Digital marketing channels small businesses can prioritize for growth and profitability

 

by Edit Christian

With the evolution of digital marketing, there is a need for small businesses to key into these trends for the...

development and growth of their businesses. A lot of businesses have drifted from traditional ways of running businesses to more innovative and digital approaches. This method has led to massive improvement, yielded faster results and equally helped them when it comes to time management.

There are a lot of digital marketing tools and channels accessible for SMEs, and the exciting part is that some of these channels are cost-effective making you pay less in order to use premium services.

1. Your website

Your website is the main gateway to your brand and many small businesses start with an attractive website as the first step in marketing their products or business. Websites are still the most effective marketing channel or tool. A website not only helps small businesses promote and sell their products and services, but it also allows them to distinguish themselves from their competitors, especially for customers who rely heavily on the internet to learn everything about a company. This makes a website one of the most important business assets for sharing information, building credibility and standing out in crowded marketplaces. Also, a website alone will fail to generate activity unless there is an active program or advertising in place to drive visitors to that website. This can be achievable with the use of other tools like email marketing, social media and content marketing.

2. Email marketing

Small businesses are in a distinctive spot to gain from email marketing. To make your business thrive with email marketing today you need to be honest, transparent and open as possible with your customers. Emails should be nothing but interesting and they should please your prospects and existing customers. Also, alternate to better organic approaches as this will yield good results for your business. To achieve this, focus on getting customers to subscribe to your newsletters. Always make it easy for customers to subscribe to your newsletter. Avoid making your mail too rigid. Keep your potential subscribers in the know of what to expect in terms of content before they sign up. Customers who sign up for your newsletter will lose trust in your brand if they find that the content is different from what they were led to expect. Take care to produce high-quality, exclusive content in your newsletters that customers cannot expect to find anywhere else.

3. Social media

In the past few years, not only has social media shown tremendous and dream-like growth but also successfully pervaded the online consciousness of all internet users worldwide. Today, its influence is even more widespread, and its footprints are impossible to ignore in commercial and business circles. Social media marketing has become so important and vital, that businesses are increasingly planning and strategizing on it to optimally exploit it to their business’s profitability. The following are the benefit of the use of social media for small business: Helps to increase brand awareness, legitimize your brand, increases website traffic and SEO, increases lead generation, brings about an Increase in Sales, provides you with better audience insight and boosts content marketing. It is also advisable that small businesses invest time and resources in growing their social media audiences as it will lead to growth and equally aid in generating more sales and traffic to the business

4. Content marketing

To generate more leads and equally drive traffic to your site and business, it is imperative to create new, original content at least once a week. For best results, concentrate on publishing well-researched content about your brand’s value proposition, innovative/engaging, thought-led and SEO-rich weekly blog posts. The use of infographic is also advised to include in your content as this will help to provide information in a way that is more visual and fascinating to the users. It is also very crucial to imbed links of your article to other related blogs. This can be informed of a barter arrangement as it will aid in increasing your overall SEO rankings. Furthermore, research has shown that generating content that has at least 2000 words (an average content length for a web page) usually ranks in the top 10 results for any keyword on Google.

5. Video marketing

Video marketing is now the new trend in marketing. It is not new that a lot of people like gaining information through visuals than reading. So, as a small business, it is really very important to create compiling content through visuals to enlighten your customer and your target audience about your brand. You can decide to start a programme about your products/services or modify some of your blog content into visuals. This is because there is a huge potential audience reach and social engagement from repurposing content from your blog as video content, and then embedding the videos in the original posts – and videos can be search optimized just like blog posts.

Also, hosting a webinar maybe once every quarter to discuss trending topics about your business or your newly launched product will create more awareness for your brand and equally give you brand visibility which usually leads to massive sales.

A good example of an online video maker that gives you everything you need to make high-quality professional video clips, royalty-free music, and customizable video templates for your business can be gotten online.

In conclusion, these digital marketing channels listed above work together and using them to drive traffic for your business is economical, yields good result and increase your RIO for your business.

Kindly share with us in the comment sections other digital marketing channels small businesses can prioritize that are not listed above.