The Best Online Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses

Val Watson
Authored by Val Watson
Posted Sunday, January 16, 2022 - 6:23pm

Businesses, no matter what industry they are in, need to have a good marketing strategy if they want to be successful. Marketing is all about creating awareness of a company and its products or services and reaching as many people as possible. There are many different types of marketing strategies, and each one has its strengths and weaknesses. There are also various tools available that can help you capture more leads, increase sales and reduce cart abandonment since more and more people move away from brick and mortar stores and move online. One such toolkit is found on Socital’s website and offers quite a few unique and useful features that will help you get the most out of products and services. That being said, businesses need to find the right marketing mix that will work best for them.

If you are a small business and would like to know some of the best marketing strategies that you can use, here are a few.

Social Media Marketing  

One of the most common forms of marketing for small businesses, and one that has proved to be quite effective, is social media marketing. In a nutshell, social media marketing refers to anything that a business does on social media platforms to market itself.

The great thing about social media marketing for small businesses is that it is free, very cost-effective, and can help you reach a wider audience. Businesses can reach more people since around 4.48 billion people use social media. In addition to this, many platforms offer very affordable advertising solutions.

Content Marketing 

The next form of marketing that small businesses can use which will increase brand awareness, as well as website traffic, is content marketing. Content marketing is a very diverse form of marketing and includes anything from podcasts to e-books, blog content, images and videos, and more.

This form of marketing is very effective since the one thing that customers need is either information or entertainment. If you provide both of those things, you will increase your credibility, and appear as an authority to potential customers. Not only does this mean that the next time customers want a product from your industry, but they will also think of you. It also means that by utilizing blog posts and linking your website you will be able to increase traffic.

Referral Marketing   

If you have an existing customer base and would like to utilize them to grow, then referral marketing might be worth a shot. Referral marketing means providing customers with an incentive to bring new customers to your business.

Targeting customers as a small business can be difficult, which is why referral marketing is great since you are using customers to do this for you. Another great thing about referral marketing is that if you set up a good strategy with a budget, you will be able to use the profits from referral marketing to continue to fund this strategy. In other words; once you have got the ball rolling, it can be self-sustaining.

Email Marketing     

One of the most effective, if not the most effective forms of marketing, is email marketing and is the most tried and tested method. Email marketing is sending emails to customers, or potential customers, and alerting them to specials or products that they might be interested in. More than this, you can set up email marketing to alert customers to products in their cart that they have abandoned.

Email marketing is effective because it feels personal to the customer, and you are directly communicating with them. More than this, the customer will open the email in their own time, which means they won’t feel like they are being badgered.

SEO 

With everything moving online, it would be a wasted opportunity if you did not have a website, and more to the point, an extremely effective method of marketing is SEO. SEO is search engine optimization, and it is the process of performing actions that will increase your ranking on a search engine, such as Google.

The higher your website is ranked on a search engine; the more likely customers will be able to find you. Not only does this increase traffic, but it also increases sales. Something to think about is the fact that the clickthrough rate for the first 3 websites on the search results are 28.5% for the first result, 15.7% for the second, and 11% for the third. Essentially what this means is that if your website doesn’t place within the top three search results, the chances of people clicking on your website decreases drastically, which translates to lost business opportunities.










 

 

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