Digital Marketing Tips For Small Businesses
Small businesses are often owner-managed and the owners are usually wearing many hats that often include marketing the business. In this post, I am going to share some digital marketing tips that small businesses can adapt easily. You will find that not only you will be better at marketing your business, you will also learn how to use digital technology to work more efficiently.
According to the article written by Eric Johansson in Elite Business, the result of a survey conducted with 1,000 people indicates 11% of British currently working are planning to launch a business in 2018. The article also states that more women (52%) than men (46%) are interested in becoming an entrepreneur.
This is quite exciting. Because people are more motivated to achieve better work-life balance and a freedom to choose what they do to earn a living.
However, I note that many wannabe entrepreneurs are still considering starting a business with a traditional business model in mind, slightly stuck in the past. It is important more than ever to consider the impact of the digital economy on your future business. In fact, I believe it is a crucial element of any business and utilising the benefits of the internet for your business is now a must.
Here are the reasons why you need to be a digital savvy to help your business to be more successful.
Sales Generation
Long gone the days of people knocking on the door for a custom or waiting for customers to walk through the door. The Internet allows you to look for the type of customers who will buy your products and services and present your wares in front of them without leaving your house.
This is one of the cleverest things that the internet can do. By using digital tools such as Google analytics, you will be able to find out quite a lot of information about your potential customers. For example, by having some data of the visitors to your website, the analysis can show you information about them such as their location, the device they use, their gender, their age group etc. Moreover, you can monitor what pages they visited and how long they spent there.
Some of the large corporations have dedicated teams looking at these sort of information to create suitable marketing strategies. But for small businesses, what this shows is not only having the digital presence online but also to use it to understand more about your customers so that you can use the information to plan your marketing campaigns.
One of the essential tools in researching what your potential customers are looking for is to use a keyword search. I use the best keyword search tool on the market which saves time and effort in creating content that serves my customers and to create an effective marketing campaign. Try it yourself.
Customer Engagement
In a similar way, just because they left your shop without buying anything this time, it does not mean they do not come back to buy something next time. It is so much easier for you to keep track of the visitors and engage them in conversations online. The Internet can keep your potential customers and your business connected in a way that is more engaging and effective than somebody walking in the shop to talk about what they are looking for.
For example, even if you don’t have what they are looking for right now, you can keep in touch with them by maintaining a list of email addresses for you to send them updates and offers. There are some rules on collecting customers’ email addresses and you have to make it easy for them to opt out of receiving emails from you easily.
But as long as you keep in the rule, email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to turn potential customers into paying customers. And once you have collected the email addresses, the cost of ongoing engagements are minimal. It is handy when you are launching a new product or services, as well as when you are offering good deals for a short period of time.
Open All Hours
Are you prepared to be available to answer the telephone queries from your customers 24/7? The Internet is a perfect assistance who never sleeps to take the calls, make appointments on your behalf, answer simple queries, even send out one or a series of emails while you are asleep. Not just answering the telephone, but internet (depending on what/how you sell) allows your products and services to be sold any time of the day to almost anywhere in the world.
One of the things that many small service-based businesses are not doing enough of is to give customers an option to book one of your services online. Whether you are a coach, a personal trainer, a plumber, having a way for your customers to make a booking online whatever the time of the day it is, will help your conversations from enquiry to an appointment.
Market size
If your products and service do not appeal to everyone in your locals, you still have potential customers online which can be as many as 2.5 billion people.
You may be thinking about being the best at servicing customers locally but depending on your products and services, your business may be suitable to market to a much wide audience including worldwide. This is especially so if you are dealing in specialist products or services.
And the cost of reaching those customers are so small in comparison to what it used to be before the internet age.
Annual Leave
One of the downsides of running your own business as a solepreneur used to be not being able to take time off from your own work unless you have someone reliable and as capable as you to cover for your absence.
It is possible to set up your business so that many of your administration and customer service activities are automated so that you don’t have to be present in your business every day.
The Internet gives you the flexibility to set up your business the way you like with plenty of time off in mind. Learning to utilise the internet in your business is not too hard and it is more cost effective than employing an external consultant.
I hope the information has been helpful for you. If you have any questions or comments, please let me know by commenting below.