The best digital marketing solutions for small businesses are impactful with small budgets, quantifiable, and offer flexibility and scalability so that you can adapt them to updated business budgets and objectives.
As a small business looking to grow, it's even more important to use every marketing dollar as efficiently as possible. Small businesses don't have the same wiggle room larger organizations have when it comes to experimenting with digital advertising campaigns. Their ad budgets are precious, so we wanted to highlight a few digital marketing options that offer tangible, trackable results, while still offering the type of flexibility and affordability that small business owners need to run their operations.
It's hard to say which of these online advertising campaigns is the best choice, since there are a lot of variables to take into consideration, such as a small business's monthly marketing budget, their business type, industry, service area, local competition, and more. But these digital marketing ad campaign types can help most small businesses develop a solid online marketing foundation to build upon.
Pay Per Click Marketing on Search Engines
If your products or services are searched for online, it's hard not to recommend some form of search engine advertising. Sites like Google and Yelp are titans for a reason. Platforms like these connect internet users with the products, services, and information that they're looking for, and there's no better time to show a desktop or mobile user an advertisement than right when and where they're looking for something.
But you have to be smart about how you approach a new search engine marketing campaign. You have to monitor it closely, especially during the first 90 days of a new PPC campaign. Because this form of digital marketing has many pitfalls and is technically demanding, it's typically not wise to do it yourself. You'll get results exponentially quicker and with significantly less wasteful ad spend if you hire a professional to develop and monitor your pay per click marketing campaigns for you, so please don't DIY this one unless you intend on investing time to learn how to do it the right way, monitor it, and optimize it accordingly.
Also, consider allocating a small daily budget to a display campaign. Display ads are like tiny digital billboards that are proactively shown to users on all devices. They deliver a high volume of exposure at a low cost, and can help people discover your business. If you pair a display ad campaign with polished graphics, and do a good job of defining your targeting parameters while simultaneously incorporating general marketing best practices such as time-sensitive offers, they can yield great results, even though your users might not be looking to buy in that exact moment.
Display advertising has a very low barrier to entry, making them a great option for newer small businesses or businesses on tight budgets.
Search Engine Optimization
When compared to pay per click ad campaigns, SEO campaigns take a little bit longer to start bearing fruit. SEO is another crucial form of digital marketing that simply cannot be overlooked, especially when it comes to the long-term health of your small business.
SEO can be broken down into a few different subcategories such as technical SEO, on-page SEO or content SEO, and off-page SEO.
Technical SEO refers to ensuring your website's metadata is thorough and on point. On-page SEO involves making sure your website has enough high-quality verbiage on it, and off-page SEO more so refers to optimizing elements that are not directly part of the client-facing or backend of your website, such as reviewing the quantity and quality of your business's directory listings across the internet.
When these various forms of search engine optimization are reviewed and overhauled, their cumulative impact equates to significantly more exposure for your business online. Not only can it greatly impact the volume of your exposure, but the nature of your exposure too, because how you approach the overhaul of these elements will impact the type of users that see your website as a result.
Again, depending on which form of SEO we're talking about, some of these tasks can be quite technically cumbersome and frustrating for a typical business owner, so it might be a good idea to speak with a local digital marketing professional and recruit their assistance with this endeavor.
Social Media Advertising and Posting
Your average business owner understands and agrees that having a presence on social media is important, even if they don't give their business's social media efforts as much dedication as they'd like to.
One of the many reasons why social media is so important is that when consumers discover a new business they're considering patronizing, most like to conduct research before making a purchase. They want to see images of the products or services in question, or read reviews from previous customers, to help them feel like they've made a wise, informed purchasing decision.
If a user heads back to Google for example and searches for a business, a lack of an adequate web presence or even worse, negative reviews, can quickly cause them to disengage and seek out a solution elsewhere. This is why it's so important for a small business to manage their listings, manage their social media, and polish everything. Ensuring their business info is abundant and consistent across different websites and platforms, to help alleviate confusion and bolster consumer confidence.
And since content on social media platforms is primarily visual, you can leverage the right pictures or videos to really tell your business's story and attract the types of buyers that most closely align with your business's products and services.
Many small businesses engage in these types of digital marketing efforts, but unfortunately, very few of them do it well. It takes knowledge and time to execute the aforementioned forms of online advertising well, and your average business owner is more of a specialist in their own field, or simply doesn't have the time to dedicate toward proper, polished digital advertising efforts.
Of course, that's why you have organizations like Array Marketing Solutions here to help. If you've always wished you could bolster your business's appearance on search engines, review sites, social media platforms, and more, it can't hurt to schedule a free 15-minute consultation or give us a call. You'll always leave the conversation knowing more than you did before, or better yet, we can work together to help your small business shine online.
Cheers,
-AS