of online marketing that allows organizations to establish a brand identity, generate quality leads, and ultimately, drive sales.
But what are all the moving parts that make up the digital marketing machine? Let’s look at the 7 parts that make up the whole!
1. Search Engine Optimization
The goal of SEO is to get a company’s website to rank higher in Google search results, resulting in more traffic from search engines. It entails raising your site’s ranking in search results for specific keywords and phrases, making it easier for your target audience to find you when they’re looking for services or information.
To do so, SEO marketers look up words and phrases that people use to search for information online and incorporate them into their content.
2. Email Marketing
Email marketing is probably one of the oldest parts of digital marketing. Newsletters with company updates, as well as sales promotions and exclusive deals for subscribers, are examples of email marketing. In the aftermath of a natural disaster, a trending news topic that affects consumers, or a company controversy, marketing emails may seek to share a general message or viewpoint on behalf of the company.
Email marketing, at its best, allows businesses to keep customers informed and tailor marketing messages to their specific audience.
3. Pay-per-click Advertising
Paid advertising and promoted search engine results are both examples of pay-per-click advertising. This is a short-term form of digital marketing, which means that once you stop paying for it, the ad disappears. PPC, like SEO, is a method for boosting online traffic to a business.
In addition to the ads you see while surfing the web and watching YouTube videos, pay-per-click advertising can also be found in mobile app ads and ads that appear above and to the side of search engine results.
4. Marketing On Mobile
Smartphones and other handheld devices such as tablets and mobile phones are the medium in which mobile marketing is delivered. It is the goal of mobile marketing to reach a mobile audience via methods such as mobile-optimized ads, apps for mobile, and push notifications.
5. Content Marketing
You can use blogs, videos, guides, and more to build trust in your company and shorten sales timelines by using content marketing to attract potential customers. Search engine optimization (SEO) success necessitates the use of content marketing.
For your website or blog to appear at the top of search results, you must produce high-quality, relevant, in-depth content that is specifically written for your audience.
6. Social Media Marketing
When it comes to using social media to promote a business, the term “social media marketing” describes the practice of developing unique content for each platform to increase user interaction and awareness.
Brands benefit from social media marketing because it allows them to build stronger relationships with their customers on the channels they use most. To be effective, all of your digital marketing efforts must be coordinated and built on the same foundation, whether it’s social media marketing, content marketing, or SEO.
Your Digital Marketing Tips To Drive Leads And Sales
It’s one thing to understand all the elements that make up digital marketing, and a whole different level to make each one work for you. We’ve gathered the best tips and digital marketing advice for you to make sure each cog turns well, so the entire digital marketing machine works well-oiled for your brand!
1. Form A Solid Foundation
As with any marketing campaign, traditional or digital, there has to be a strategy that drives your tactical decisions. For marketing, this will always be your target market.
To ensure that you get results from your digital marketing strategy, extensive and comprehensive research should be done into your ideal target market.
Recognizing, anticipating, and meeting the needs of your customers online is critical. Instead of treating them as a single entity, break them down into smaller, more manageable pieces.
When it comes to marketing, the preferences of younger generations often differ from those of older generations, and the popularity of certain social media platforms may also vary by region. You can better target your marketing efforts if you know where certain demographics interact with you.
2. User Experience And Your Website
If you take some time to visit your website as a normal visitor would, then you can make notes on what they experience as they navigate through it.
Designing your website with them in mind is called designing for the user experience. There are three key things to focus on if you want to improve on this.
Page Loading Speed
Slow-loading web pages annoy users. Users will return to the search results if a page does not load within a few seconds. This means that if your website is sluggish, you may lose customers to your competitors.
You will lose 25% of your visitors if your website takes longer than 4 seconds to load so to drum up more leads and increase sales, you need to make sure that those speeds are way, way down!
Site Structure And Navigation
When someone lands on your website, generally speaking, they’re looking for something specific. This may be a product, a service, or just information. Your objective should be to get them what they want in the simplest and quickest way possible.
This is where site structure and ease of navigation come in. Your goal is to make it as easy as possible for people to find the information they need. A user-friendly interface is critical for your website’s usability. As a result, visitors will stay on your site longer and have a more positive impression of it.
Design For The User
Not only should you design the usability with your website visitor in mind but the actual aesthetic of your website should be for them too.
Outdated content should be removed, opting for cleaner and more organized pages will give your website a sleek look that’s more appealing to your audience.
Make sure that your branding is consistent throughout your website and other digital marketing platforms, it’s really important to have that brand consistency.
3. Create Creative Content
Another effective lead generation strategy is content marketing. In addition to bringing in more reliable customers, it also allows you to raise your profile on the web.
Content marketing often conjures up images of blogs, but there are a slew of other options, including long-form writing, video production, online guides, and guides in the form of infographics and other visual aids.
Content marketing can be used as long as you’re providing useful information. The information you provide must be relevant to the search terms your audience is using.
Here’s what you can do:
- Writing quality blogs will establish you as authoritative and increase your blog viewership and subscribers
- Beautiful images can give your brand credibility and encourage people to place more trust in your brand
- Video content can increase audience engagement and drive up leads as video is 1200% more effective
Ensure your content creation is aligned with your SEO and other digital marketing strategies though. It will not show positive results if it sits in total isolation from the others.
4. Local SEO Is a Must
There are over 200 factors that affect how search engines rank your website so it can be tough to decide which ones to focus on to improve the ranking of your website.
Local SEO is a part of the whole SEO strategy and of the people who search for business locally, more than 70% will visit that store within 24 hours.
Your brand should be focusing on leveraging as much of the local SEO results as you can. Ensure that your website shows where you operate from, also you’re going to want to claim your business listings like Google My Business to rank up these results.
Leads will come in from places like Google Maps and other local search directories if you do this step right. Local SEO allows you to tap into your immediate community and potential leads geographically ‘surrounding’ your business.
5. Segment Your Email Database and Marketing
When trying to reach out to prospects or upsell existing customers, email marketing can be a very effective tool. It’s critical to adapt your email marketing strategy to target specific segments of your customer database by tailoring your messaging. Marketing automation is a popular method for helping marketers send highly targeted emails to leads automatically.
Leads can be placed into a workflow that is synced with your CRM so that once they fill out a website form, they are nurtured with content that matches their specific interests. Follow-up emails with great content and a CTA (call to action) to subscribe to your blog or do other things like visit a specific website or see a specific sales promotion are examples of this. This leads us to the next tip!
6. Make Sure Systems Are Integrated
You will have systems in place to measure your website traffic and user behavior like Google Analytics. Then you will most likely have an email client that helps you to manage your email marketing campaigns.
Over and above that, you’ll have a CRM system that your salespeople use to capture sales data. You’ll also have a marketer who manages your digital marketing strategy and answers social media queries and responds to leads.
But who is bringing all this information together?
If you can have one central system that correlates all this information and helps you to understand the sales funnel, your digital marketing efforts will work for you much better. You can then tell where leads came from, and where they are sitting in the funnel. You can have special tags to send segmented emails to them too to move leads along your sales funnel and generate sales.
Be Direct But Be Different With Your Digital Marketing
Your small business digital marketing efforts don’t have to bring small results. If you can focus your resources and set realistic goals for your digital marketing tactics then you’re halfway over the obstacles you might encounter.
Don’t forget that your digital marketing should be directed at your ideal target audience and tailor-made just for them. That’s not to say that you can’t dare to be a little different with your efforts, some trial and error can do you good if you’re looking to increase leads and generate more sales.
Simply put, just ensure that you have everything in place to help you measure your digital performance so that you know what might need to change in your strategy.
Feeling a little lost, still? We can help you with all your digital marketing requirements, contact us now.
