These days, you need to tap into Digital Marketing to grow your business. With the world going digital, you cannot afford to be left behind. Businesses of all sizes, from the small home-based businesses to large global enterprises, now use digital marketing to grow their market share and profit.
As a small business owner, there are three approaches you can use to run digital marketing for your business. You can do it yourself, employ someone to manage your digital marketing, or engage the services of a digital marketing service provider.
Each approach has its pros and cons; you just have to find which one works best for you. Doing it yourself means you have to spend time you would have spent on your core business learning and implementing digital marketing, which can spread you pretty thin.
Hiring a full-time staff to handle digital marketing might not be cost-effective, especially for a small business with limited requirements to justify paying someone full-time.
Outsourcing is usually the most cost-effective way to go for small businesses. You can pay for what you need and not a penny more.
If all you need is SEO Services, you pay for just that. Outsourcing also lets you hire experts to handle the different types of digital marketing you need.
No need to hire a jack of all trades to handle all your digital marketing when you can get an expert anytime for specific digital marketing needs.
For example, if you need SEO, you go for an SEO expert. You can do the same for social media marketing, search engine marketing, or web design.
You can outsource your digital marketing needs to freelancers available at freelancing sites, or you can engage digital marketing consulting companies.
Digital Marketing Needs of Businesses
Here are some of the ways you can use digital marketing in your business.
Social Media Marketing
Social media is probably the easiest path to digital marketing for your business. There are dozens of social media platforms to use in growing your business.
You can easily open a free account on most social networking sites and start building and engaging your audience.
There are now billions of people using social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc, they are an audience waiting to be tapped.
However, too many options can also be a problem. Not every social network will work for your business, and spending time in all of them may not be the best option.
Also, while social media is usually free, to gain traction, you may need to spend money on advertising.
This is why you need to contact social media experts who can help you target your time on the most effective social media networks and target your budget more effectively for optimum results.
You can hire a digital marketing provider or find a freelancer who offers social media marketing services on freelancing sites.
A Website
While social media is an easy and fast entry point to digital marketing, you cannot fully tap the potential of digital marketing without your own website.
A website should be at the core of your digital marketing. Your strategy should drive traffic to your website, where you can hopefully showcase your products and services.
Even when you are engaging on social media, your ultimate aim should be to tap into the engagement and drive users to learn more about your products and services.
A website will also enable you to tap into other forms of digital marketing like email marketing, content marketing, SEO, and search engine marketing.
Social media is great for starting digital marketing, but having your own website will enable you to unleash the full potential of the internet to grow your business.
Again, an SEO service can be helpful in this regard, or you can find a well-rated freelancer in web design to build a website for you.
SEO
Having a website is great, but you need to optimise it so that it ranks high on search engines, which is the secret of getting targeted visitors to your website. This is where Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) comes in.
Using on-page, off-page, and technical SEO, an SEO expert can get your website to rank high for relevant keywords, which will result in loads of visitors and potential customers.
Using SEO techniques like link-building, SEO providers like DevilzSEO can help you grow and get your website ranked higher.
Apart from SEO, you can also use search engine marketing (SEM) to get a head start with search engine traffic. SEM involves paying a search engine like Google for priority placement in SERPs.
SEM is different from SEO in the sense that for SEM, you pay the search engine for traffic, but for SEO, you don’t pay the search engine; you just have to follow best practices.
Email Marketing
Email marketing involves using email to market to customers and potential customers. However, first you need to build an email list.
This could be a list of the email addresses of all customers who have ever bought your products or services. The whole process can be automated using email marketing platforms like Constant Contact and GetResponse.
With this, you can upsell and market your other products. While using email marketing to squeeze out more sales from your existing customers is great, the real power of email marketing lies in lead building and new customer acquisition.
This latter approach is very effective if you have a website. You can ask visitors to sign up for some compelling offer, but require them to provide their email address in order to opt in.
You can then send them helpful emails laced with marketing of your products and services.
