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Digital Marketing Opportunities and Tools Guide for Small Businesses

As a small business owner, you likely feel you should be doing more online and implementing more digital marketing opportunities.  Having a digital presence is one of the best ways of building brand awareness and reaching a broader audience to grow your business sales. When you are just getting started, it may seem overwhelming to know where to begin and how to “up your game.”  

Digital Marketing Opportunities and Tools for Small Businesses

In this Halftime Mike Podcast I’ll share key online marketing opportunities in this post and give you key tips on how, why, and when to use each.  

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VIDEO PODCAST:
Digital Marketing Opportunities and Tools Guide for Small Businesses

Diving into the Details:

Digital Marketing Opportunities Infographic

Here's a visual breakdown of the digital marketing opportunities, tips, and tools.  This is a great infographic to pin on Pinterest so you have it handy!

digital marketing opportunities and tools infographic

Thanks to the team at Vengage for creating this infographic design.

Digital Marketing Opportunities Details

The internet keeps growing, as does the number of digital marketing solutions. The variety of opportunities can leave you overwhelmed and confused about which ones to use. Here, I will break the key options down and give you an overview of each digital marketing opportunity, followed by the tools.

Social Media Marketing

Social media has grown beyond a place for sharing vacation photos and funny videos. It has evolved into a powerful business platform. Tech giants like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube can offer extremely targeted marketing and a way to connect in a ongoing way with your ideal potential customer audience.

If you have a specific audience you are targeting, social media marketing can help you find more of that audience, build rapport with that audience, and ultimately offer opportunities for buying from you to that specific audience. Information shared by users makes it easier to market to them according to age, gender, occupation, and other demographics. If you have a much younger audience your target is likely important to be on Instagram. Getting IG followers is a great way to improve your social presence.

There is not just one social media platform to be on. Usually, it benefits businesses to be on multiple platforms based on where their ideal customers spend time on social media to be found in many different ways but it all depends on the target audience and goals for your business's social media marketing strategy.

Social media marketing is generally free (other than paid ads) but does take time and strategy to post regularly, answer comments, and be creative in what you share so that it is engaging users.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

You can get your brand in front of the ideal potential customer demographic by paying search engines to place your ads on top of search engine results pages (SERPs). Every time people search a term associated with your business, they’ll be shown your Ad as a top option. You have to bid to appear and the more competition for the term, the higher you have to bid and be willing to pay.  It can range from as low as $.30 per click to nearly $8.00 in high cases. Google AdWords is the key here and Bing Ads is the other of the most prominent players in this field.

SEM is one of the most effective ways to reach new customers and ultimately grow your business. When people search on a search engine they tend to check out the top results first, making it extremely important to be in that top spot. Now you can’t just rely on the paid ads, but when other businesses similar to yours have an SEM strategy it is important to invest to stay in the game.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

As opposed to SEM, SEO attempts to have your website rank in search engines naturally, or organically. It’s a long term process that involves posting relevant content, optimizing keywords, and having quality backlinks. The best way to increase the rank of your website is to have the most relevant and helpful content for your consumers with SEO optimized pages that focus on specific keyword phrases that would-be customers are searching for in Google and Bing. SEO is a very important tool for businesses to consider and spend money on.

Content Marketing

Content is anything that can be posted online including text, images, audio, and video. There are various ways of marketing content such as blogs, YouTube channels, social media pages, infographics, and ebooks. Video content is expected to keep growing due to its effectiveness.  I personally use content marketing via blog writing and in doing so it is related to your SEO work.  The more quality content you have on your website the better your search ranking. It’s just key to optimize the content for SEO purposes.

Writing a blog is not the end though!  It has to be shared and re-shared on social media, as well as connected to partners and influencers so that they will also hopefully share it with their audiences.  Good content is key, then getting good content seen is the next focus!

Display Advertising

This is similar to the SEM area but specific.  This shows banners (images or videos) advertising your products to people visiting various websites. By tracking their online habits, search engines can show users suitable ads wherever they are on the internet. This retargeting spreads your brand visibility across the web.

You can do display advertising within Google Ads manager but also via Facebook Ads manager and any site that sells ad space on the site.  

Influencer Marketing

This is a newcomer to the marketing arena that is growing fast.  Influencers are people who have a significant following on social media and online (blog/website). When you contract with them and hire them to help, they will do some agreed upon shout out, telling their fans about your product and promoting it. It’s a good way of marketing using a more natural approach to marketing that has the value of the trust factor of the influencer sharing it.  The more they are trusted by their audience, the more your product will be trusted. Its effectiveness can be harder to track than established marketing methods like SEM. The key is the right influencers and the right pitch by them that is natural and helpful.

Email Marketing

Most small businesses don’t think of email, even though it remains one of the most effective ways to market. It has a proven conversion record that guarantees you a positive ROI.  In fact, email is one of the best online ways to sell that there is! People read their email and they will buy from email.  

This needs integrated with your website so that you offer a way for web visitors to sign-up on your site

Affiliate Marketing

Through this method, you can allow anyone who meets certain conditions you set to market your products online. This allows you to essentially grow sales with a salesforce made up of affiliates who sell your product.  Once a customer referred by them makes a purchase, you pay an agreed amount as commission to the affiliate. It makes business sense because your services are marketed for free across the web, and you only pay after making a sale.  Obviously, this might not work for all small businesses as it requires the company to have resources for the affiliate and the ability to deliver the end product to the affiliate's customer.

Chatbot Marketing

This a newer and evolving marketing tool.  You've likely "chatted with a bot" via Facebook Messenger or on a website.  Chatbot marketing can be used to answer initial questions, qualify leads, and for much more!  With a free chatbot builder like SendPulse, it's easy to design a chatbot for Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Telegram.  For example, you can have a sign-up just like you would for an email list and then send "chat-blasts" to the subscriber list.  These are having a much higher view and click-through rates than email in many companies.  

Also mentioned in the podcast, creating online courses with Thinkific.

The Benefits of Niche Marketing for Small Businesses

Niche marketing is a great way to ensure that your small business stands out in the crowd. With niche marketing, you are laser targeting audiences with marketing strategies specific for that niche. The benefits of niche marketing for small businesses include better conversion rates, increased traffic to your website, and reduced competition. 

For example, niche marketing could be used in the following ways:

  • Instead of using one advertisement for your small business, you may want to create specific ads that target demographics.
  • You can develop a different website landing page design to attract certain types of customers.
  • Selecting SEO keywords that are laser-focused on your niche and easier to rank highly for.
  • Write content with a specific type of person in mind, understanding what is likely to be most engaging, based on their needs.

Niching is a powerful way to develop a winning value proposition. For those in the Industrial niches such as construction, fabrication or the manufacturing industries there are a range of the best digital marketing resources, courtesy of Industrial Idea.

Less Competition

The biggest reason why niche marketing works for small businesses is that niche marketing works in a way to decrease the amount of competition. 

The less competition there is for your niche, the easier it will be to rank well organically on search engines, which means you get free traffic rather than having to pay out money just for clicks.

Laser Targeted

Not only will niching your content make it easier to rank for, but niche marketing also means that you can target your ideal customer more easily.

Finding the right niche will allow you to speak directly to them, giving sales a better chance of converting because they are speaking with their customers instead of just throwing out random messages and hoping someone takes notice. 

Brand Loyalty

When you understand who your niche is, you can provide the best possible service to them. This means they are more likely to become brand loyal if your business provides what they need and fulfills their expectations. Your customers will begin to know, like and trust you, and in turn, they will stay with you going forward.

Fast Growth

Creating a niche can also help your business grow because it allows for more opportunities to expand into other niches that have the same customer service expectations as what you already provide. 

Digital Marketing Tools

Depending on the digital marketing method you pick, you’ll need specific tools to make it more effective. These include:

Social Media Marketing Tools

You might need to maintain many social media profiles and brand pages, which can be overwhelming. Some tools can manage all your online interactions in a central place, without you having to log into each account.

They include Agora Pulse, Lately, and Hootsuite. One benefit is the ability to schedule posts, which makes it look like you’re always active online.

This social media management tool supports five major networks: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and YouTube. It has solutions tailored for organizations of any size. Its main features include the ability to schedule new posts, as well as reschedule popular posts. Agora Pulse works great for people creating unique social media posts. You can post to multiple channels at once, tag people, add photos, videos, and so much more. The user interface makes Agora Pulse easy to use.

It aims to make the best of both human and AI marketing skills to give your business an edge. It can auto-generate social posts from a few keyword suggestions. By linking it to your website and other online assets, it will come up with various resourceful marketing ideas. This is a great resource for people who have little time to create posts. This is especially useful for posting on Twitter.

Consistently ranked the most popular digital marketing tool, HootSuite is a robust social media analytics tool. Its engagement reports are easily shareable among teams, which makes collaboration more effective.  It’s been around quite a while, has a loyal and large user base and continues to roll out new tools to help you stay effective

Search Engine Optimization Tools

Since SEO is important to stay up with the competition and rank higher in search engines two SEO tools that you can utilize include:

As an SEO tool, it gives you everything you need to dominate search engine rankings. Its analytics tools can accurately tell you how well your posts, as well as those of competitors, are performing.

As noted earlier, SerpStat is a one-stop shop for SEO, SEM, and keyword tracking solutions. Its strong points are accurate backlinks analysis, comprehensive site audit, competitor research, and SERP research.  You can identify and track keywords and how you fair in ranking for them over time. I'm a partner and you can sign-up through me on SerpStat.

  • ALPS

Take your SEO methods to the next level with ALPS enterprise SEO tool!   ALPS uses AI (artificial intelligence) to help your business by providing data-driven insights into how search can lift your overall acquisition efforts. The platform houses enterprise SEO tools that align and optimize organic strategies.  By benchmarking your URL against high-ranking competitors, ALPS allows you to uncover insights and optimization opportunities.

Keyword Research Tools

Keyword research is central to any SEO campaign. It gives you insights into what customers are searching, as well as your competitors’ SEO strategy. Some of the best tools are Ubersuggest, SEMrush, Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, and Serpstat.

Ahrefs crawls 5 billion web pages every day. It also has a database of 16 trillion known links and 3 trillion known URLs. This means it gives the most accurate keyword analysis results. It makes it easier for you to understand your competition’s online strategy through its competitor keyword analysis.

Championed by SEO guru Neil Patel, this is arguably the most effective and affordable keyword research tool. Entering a keyword on the site gives you ideas for writing your next viral content.

Website Analytics Tools

For your digital marketing campaigns to work, you should have statistics on how many people they’re reaching. This also shows you their conversion rates. They include Google Analytics, Moz pro, and Hotjar.

Email Marketing Solutions

These allow customers to sign up for services while making it easier to reach thousands of subscribers with new offers. They’re also perfect for conversion because you can notify customers about various releases, from blog posts to new products. Examples are MailChimp, AWeber, TinyEmail, and ConvertKit.

Chatbot and Facebook Messenger Marketing Solutions

One of the most trusted and fastest growing is Mobile Monkey.  With template to help you create Q & A's, qualify leads, sign-up subscribers, send chat-blasts to subscribers, and run Messenger Ads, Mobile Monkey is a robust tool that can quickly help you get started and scale your chatbot marketing.  Other chatbot tools are reviewed here.

Photo Design and Video Production Online Tools

If you want to produce quality social media, you are going to need to have tools to create graphics, customize images, edit/create videos and more.  One tool that can assist is Renderforest.  This online video making tool offers a range of features to help you improve branding and easily create animations and video.

If the photo doesn't do the product justice, you won't be able to sell it online, regardless of how amazing the product really is. Product photos are an absolutely necessary component in the realm of online retailing. Editing your product photographs for e-commerce purposes to make them appear cheerier and more appealing to customers is equally as important as taking these photographs.

There is nothing stopping you from increasing your sales and convincing your customers to buy your items when you use services like clipping path services from experts like UK Clipping Path. One of the most remarkable aspects of UK Clipping Path is that it provides its services at prices that are among the lowest in the industry. This enables customers to obtain the highest quality results. Isn't it amazing? A photo editing service contributes to the expansion of your online e-commerce firm in a variety of ways, which are outlined below.

Consumers have a greater interest in the product after the picture has been taken and altered. Editing photos is essential for an e-commerce business for a variety of other reasons as well, all of which will ultimately lead to an increase in revenue.

Animation

Needing animation for your brand and not sure where to go?  Consider Twine where you can get connected to an animator who can perform the job you need!

SMS Text Message Marketing Tools

Mass SMS Marketing systems for sending bulk sms messages to lists have really grown in popularity and are a great way to market to customers via their mobile device.  Once users subscribe to messages, a SMS text Message system can allow you to drip text messages to the subscribers.  Since most people have message notifications on and there is no filtering like with email, SMS messages get noticed and read to help your marketing impact.

Get Started

The above are some of the best digital marketing opportunities and tools available to small businesses. Their biggest advantage is scalability, so even as your business grows you’ll still be able to enjoy their benefits.  You are likely doing some of these but not all of these and that’s OK. The key is knowing which pieces will help you the most. Often times your business can best benefit from a digital marketing agency that are pros at what they do, understand and are versed in these opportunities and tools, and can help you make the best decision on where to spend your time and money.  

That's a wrap this time!

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Why the Halftime theme Mike? 

I’m an Indiana Hoosier native where basketball is the top sport. Every team heads to the locker room at halftime to evaluate the first half and create an updated plan for the second half. That plan includes adjustments based on reviewing what worked and what didn't. The “halftime” is a key review point where the game stops, the team pulls away to huddle in the locker room away from the fans, and they come out prepared and ready to succeed in the second half.

That’s what this podcast is all about, taking the time to pull away for a bit to evaluate, learn, and set some strategies for your business to succeed in the second half. Join me by subscribing and let me be your “business halftime” to help you find great success going forward!

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