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Top tips for small businesses.
Investing into online marketing is always a challenge for small businesses. Below are some tips to consider.
The online world is virtually limitless in scope and size, and owning a website or developing a social media page (or several) doesn’t guarantee any measure of marketing success.
Online assets require careful development, nurturing and constant updates, as well as a keener understanding of not just traditional marketing principles (that still apply just as much in the online world), but specifically online marketing principles.
Here are some great tips for small businesses when investing in online marketing.
Tip 1) Don’t underestimate the importance of good quality search. Next to having a good, functional website, you also want to be found. There’s no point having content and valuable information for your customers, but they don’t know you even exist
Tip 2) Find ways for your offline and online marketing to work well together (seek online offline harmony). This is harder to achieve than it sounds, but also sometimes surprisingly easy to get underway.
The hard part here is to do it well, and then to be able to properly attribute your levels of investment in offline and online marketing, but for small businesses there are many ways to creatively get your online and offline marketing to work well together.
Tip 3) Don’t just look like everybody else out there, try to look better and be different whenever possible. How many times have you been to a small business website, and you know that the site only gets updated once in a blue moon, and that the content is already mostly out of date?
That used to be ok, but in today’s internet age, it’s starting to look very embarrassing and can make your customers wonder whether you are serious about your business.
Tip 4) Pay attention to providing mobile access. Customer are increasingly using mobile as the way they surf the web, and you need to make sure that your website and any other content you have is mobile friendly.
Tip 5) Get to understand the value of building and looking after a community, or at least joining one or several. Ok, so you’re a small business and you don’t necessarily want to invest the time and effort to develop your own community.
But there are many communities out there where you ought to be visible, and if you’re not there, chances are your competitors will be. Communities are the way that the web will increasingly function in the future, and if you want to stay ahead of the game, think community.
Tip 6) Develop good quality content. This is tied into search, finding and developing good quality content is essential these days to being discovered, found and repeatedly visited.
What is good quality content? Relevance is a key, originality another, and frequency is often under stated when developing content.
Tip 7) Get to understand the behavior of your customer online. Where do they go? What do they do online? How do they use your site? This requires access to analytics, with a lot of being available for free or almost for free these days.
However, understanding and making sense of the analytics is a lot tougher than it looks, and it’s useful to look for some expertise in this area, unless you have a head for numbers and a deeper understanding of online.
Tip 8) Ecommerce is often used in websites that aren’t fully ecommerce enabled (they may have a limited selection of ecommerce functionality, whereas most of the services or products are purchased offline), and it’s important to understand that ecommerce is a discipline in itself.
If you are transacting online, then be sure to understand how to successfully conduct ecommerce online, and what the challenges are. Do not assume that digital marketing and ecommerce are one and the same, they have overlaps, but the skill sets are varied and often quite different.
Tip 9) Think of how to effectively use video. Video is already big, and it’s only going to get bigger. Video is key these days to effective digital marketing, and the types of video are quite varied from head shot type videos explaining different things to full scale video productions.
A very common form of video on the internet today is motion graphics video.
Tip 10) Get to know UX (user experience) at least a little bit. How do people look at web sites, what are their customer journeys like? More importantly, how do you make it work better and easier for your customers to find what they are seeking on your website?
UX is key to developing successful websites, and either reach out to those who know how to do this, or at least get to learn some of the most common UX lessons for yourself.
There are lots more tips to provide, and therefore this is only a few initial thoughts.