Having ideas for digital marketing can hit a brain wall sometimes, so you'll need some additional inspiration to keep them flowing. To help you find ways to get your company out to the masses.
Here are 20 digital marketing ideas for small businesses. Pick the ones that you think might work for you, put them into action, test and great a report on what works and what doesn't.
1) Build some links to your website (SEO)
Good SEO is achieved through gaining quality links from other websites to your site. By building more authoritative links back to your website, whether through high quality directories, blogs, or business partners, you’ll be able to rank in search engines for selected keywords that match your business.
2) Start a weekly newsletter to local customers
As a digital marketing expert, I am appalled at how many small businesses do not do even basic email marketing in this day and age.
Start emailing your above-mentioned email list at least once or twice a week, offering a discount or something of value to them will keep you company in the back of their brain. This helps - so when next they are searching for something similar to your products or services, you will be right there to help.
3) Get email addresses from potential customers
Email addresses are like a biggy bank for your business. With an email address, you can do a lot of communication with customers (You'll see more in this post). But it all starts from getting their email addresses and utilising them with strategy.
Whether that’s through Newsletters, a physical sheet of paper at a physical store, or required on sign-in or sign up to your store, get that email and get permission to email the correspondents.
4) Offer discounts for check-ins on Foursquare/Yelp/Facebook
Use Geo-location apps like Facebook, foursquare and yelp. This is a great way to do local marketing for your small business. See potential customers check in on their social media app of choice and give them a discount to your services or products.
5) Write five keyword-targeted blog posts
How Search engine optimization works, and primarily driven by content and links. Go do some keyword research and write five blog posts targeted towards those keywords, then spend as much time promoting them as you did writing the articles.
This will help you gain attention for those keywords, also try to make sure you are targeting long-tail keyword phrases for better ranking.
6) Start a Buffer account and schedule social media content regularly
Use social management tools like Buffer or ChooseJarvis are some free tools (up to a certain number of accounts and after that for a small fee) that can allow you to schedule social content across all of your social media accounts. Because social media updates have a short half life, consistency is key to see results. These social media marketing tools will give you more consistency.
7) Use FiveStars to reward frequent customers
Reward customers and keep them coming back for more. Use FiveStars or TangoCard to create cool rewards for your business, so you can reward frequent customers.
8) Get more reviews on Yelp
Reviews can help build trust for your small business. Use Yelp business to get more positive reviews, it is the most used tool for local business in the service industry for recommendations and reviews, so ask your customers to leave you a review of their time at your local business.
9) Buy ads to target your email list on Facebook
Facebook ads and re-targeting can increase exposure. Remember that email list we mentioned above? Did you know that you can upload those email addresses to Facebook and re-target them there to bring them back to your business? Yes, it's like magic - so start doing that today.
10) Promote tweets in your local area
Use twitter to get the word out. Depending your audience, promoting tweets in your local business area or using hashtags specific to your area can be great for business, and still relatively cheap compared to other marketing channels.
11) Offer discounts potential email addresses
There are many ways to get emails from people. Think about this – get them to sign up using Twitter cards and send them a discount code to use with their next purchase via an email management platform like MailChimp, then drop them into your weekly drip campaigns and keep nurturing till it clicks to sales.
12) Create an Instagram account
Instagram is still the fastest growing social network, and every business can be visual. It’s where your customers are, especially if you have a younger audience, so be where they are.
13) Create a Pinterest account
Pinterest growth explored back 2012. They now boast over 100 million users, so you can be sure to gain an audience for your business. Start off by creating a Pinterest account, create a few boards research, and build your account.
14) Promote pins on Pinterest
Pinterest allows you to promote pins to followers and new audiences. If you’re an online business especially in a B2C niche, this might be something to explore.
15) Write an e-book on a specific topic
E-Books are a great way to show your authority and knowledge of a topic, and if you are a fast writer then it doesn’t have to take that long to write a great ebook and publish online.
Get your outline in place, do your writing, pass it off to a great editor, then publish and promote. And remember that email list? This is another great way to get more email addresses and start nurturing potential customers on the go.
16) Put a Facebook re-targeting pixel on your website
Keep visitors on facebook coming back to your site after their first visit. If you have the Facebook re-targeting pixel on your site, you can then serve them targeted ads and bring them back to your website to complete their purchase at another time or when they are ready to buy.
17) Do Musculus keyword research for your website
SEO is greatly important to online businesses or small businesses who promote themselves online, so learn how to do targeted keyword research and then create targeted pages on your site for those keywords and build some links to get them ranking in search over time.
18) Write new website copy to increase conversions
Rewriting your website copy to focus it around conversion and driving people to that goal is a great way to do it.
19) Check Search Console and redirect 404s
If you operate a website for your small business, you need to have a Google webmaster Search Console verified for your domain. Navigate to Crawl Errors and find the URLs that currently 404 on your site and redirect them to the right place. You need to sign up Asap if you haven't yet!
20) Promote blog posts to website users on Facebook and Twitter
Promote your blog content on Facebook and twitter. Sometimes your users have a longer conversion time and need to see your content often, especially if it’s a higher price item. Promote your blog posts directly to these audiences and watch the revenue roll in over time. You have to be consist with content value and posting.
Divine Tumenta is an entrepreneur and professional digital marketing expert based in Los Angeles. He has worked in digital marketing for more than 8 years. He is currently founder and CEO of backlinkfy.com and a go to consultant for startups and small businesses in the USA.
