Another year is in the books, welcome to 2017! If you’re like most small business owners, you may be feeling like you can’t keep up with all the new digital marketing opportunities that keep popping up. As captain of your ship, you may believe you’re supposed to take to the waters like a pro. Of course, if your reality doesn’t align with this ideal, you may be afraid that you’ll end up drowning in a sea of digital marketing opportunities. Don’t let digital marketing become your white whale. Let us throw you a lifeline by showing you 5 simple strategies for tackling your digital marketing woes.
Get to Know Your Catch (Customer)
In order to lure in your catch, you’ll need to learn more about what they want. You can’t just offer a product or service without knowing who your customer is. Without this information, you’ll be tossing your digital marketing efforts to the four winds. Why waste your hard-earned money on strategies that won’t pan out. Do a little digging and develop a customer persona or personas and leverage your digital marketing efforts to solve problems and build a relationship with that customer.
Find Out Where the Fishing is Good
Do you know what social channels your customers use? You’ll want to concentrate your efforts on those channels instead of trying to cover them all. Use these channels to feature customer stories, special offers, discounts, and customer service. Once you open dialogue with your customers, you’ll be spreading your brand at an exponential rate and turning your customers into brand evangelists.
Reel Them in with a Relationship
You’ll be able to reel in more customers when you focus on building relationships by engaging in conversations, making connections, and by getting personal. Engagement is the key factor that induces audiences to want to participate in relationship-building with you. Some great relationship-building activities are:
- Solving problems or sharing information
- Asking questions or posting surveys
- Holding contests
- Featuring customers in posts
It’s important to follow through from start to finish with all your relationship building activities. You’ll want to read and respond to feedback and comments on posts. If you can’t engage your customers like that, it would be better to not make the effort in the first place.
Plot the Best Digital Marketing Course
Investing in digital marketing doesn’t mean spending a lot of cash. You need to develop a strategic approach, making the most of tools and methods avaliable while being cost-conscious. You can explore reciprocal arrangements with related niches and use social media platforms to pay for ads targeted to specific customer groups. You can also make use of cheap and effective pay-per-click marketing opportunities. Also, don’t forget about content marketing. You’ll need to have something to keep people coming back to you. Amongst the tools you’ll want in your toolbelt include: blog posts, photos, surveys, and videos.
Steer Your Digital Marketing Ship with SEO
If you’re not sure how to optimize your content for search rankings, don’t hesitate to invest in someone who does. Organic search is still the best method to reel customers in. Most people use search engines like Google and Bing when they’re looking for information, products, or services. SEO can be complex and it takes time to implement the appropriate strategies. Oh, and search engine algorithms change more often than the tides. If you’re a small business with limited staff on hand, it’s just not always possible to stay on top of all those changes.
Now that you’re no longer coasting along in uncharted digital marketing waters, you can spend more time actually running your business instead of flailing with all those new-fangled digital marketing tools. It’s time to set sail to brand new horizons as these simple strategies are sure to lead to some smooth sailing and great catches. Let Valley Inbound help you chart your next digital marketing voyage. Contact us today to discover how we can help you achieve digital marketing success for your small business.
