Keep Up With the Competition: A Digital Marketing Survival Guide for Small Businesses

If you’re a small business owner, you know very well how overwhelming it is to run a business. The sheer amount of responsibility, time, and work you have to put in day in and day out can sometimes become too much to handle. Because you have to do sales, accounting, and staff management yourself, keeping up with the demands of your business can burn you out.

Since your business operations already demand so much time from you, other parts of your business tend to suffer. And marketing is what usually takes a hit and gets pushed to the side. However, business owners should not neglect the potential benefits that they can gain from investing in marketing. Instead, they need to lock in on marketing efforts to make a massive impact on their businesses.

While traditional marketing and print ads still have value in their own right, digital marketing is way more efficient and cost-effective, especially in a growing digital population. Failure to do so means you’ll fall behind the curve, and competition that starts paying attention to their digital marketing first will get ahead of you and your business.

Here is a guide to some of the best digital marketing tools available today to help you keep up with digital transformation.

Get Social Online

The easiest way to start digital marketing for your business is to get your brand on social media platforms. Social media provides your business with a way to communicate with your fans and customers. It can make your business look and feel more approachable since customers can message you directly through your social media accounts.

The most crucial part of running a social media account for your business is the content you make. Creating attention-grabbing photos or viral videos that showcase your business will help you gain new followers and new customers. Most of these social media platforms offer a digital advertising service called post boosting. It allows you to promote and show your posts to specific demographics even if they don’t follow you yet. It also gives your business more exposure to more people, making your brand more recognizable.

Social media is such a powerful digital advertising tool for any business. And it’s because most people spend the majority of their time online on these social media platforms. But just having social media accounts isn’t enough for a successful advertising campaign. While you can find general ideas online for your next social media marketing campaign, remember that every type of business requires a different approach. What might be an effective strategy for one company might not work for another. The success of social media marketing for HVAC companies requires specific content unique to that industry. It is something you must keep in mind when formulating your social media marketing strategy.

people writing code

Get on the Web

If you’re ready to take the next formal step in digital marketing, then you should look into building your first business website. A website can serve as a central online space for information and resources about your brand. Customers, both old and new, should be able to find out everything about your business through your website, from your contact details to your products and services.

Aside from the contents of your website, it’s an absolute must that you optimize it for mobile devices. Almost everyone has a smartphone that can access the web, and that figure is close to seven billion people, which is about 80% of the entire population. So it only makes sense that your website should be responsive and smooth on any mobile browser. But that also doesn’t mean that your desktop version of the website shouldn’t be just as good. In any case, good web content plus a responsive user interface will make for a great website.

The Down-low on SEO

Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, is a tool that does what its name suggests. It optimizes your content for search engines. Search engines rely on keywords that you enter to produce a list of related websites and content online. For specific purposes or products, some keywords stand out more than others. The goal of SEO is to interlace those high-traffic keywords into your content so that when someone searches that specific keyword online, your website is the first on the list.

When people use search engines like Google or Bing!, they mostly only pay attention to the first three results of their search. That result is why SEO is such a powerful tool when it comes to digital marketing. Coming up first in search engine results makes your business feel like an authoritative figure in the industry, thus giving people the confidence to trust you and your brand.

Final Thoughts

No matter what stage you are in your business, you should never neglect marketing. It will help give your brand more exposure and become well-known, subsequently gaining customers’ trust. Ultimately, it will help generate sales through new and repeat customers, placing you ahead of the competition. So what are you waiting for? Get started on your digital marketing today!

Share this post on

The Author

Scroll to Top