Digital Marketing Tips for Small Businesses
Dont know if you should improve your website or social media? Here are some quick and effective ways that you can do to improve your digital marketing. If you are a local or small business owner, taking advantage of digital marketing is so important. You are very limited when it comes to traditional marketing, and digital marketing is the way forward.
Research the Competition
In digital marketing, researching your competitors is essential because, as a local business, you will want to be the best in the market and offer something that they dont. To start your research, go straight to Google. You can see if your competitors are putting themselves in Google Ads or even how high they are ranking.
You now must be thinking about how I can differentiate from your competitors who sell or provide the same service? If you dont have one, invent one. Below are some methods of how you can differentiate yourself from your competitors:
- Product – most notable but easily duplicated and could be short-lived
- Service – training, installation, speed, ease of doing business etc
- Distribution – suppliers, manufacturers, distributors or retailers you work with
- Relationship – employees and customer service could be an effective means to differentiate. Perhaps add a review service such as a Trustpilot rating
- Image/Reputation – this can be established through your current customers, who can later become your advocates
- Price – again, this can easily be duplicated. However, depending on your product, customers may choose to pay more if there is an added value in doing business with you
The Website Basics
People are online all the time, and they want to have the best experience on the internet. Your website is apart of that experience. People want to be able to get on your website as fast as possible. This means having a fast loading time, which is a minimum requirement. As a small business, you might not have a more prominent national or international firm budget, but you can do the basics.
Page speed is becoming more important on mobile devices, and if your site takes over five seconds to load, you will start to see a tremendous bounce rate.
Google PageSpeed Insights shows you how fast your site is on mobile and desktop. It will also give you a list of what is slowing down your site and how you can improve it.
Improve your Google My Business Listing
Your online presence could be the factor on whether a customer chooses you or your competitor. With Google My Business, you do have a level of control when managing how people view your company.
This is when people Google your company, and you come up with a knowledge panel on the right-hand side of your search results. This usually has a small section with your companies information in it.
Create Engaging Blogs
If you are in a very competitive industry, you will need to think about a content strategy that will drive results. Working in smaller companies, they are often not on the first page on Google for a broad keyword. This is ok because sometimes this is not the best thing to do. Some times it is better to focus on a more specific keyword that represents your company best.