How to uncomplicate your small business digital marketing strategies

• Updated on: 2017-05-09
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Does your business get enough leads every month? Are you spending too much time and money on marketing? Getting more leads is often the number one wish-list item of a small business and those with an effective online presence find new ways to gain access to a new customer base. The ambit for digital marketing comprises a very broad term that includes: website design, organic SEO social media , SEM, mobile and location, content and more. Most often, small businesses tend to overcomplicate their digital marketing strategies since they are less confident about their knowledge and use of digital when compared to larger businesses. For example, email marketing is just one of the few simple ways to increase a company's online sales and build relationships with current and potential customers without spending much money. With an aim to furthering best practices and doing the easy things right, you need to work from the ground up without breaking the bank. Just about every effort made online links back or drives internet traffic to the website. This is the focal point of all digital efforts and should be treated as much. Yet, we see too many websites that are not created with a responsive design Smashing Magazine, defines responsive design as "an approach that suggests that design and development should respond to the user's behavior and environment based on screen size, platform and orientation". With more devices coming in varying screen resolutions, definitions and orientations, it is important that your content, images, and the structure of the site can be adapted in a fluid and flexible way as per the screen. Further it states, "As the user switches from their laptop to iPad , the website should automatically switch to accommodate for resolution, image size and scripting abilities". In fact, according to Smart Insights, out of the 4 billion mobile phones worldwide, 1.10 billion are smartphones and 3.07 are SMS enabled. That's a lot! Secondly, Google bots love to crawl sites and index and organize all information on it. With a responsive design, there is just one website and URL to crawl which is much easier for users to engage, share and interact with a site's content as compared to different versions for mobile and desktop users. Besides, for the initiated business owner who wants a better user experience for his customers, can make use of responsive design to segment users by mobile through important heat-mapping and A/B testing software such as Clicktale and Optimizely to gain a better understanding of how users interact on his site. Internet users today are smarter and more sagacious when it comes to searching answers for their queries. They look for solutions and not just suggestions - and when they find content to be disjointed, confusing they look elsewhere. By mapping out a good content strategy, you have the unique opportunity to create a unified message and meaning for your brand that helps fulfill your business goal. Sprucing up website content is not rocket science . The first step is to share accurate answers to all the probable questions that your visitors might have when they visit your site for information. Apart from this, segment the content of your website properly into different pages with relevant headings. Be concise and stay relevant when creating content for your own website. Email marketing has resurged as a simple and effective digital strategy. It is a cost-effective method of promotion when you are not sending emails with a poor subject line or bombard customers with emails every day. Sending poor messages is a wrong method, even if using email is a wise decision. At a basic level, you need to collect email addresses, write a message and send it to recipients. However, owners who are too busy running operations fail to investigate how a great email campaign is built, or what works best for their business. Email marketing also comes to rescue when social media limits expansion. Email service providers like MailChimp offering free usage of their platform for nearly 2,000 email addresses. Others are Digital Aka, Octane.in, Kensico and more. Also, the click-through rates of these customized emails are much better than any other platform. You can accomplish the desired results simply by avoiding common pitfalls like writing uninteresting generic messages, sending too many emails, and failing to cut through spam. The solutions are simple. Focus on writing compelling messages that insist on clicking. Most importantly, use the analytics and stats judiciously to measure the impact of your emailing strategy and tweak it accordingly. Believe it or not, social media largely influences user behaviours. In the Indian context, platforms like Facebook , Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ are defining customer-facing interactions. However, it is surprising to notice that businesses are still not joining this bandwagon. Using social media is a free way to sell your products or services in the desired domains. The simplicity of accessing these sites makes them a preferred digital marketing tool for the small business owners. However, you need to be hyperactive and wise when using these platforms. Engaging is necessary while overselling is not. Remember, people are not following you on the social media for reading your promotional materials. Rather, they seek information that only you can offer them. So, be unique, identify the USP of your business, and harness it. When you connect well with your audience, you can inspire them to share your content and become your virtual brand ambassadors. You must add some value to these communications by leveraging your industry expertise and domain knowledge. If you run a small local business, you need not feel intimidated by the cluttered online marketplaces. You can reach out to your targeted users through local listings and citations. Using tools like Google My Business (GMB), Yellow Pages, and Sulekha ensures local customers can find you easily when they are searching for a business similar to yours. For instance, it is absolutely simple to open an account on GMB to get started. You can give business citations and check customer reviews easily on this platform. This data is what you need to stay ahead of the competition lurking in your local market Digital marketing can be easy and affordable if you follow the right practices and present your business in front of potential customers by using the right language. You can make your mark on this massive landscape by being innovative and unique. Always remember to use your local presence and size of your business as the strongest weapons in your marketing arsenal.