Robyn Rivera
Digital marketing has always given small businesses the opportunity to compete with bigger rivals and grow their customer base. And with more and more time being spent in digital spaces, it's become a critical piece of the puzzle for successful small business owners.
The online world is vast, and there’s plenty of competition to contend with. In order to make your small business stand out, you’re going to need a big online presence. Here are a few steps you can take to build one.
Your small business should have a presence across the web (as I will talk about in-depth in Step #2), but all of your social media profiles, listings and ads will point to the same place — your website.
As your small business’s main hub online, it’s very important that your website is up to par. It needs to be able to meet the needs and expectations of modern users, which means that it needs to be responsive and mobile-friendly, and it needs to be fully functional for all users.
It’s of no value to you to build a presence on, say TikTok, if none of your customers are currently on TikTok. To get the most of your investment in digital marketing, you need to make sure that you have a presence wherever your potential customers are looking.
If you’re a local business, this means ensuring that you have a listing on local business directories and review sites, like Google, Yelp and Top Rated Local®. You also want to make sure that you have a profile on the social media platforms your customers are using, most importantly, Facebook.
If you want to build a big online presence for your small business, it needs to be visible on the top search engines, especially Google and Bing. To do that, you need to focus some of your time and energy on search engine optimization (SEO).
Research relevant keywords for your business, and optimize your site for those keywords, including in page titles, meta data, headlines and content. Also, harness the power of content marketing by creating new content on your site on a regular basis.
Advertising is a wonderful way to drastically increase your visibility online right away, and you can extend your reach even further by advertising on all of the most popular channels, like Google, Facebook and YouTube.
Get more out of your advertising budget by targeting your ads to the right audience. You can also maximize your ROI by retargeting people who have already shown interest in your business by visiting your website, clicking on a previous ad, etc.
Whether consumers are shopping online or looking for a local service provider, they almost always read at least a few reviews along the way. That’s why every small business needs to make sure they have reviews, and that those reviews paint them in the best possible light.
Left up to their own devices, most consumers won’t write reviews on their own unless they’ve had a negative experience. However, most are happy to write reviews if you simply ask. Start making it a point to follow up after every purchase or appointment to ask for feedback, and monitor your reputation closely.
A lot of people are spending a good amount of time on social media these days, and with the pandemic, social media usage is only increasing. Making sure that you stay active on your social media profiles is a good way to connect with those people.
Staying consistent with posting on social media is important, but it can be difficult when you already have so many other things on your plate (like running your small business, for instance!). Use a social media scheduling tool to schedule posts out in advance and stay consistent, no matter how full your schedule is.
A lot of the steps I’ve gone over so far are geared towards getting your small business in front of new customers, but there’s a lot of value in staying in contact with your existing customers as well. Email marketing is a great way to do just that.
With the right software, you can create automated email campaigns quickly and easily. With email, you can remind customers about items in their shopping cart, recommend additional products or services, request reviews, send out curated offers and more.
To say that small business owners are busy might be the understatement of the decade. Small business owners average twice the amount of work hours as regular employees. The last thing a small business owner wants is to waste their already limited time on a marketing strategy that isn’t working for them.
One of the biggest benefits of digital marketing is the ability to monitor almost every aspect of your performance, and it’s one you should absolutely be taking advantage of. When you keep a close eye on your performance, you’ll have the data on your side, helping you make smarter, more informed decisions about your marketing budget and strategy.
Building a big online presence for your small business starts with having the right website on your side. Build yours today with Websites 360®.
With the Websites 360 website builder, it’s easy to build a professional, modern small business website that has all of the functionality you need — even if you don’t have prior experience with website design.
Websites 360 websites are built with SEO in mind and made to integrate with Marketing 360®, the only digital marketing platform you need to manage and grow your business.
Originally published on 1/29/21