#digitalblog

Discover practical, experience-based posts on digital marketing, freelancing, online income, blogging tools, SEO tips and more. If you want to stay ahead in the digital world, this is for you.

Angels are real.

1. Define Your Target Audience

Before you can start using digital marketing to grow your small business, you need to define your target audience.

A target audience is the specific segment of the market that you choose to make the focal point of your marketing efforts.

With a clearly defined audience, your business is able to craft more relevant content, messaging, and advertisements.

Without a target audience, your business will waste important resources attempting to market to people who are not interested in what you’re selling.

To define your target audience you need to:

Analyze the profile of your existing customers

Analyze the profile of your website visitors

Identify who can benefit from your product/service

Learn from the competition

Create primary and secondary targets

2. Adopt Mobile-First Website Design

A high-performing mobile site is essential to the success of your small business.

More than half of all web traffic now comes from mobile devices including almost 60% of all online searches.

Also, Google has clearly shown that it considers mobile-friendliness as a key part of ranking websites. Earlier this year the search engine switched to mobile-first indexing meaning that they now use the mobile version of all websites as the baseline when ranking websites.

Despite this, many businesses do not optimize their websites for mobile. This has created an opportunity for businesses that provide a mobile-friendly site to improve their search engine rankings while leaving a lasting impression on customers.

The most efficient way to make your website mobile-friendly is to use a responsive web design for your site.

This will enable all your web pages to automatically adapt to each user’s device so that your site looks great and loads quickly.

3. Establish Your Social Media Presence

Having a strong social media presence can help you grow your customer base quickly.

To be able to cut through the noise of all the brands vying for attention on social media, you need to know who your audience is so that you can design a profile and create content that is valuable to them.

It’s important to stay active and regularly engage with your audience to avoid people forgetting about you.

You’ll need to stay on top of trends and optimize your content to get as much exposure as possible.

There are plenty of tools to manage your social media accounts and you can also consider hiring a social media manager.

4. Get a Technical SEO Audit

There are many technical factors that impact search engine rankings.

A technical SEO audit is a process of analyzing these factors to determine the health of your website.

With a technical SEO audit, you can catch issues that may be negatively impacting your search engine rankings.

When conducting a technical SEO audit you should analyze the following:

Indexability

Site speed

Mobile-friendliness

Duplicate content

Broken links

Thin and low-value pages

There are plenty of tools online that you can use to run a quick technical audit of your site including SEMrush and SEOptimer.

5. Perform On-Going SEO Work

SEO is an ongoing process and requires consistent attention if you hope to rank high for important keywords and stay there.

Some of the ongoing SEO work your small business will need to perform includes:

Optimizing technical factors

Researching target keywords

Creating content for those keywords

Optimizing the on-page elements of your site to rank for those keywords

Gaining backlinks to increase page and domain authority

You can choose to hire in-house staff to perform these tasks or outsource the work to an SEO expert or agency.

6. Set up one or more Marketing Funnels

A marketing funnel is a process of breaking down the customer journey into different stages to be able to send each individual more relevant messages based on where they are in the decision-making process.

Businesses can define their own funnel stages but most usually use some variation of the following:

Awareness

Discovery

Consideration

Conversion

Setting up one or more funnels to get your audience to complete the desired action is a great way to make your business grow.

You want to start by defining the goal of each marketing campaign.

Is it to increase overall sales, sell more of a certain product, or generate more email leads?

Once you have determined your goals, you can focus on the specific audience you want to target in your funnel. You will then create unique content to target each different stage of the funnel.

For example, in a B2B sales funnel you may use an e-book during the awareness stage and a detailed case study during the consideration stage.

As people move through your funnel, you need to track the performance of your campaigns.

This will allow you to see what is working and what is not so you can make any necessary adjustments.

7. Create a Blog and Publish Helpful Content

Blogs are a great way to build a connection with your audience while bringing more traffic to your website.

By creating valuable content, you can also establish yourself as an authority in your industry.

To get started with your business blog you need to create a content marketing strategy. This will involve performing keyword research to find relevant ideas that your target audience is looking for in search engines.

Once you compile a list of keywords you can create topics for your blog posts and start producing content.

You’ll want to be sure to optimize your blogs for SEO by including the target keywords, and related keywords, as well as ensuring the piece is structured to maximize user engagement.

Look to create content for all stages of your marketing funnel so that you are able to provide value to all your readers.

8. Create Downloadable Resources

Creating free resources for your audience is a great way to provide value while strengthening the connection with your business.

The goal of providing downloadable resources is to have your audience exchange their email for the content.

This allows you to follow up with subscribers to provide them even more detail about your products or services.

There are different ways you can deliver your downloadable resources including:

A direct download link on your website

Automated email follow-ups containing a link to the resource or a downloadable attachment

A resource library page that is restricted and only available to subscribers

9. Grow an Email List

While it may be one of the oldest digital marketing strategies, email marketing remains one of the most cost-effective tactics while also providing the highest ROI potential.

Email marketing allows you to reach a relevant audience with highly personalized messages.

To take advantage of all the benefits of email marketing, you need to build your email list. For this, you will need to leverage your website to get users to provide you with their email addresses.

You can create landing pages in which you give away a valuable piece of content like an ebook or a checklist for free in exchange for emails.

Another effective way to gain subscribers is to add forms to your blog either on the sidebar or as an exit-intent popup.

10. Send a Newsletter

As your email list grows you want to continue to build relationships with subscribers by sending regular newsletters.

This will allow you to nurture new prospects, teaching them more about your business as well as connect with existing customers.

There are plenty of email marketing tools you can use to send newsletters to your audience.

These solutions allow you to schedule newsletters in advance and segment the recipients based on a wide range of criteria to ensure that you are sending highly-relevant messages

11.Create a Facebook Group for Your Business

Facebook groups are a great marketing tool for both attracting new customers and engaging with your previous buyers.

They serve as a place where those who are interested in your business come together to connect over their mutual love for your company.

You can use your Facebook groups to engage with your audience by answering their questions and giving them bonuses for being part of your community. This helps you increase brand awareness to be able to attract an even larger audience.

12. Develop an App for Android and iOS

Building your own mobile app can help your business expand its reach to attract a larger customer base.

Mobile apps are also highly engaging allowing you to build a better connection with your audience.

You can add unique functionality to your app by enabling customers to buy your products or it can simply be informational. Another effective marketing technique is to offer promotions to those who download and/or actively use your app.

13. Publish Web Stories

Web stories are a visually-rich form of content that can appear on Google and Google Discover on mobile devices. They will soon be available on desktop as well.

You create the stories on your own website and add the appropriate metadata to ensure they are eligible to appear on Google Search and Google Discover.

Web stories are a great way to generate awareness for your business as they appear right at the top of search results.

You want to make sure that your web story pages are mobile-friendly and that Google Search has indexed them.

14. Use Facebook Ads

It goes without saying that advertisements are one of the most common suggestions when learning how to make your business grow.

Advertising allows you to get your business right in front of people most interested in your products.

Facebook is a great platform for advertising as it has an incredible amount of data for each of its users.

This allows you to craft highly targeted campaigns that yield better results.

You want to start by experimenting with different ad formats. After your campaigns run for a while you should examine their performance to see which ads were the most effective.

You’ll also want to set up retargeting campaigns to reach out to your previous customers as well as people who interacted with your business but didn’t buy.

If you are inexperienced with advertising, you can outsource the work to experts. They will be able to determine the best strategy and create the ad copy and images needed to drive results.

15. Use Google and Bing Ads

Google and Bing are other useful advertising mediums as you are able to target a relevant audience at scale.

The mechanics of running ad campaigns on Google or Bing is slightly different than that of Facebook.

You’ll want to begin your campaigns by researching the related keywords your potential customers are searching for.

This will allow you to include these terms in your campaigns so that your ads appear in front of the right people.

Retargeting is also important with Google and Bings ads as it allows you to reconnect with those that have previously interacted with your business.

16. Host a Webinar

If you are looking for a more interactive way to engage with your audience while teaching them about your products or services, webinars are a solid choice.

Webinars provide great value and allow you to interact with hundreds of people anywhere in the world at the same time.

They also serve as an effective lead generation tool as individuals will need to register to gain access to the event.

You can expand the reach of your webinars even further by inviting guest contributors and leveraging their audiences.

17. Start a YouTube Channel

You can use the power of video to grow your small business by creating a Youtube channel.

This will allow you to upload demos of your products to highlight the benefits to users.

You can also create free educational content to provide value to your audience and drive them to your site to generate leads and sales.

18. Offer Free Courses

Offering free online courses is a great way to educate potential customers about your product and other related topics.

With a better understanding of how your products work and the benefits they provide, people will be more likely to buy from your business.

This will also enable customers to use your products more efficiently, leading to better customer satisfaction and a better reputation for your business.

19. Partner With Other Companies

Partnering with other companies can help you leverage their audience and brand awareness to grow your business.

You could host a joint event like a webinar, or create a joint piece of content for shared lead generation.

You can also actively promote each other’s businesses to your customer base and offer a discount for any customers you refer.

When forming strategic partnerships you’ll want to research to find companies that have an audience with similar interests but are not direct competitors.

20. Add Limited Time Offers and Sales

One of the most tried and true marketing ideas for small businesses is to run limited-time promotions.

Time-bound offers, and sales create a sense of urgency, increasing the likelihood that people complete a purchase.

Whether a startup or an existing brand, any brand may achieve its primary objective. Before implementing any digital marketing strategy to increase and boost website traffic, it is critical to understand the brand, nature, and target audience.

However, when it comes to digital marketing tactics, one should not implement them across all channels in order to divert traffic to a website. As a result, it becomes difficult for the company to establish a memorable identity.

Furthermore, there are several methods that can be used to boost website traffic.

Building up the friendly website User experience and interface

Create content that is relatable, meaningful, genuine, and interesting in order to gain readers' confidence and keep them on the website.

Use search engine optimization techniques on the content to boost the website's search engine ranking.

Use exclusive long-tail, commonly used keywords to make your brand appear more frequently when a visitor search for it.

Integrate your website with social networking sites.

Use email marketing to target the consumer and direct them to the website.

Use guest listings to drive more traffic to your website.

There are a few pointers that can really assist a brand in attracting more visitors to their website.

I want to share few tips for designing a logo for a business, event, etc. There are several aspects to consider while designing a logo, but you must first consider the purpose of designing a logo. For instance, if you own a business, then the nature of the business is important. For example, if you have a financial service company, you would not attempt to design any vibrant color design. Instead, you would try to keep things professional and simple. Similarly, the logo should be aligned with the mission, objectives, and purpose of the business.

Moreover, there are certain elements you should consider while designing a unique and creative logo. Such as; It should have

Simplicity

Describable

Memorability

Uniqueness

Scalable

These aspects are the necessary foundation of designing a logo. Suppose you are selling something which is a similar product or service sold by your competitor. Then you must incorporate your unique selling proposition in your custom logo design.