Search engines generate nearly 93% of all web traffic. Over half of Internet traffic is generated by mobile devices. If anything, the best myth you hear about digital marketing is that it is for large businesses. But what if we can demystify the fact?
How does Digital Marketing Help Small Businesses?
The Digital Revolution has changed the nature of modern businesses. Digital marketing is not just for large companies and brands anymore. B2B marketing is now available to businesses of all sizes. And, small business marketing strategy has evolved beyond ROI.
In essence, digital marketing strategy is centered on creating impact, brand awareness, and fostering customer loyalty. The trick lies in scaling strategies to the changing business needs. The goal is to establish an effective brand identity that drives an exceptional customer relationship. How does that happen? By using three different digital marketing techniques. Scroll down!
Start with a Brand Identity that helps you connect with your customers!
An organization’s brand identity combines what the company believes in, its values, its products, and how it wants its customers to perceive them as a business. Simply put, a brand identity is the face of your business and a commitment you give to your customers.
But there’s a subtle strategy hidden to execute this phenomenon. Can we call it a brand identity strategy or customer experience strategy? Because brand identity and your customer’s trust are intertwined. How will you establish a safe path toward building it? A five-step strategy is all it takes.
Research – Like any business plan, generating brand identity requires some market research. It should help bring out all the questions regarding who your audience is, the uniqueness that puts you out of the crowd, what can compel them to make you their choice, and what are the pitfalls? Simply put, a SWOT analysis considers the biggest whys and pushes them to be the best reasons for building your brand.
Logo – Although logos are not all that make up your brand identity, they are one of the most critical branding components. Your business cards, website, and online advertisements all feature it. It needs to be interesting, with attention-grabbing colors, hooking templates, and consistency in its use. Make sure your branding is as cohesive as possible.
Connection with communication – Language is the bridge that acts between your product and customer. By that, we don’t mean the formality but the tone and intent. Who doesn’t love stories? So tell some engaging and moving stories in building your brand. Be it your blogs, social media, or advertisements, make sure your communication can connect you with your customers. How would they like that to be?
But Avoid – Language gives the freedom to communicate and connect with your customers. But hold on and revisit your strategies before you implement them. The social presence of people is becoming vast every single day. One mistake, and it’s easy to remember your brand for it. Do you remember the Myntra Logo Issue? So creating sensible and publicly acceptable content across all marketing channels with consistency on both online and offline mediums is crucial.
Monitor – Tracking key performance metrics is vital for knowing what is working (or not) as part of your marketing. Analyze how people talk about and interact with your brand using the right analytics tools. That allows for fixing mistakes or improving your brand identity as needed. Recall that Domino’s revamped its brand to get to where it is today.
Now, with these five strategies in hand, let’s design a traffic-driving social media strategy.
Target your audience with a compelling social media strategy
Social media serves a variety of business purposes. In addition to promoting your products, services, and brand, social media connects you with your audience.
Building a social media strategy differs slightly from what we discussed earlier. How? For example, the above strategy works wonders for creating brand identity. The same strategy with a few tweaks can accommodate a social media campaign plan for small businesses.
Drill the goal: What is your objective for this social media strategy? Is it creating brand awareness? Acquiring customers? Increasing engagement?
Buyer personas: Learn everything you can about your customer – age, gender, locality, interests, pain points, and active social media channels.
Which channel is best for you? With a dozen social media channels used across marketing, knowing which one suits your and your audience’s needs is vital. It’s not a trend you need to catch up on; it’s about the reciprocation and engagement that a channel gives you.
Create a social media content calendar. We mean setting a clean layout of your agendas, what you require for it, who works on it, who designs the creatives, when is the publishing date, etc. It should give an overview of your mission on social media just with a glance.
A bunch of tools, maybe. Yes, for starters, any small business can do their social media posts using tools like Canva for creating designs. Similarly, there are management tools that help the process run seamless clearing bottlenecks. Again, get what suits your needs.
Posting day: Make sure all your posts are published on the set date. Maintain consistency. Start engaging your audience on it by adding them to the other marketing channels. Give them that push to meet your objective.
Analyze: Finally, sit back and reflect. Not every social media strategy or campaign works wonders. Some win, and some lose. So, cheers, find the reasons and act accordingly.
Now that’s about the social media marketing campaign. But for any marketing strategy, the content remains the king of it. Then how to create a content strategy that gets results?
Build a winning content strategy
You can define content strategy as the process of using content (written, audio, and visual) to accomplish your goals. You will attract and engage your target audience throughout the funnel and even after they have made a purchase with a successful content strategy.
The steps for creating an outstanding content marketing strategy look very similar to the templates of brand identity and social media campaign planning.
It all starts with identifying your audience with whom you need to engage the content and chalking out their likes and dislikes. After knowing your buyer personas, it is advisable to do a content audit of how your current strategies are working.
Now is the time to choose a content management system that helps deal with flowing data silos. This step gives an idea to curate and brainstorms the ideas and strategies that best work for the target group with specified teams.
As a next step, you will now need a content calendar that provides a clear glimpse of how your strategy will take place. This boils down to the final publishing, managing, and finding the right analysis to work down for later.
Finally, there are numerous digital marketing varieties, from social media to influencer, email to content, SEO to pay-per-click, and mobile to an affiliate. The real strategy lies in which one you pick for your business. There is no one approach that suits every small business. But the advantage of being a small business favors a lot. It is easy to break the business sectors, identify the key areas that need attention, and execute an impactful digital marketing plan accordingly.
With that said, if you’re a small business ready to embrace a digital transformation that could change your business game, then you’re at the right place. Wild Creek is a leading digital marketing firm that helps you build your own digital story. Contact us today!
