Digital marketing

9 Internet Marketing Tips for Small Business Owners

An increasing number of entrepreneurs who’ve been running a small local business for a while are now keenly looking to build an online presence and expand their operations beyond the saturated local market.

If you’re a small business owner looking to go online, or if you already have an online presence via social media, you can solidify your brand’s digital foothold by working on the basics first. Here are nine tried and tested tips to help you get started on the path to online success which, undoubtedly, begins with having a website that would serve as your company’s virtual address.

Internet Marketing Tips for Small Business Owners

Get a website at the earliest

Build a website to represent your business, even if it’s a single landing page where your present and future clients can find a list of your services, your contact information, and your history. By not having a website, you’re allowing your competitors a free rein where they can capture your target customers by reaching out to them online. The article “Do I Need a Website for My Small Business?” from Digital Logic explains that websites help businesses get new customers through high quantity and high quality leads.

Add an FAQ page on your site

Having an FAQ page makes life easier for both your customers and your support team. And it’s simple to make—just create a list of all the questions your customers have asked in the past as well as those that you’d like to address. Write the answers using crisp, grammatically correct and accurate information and ask your developer to create a separate FAQ page on the site.

Experts say that business websites that have a good FAQs page are able to establish a greater connection with their customers by addressing their queries even before they’re asked.

Update your social media regularly

Running paid advertisements on Facebook and Google will help you reach out to your local audience much more effectively than would the traditional advertising tools such as flyers, hoardings, and newspaper/magazine adverts. Aside from ads, maintain an active social profile by updating your social media handles with relevant, useful and interesting information your targeted audience will be interested to read.

Always keep your target audience in mind when posting something on a social platform and don’t overdo social posts. Aim to strike a balance to avoid irking away your followers.

Upgrade your neglected website and social media handles

If you have a website that you got made a long time ago but that’s doing your business no good, show it to a good website designer to know what’s lacking. To grow in a digitized world, your small business needs a good, responsive, attractive and fast website that loads just as well on a cell phone or tablet as it does on a desktop.

The same goes for your business pages on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so forth. Get off platforms that are not relevant to your business and focus on those where your target customers spend maximum time.

Use content marketing to connect with your customers

Implement a well-thought-out content marketing strategy that utilizes high-quality informative content to establish a brand identity that your customers can relate to. Get industry influencers on board, create video content and publish blog posts and articles on high-authority websites in relevant niches. Consistent and relevant content marketing helps build brand loyalty, boosts sales and saves marketing costs in the long run.

Use retargeting to bring back visitors

If people are abandoning your website or a certain web page a few seconds into their first visit, you need to find out and fix the reasons that could be causing people to leave your site too early. This could be due to poor navigation, slow loading speed, missing call-to-action, complex checkout process, boring design or incomplete information. A good web designing company can help fix these problems.

At the same time, you can use retargeting or remarketing to bring back past visitors to your site. This process works by showing your product/service ads to your past visitors on other websites they’re visiting. Retargeting helps build brand recall and gives your potential customers an instant opportunity to return to your site.

Continuously evolve your marketing efforts based on results

If you’ve employed a robust digital marketing strategy that uses important tools such as local SEO, SEM, guest posting, social media marketing, email marketing, blogging etc. to bring traffic to your site, you will see positive results in a short time. To be able to track your progress, work with a digital agency that will regularly share analytics and reports with you.

Remember that your marketing strategy needs to be tweaked constantly based on measurable results and it needs to be in line with the changing needs and expectations of your customers. So work with an agency that can create and drive a digital campaign that best serves your immediate and long-term goals.