Crafting a digital marketing strategy for small businesses

A digital marketing strategy is your approach to how you’re going to market your business in the digital world. Having a strategy in place ensures your budget and resources are allocated effectively to deliver you the best results based on your objectives. Not doing so, risks you wasting your money or time on ineffective activity. We all want to work smarter, right?

Some of the key digital marketing channels to consider are your website, social media, email, SEO, and paid search. 

As with any strategic exercise, it’s good to have some basic principles in mind. If you follow these best practice tips you’ll be in a good place. 

Know your audience

Whether you’re just starting out or already running a business, you need to have an idea of your target audience. A smart idea is to slice your target audience into different segments based on different demographic and behavioural considerations. For example, one segment might be university students under the age of 21 whereas another might be graduates aged 21+. 

Once you know this, it’ll help you form your strategy. You can even build customer profiles for each audience segment answering key questions that will help inform your targeting approach and messaging. 

• What are their goals?
• What are their pain points?
• How does your product help?
• Where do they hang out online?

Understand your competitors

As part of your digital marketing strategy, research your competitors to see what they’re doing well and not so well. How are they marketing their business? What channels are they using? What are customers saying about them? This can help to inform your unique selling proposition and position your business attractively to potential customers. 

Focus on your brand

Having a strong brand identity is a great way to mark your business out from the crowd. Once you know your target audience and your competitors, you’re in a good place to think about how you’re going to present your business to the world through your branding – whether that’s the visual identity or the way you talk. Those brand elements should be present across all your digital marketing activities. 

Test and experiment

One of the joys of digital marketing is you’re able to measure performance in real-time. That means you can run tests in lots of ways to make data-based decisions. That could be experimenting with content and design on your website or testing different messaging in ad campaigns. Embed the process of testing and refining into your digital marketing strategy. 

Your business website is one of the most important elements of your digital presence. There’s no point generating interest in your business and driving traffic to your website if it’s going to let the side down. 

The first step for small business website design is to define your goals. What do you want your website to do for your business? In most cases, this will be to sell more products/services – so think about the customer journey to reach this end goal. Go back to your customer profiles and put yourself in their shoes. What is the buyer journey likely to look like? Is it likely to be a straightforward decision to buy from you and you can offer new customer discounts to boost your conversion chances? Or, perhaps it’s a longer buyer journey and you need to offer some value upfront – content, proposals, product trials – to help you capture data and then convert. 

Whatever you decide, these end goals should inform your design and content decisions. Try and keep it simple with everything flowing towards your end goals. Throwing too much at your target audience will overwhelm them. 

Whilst you can go DIY and manage fine these days, if you have the budget consider using a specialist freelancer or web design agency. 

SEO stands for search engine optimisation. This means getting your business to rank higher in Google searches. When people are looking for something, they tend to click on one of the first three links. So businesses aim for the top. For smaller entities, this can be tricky, but not impossible. 

The most important exercise is identifying the search terms and phrases you want your business to appear in results for. Knowing these ‘keywords’ will determine how you structure content and write copy for your website. Very simply, if you decide ‘Small business marketing in Coventry’ is a keyword you want to rank for, you will want to create a page on your site that has this as a heading and features the keyword in the copy.

You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner to research the search market and identify which relevant keywords you want to focus on. It’s important to consider the volume and the competition for these keywords. In a perfect world, you want to find keywords that are highly relevant to your business and have a high volume and low competition. The reality for small businesses is you will likely struggle to attain strong rankings for high-competition keywords so you might choose to focus on very specific or niche keywords. 

SEO is complex and, once again, if you have the budget it’s always worth speaking with specialist freelancers or agencies. On the upside, however, many DIY web builders have built-in SEO features to help you fulfill the basic requirements. 

You may have considered newsletters as part of your digital strategy. Along with this, email lists can be used to send seasonal messages or start a loyalty programme. Having a sign-up option on your website is key – but make sure people know what they’re signing up for.

Tips for good email marketing:

Know your goals

You may want to build more engagement, update people on changes in your business, or target new subscribers. There are many goals your email marketing strategy could have, you just need to pick the best ones for you.

• Promotional – If you aim to promote your service, you may want to include your latest discounts and offers.
• Transactional – This includes order confirmations, updates about an order, or an email sign-up confirmation. These should be informative and simple
• Relational – This is the option you should go with if you want to create a relationship with your consumers. These emails may link to digital content.

Don’t send too many emails

Having people on your mailing list is exciting, but if you email someone several times a week, bombarding them with promotions, you may risk people unsubscribing. Plan how often you want your newsletters to be sent out to avoid mishaps.

Optimise your timing

Think about what time you’re sending your emails. Consider your demographic and when they might find time to check their emails. For example, a businessperson might check their emails at 8 am as they’re on their way to work.

Segment your list

Split your data up into segmented groups based on your customer profiles. This allows you to send focused content to the relevant people. 

Think about what’s going to attract people

If your subject lines are punchy, people are more likely to open them. But the content within the email should be interesting too to keep people hooked. You have around three seconds to capture people’s attention – go!