Tom Welbourne
Helping Small and Medium Businesses Achieve Their Full Marketing Potential | Digital Marketing Expert
Digital Marketing Basics For Small Business Owners
Getting a business up and running consists of long hours, lots of stress and many early mornings & late nights, agree?
And just when you think you have your business up and running, you find out that you need to learn how to use digital marketing channels such as:
Google Ads
Facebook Ads
Instagram Ads
Content Marketing
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
It’s a heck of a lot to take on and to be honest, it’s not something you want to spend a lot of time on when you’ve spent the last few months/year getting other aspects of your business up and running such as a website, legalities and the multiple other formalities.
If you don’t have a business partner, employee or someone who is familiar with digital marketing then you’re going to have to learn this yourself and if you do this, then you’re looking at spending a minimum of 6-months learning the basics.
Not fun.
In this article, we want to cut those 6-months into one post and give you a headstart on your competitors by telling you where to start, what to learn and how to apply it to your business.
SETTING UP YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA PROFILES - (APPROX 10 MINS)
Whatever business you are in and no matter what industry you are operating in, you need your social media profiles set up.
Why?
It instantly adds to your credibility, most of your customers will be using these platforms and it’s a great way of communicating with your audience.
What would you think if you were about to buy a pair of shoes from a clothing store and they don’t have something as basic as a Facebook profile?
You’d probably start to wonder whether they were legit and questioning their credibility.
It is so easy to set up a social media profile nowadays that you do this almost INSTANTLY.
CHECK YOUR WEBSITE SPEED - (APPROX 2 MINS)
Not directly related to marketing, but your website speed should be a key focus when getting your business up and running on the internet.
Again, check your website speed takes less than 2-minutes as you can use a simple tool such GTmetrics.
Here are 10 ways to improve your website speed:
Implement your own content delivery network
Use adaptive images
Cache
Evaluate your plugins
Combine images into CCS sprites
Enable HTTP keep-alive response headers
Compress your content
Configure expires headers
Minify Javascript and CSS
Review your hosting package
Don’t know what the above means?
Read this blog post here for further information.
START PRODUCING & PROMOTING CONTENT
Notice we mentioned promote as well as produce?
The big step most small business owners make when making content is that they think that their job is done once they upload their blog post of video onto Youtube.
WRONG!
The job starts when you publish or upload your content.
Don’t expect a bunch of random people to randomly click on your website out of all the websites on the internet without you telling them to do.
Promote your content until the cows come home and encourage people to consume your content as it the content you’re putting out is damn valuable.
How much content do you need to produce?
There are two approaches to this question that you can take. Both include researching your industry/competitors and then:
Producing more content than your competitors
Providing more value in your content than your competitors
We’d say that 99% of the time you should go with the second option as the internet is reaching a point where people have too much information and instead want content/information where they’re getting the most value/best information.
Put a new spin on a blog post or use the skyscraper technique (adding more value to an article that has already been published).
DATA COLLECTION + ANALYSIS
The most valuable component for most businesses nowadays is the data they collect from their audience/customers.
Despite the upsets caused by Facebook on collecting people’s data and using it in rather suspicious ways, data is so important for a business that you want to know the ins and outs of how your customers are interacting with your audience.
The more you know about details such as why a customer didn’t click through during the checkout process, the quicker you can figure out what isn’t working and come up with a solution.
CONCLUSION
So, there are the basics of Digital Marketing for Small Business Owners and we hope they give you a good start to lead from.
There’s no point in typing up everything we know on digital marketing when the title includes the word “basics” and confuse the lift out of you.
However, we can offer you and your business more info if you would like to learn more so please click HERE and book a call with one of our team at The Good Marketer.
