Beginner’s Guide to Digital Marketing: 6 Tips to Promote Your Small Business

Are you a beginner in the digital marketing sphere? If so, you’ve landed at the right place to get started with your journey of promoting your small business. Keep reading below for our six digital marketing tips! 

The digital world is a crowded arena, which makes it really intimidating. Here, competition is fiercer than ever before as businesses of all shapes and sizes are fighting hard to have their voices heard. Sounds scary, right? 

This is where this article can come in handy. 

Digital marketing is crucial for the success of your business. It is a powerful tool to increase brand awareness and attract more clients to purchase your products and services. In this article, you will learn the best digital marketing tips that will help you grow your business faster, even if you’re a novice in the online marketing sphere. 

1. Know your marketing goals 

Truth be told, it can be tough to choose a direction for your marketing efforts if you’re not sure what destination you hope to reach. Simply put, you need goals to determine which marketing strategies are best suited for your business. So, when you’re just starting your marketing journey, start by setting specific goals you want to achieve.

There are a number of goals you can think of. For example, you may want to increase brand awareness, meaning that at the end of your marketing efforts, more people will know about your business. Or, maybe you want to increase sales for a certain product/ service. Another goal your small business may have is attracting more people to your website. These are just a few examples of marketing goals your business may have. However, you can decide on whatever you think your business needs. 

Once you know what you want to achieve with your marketing efforts, you can direct your resources towards techniques that can help you reach your goals. Note that your goals should determine everything about your online marketing efforts, from content to channels used, and so on.  

2. ALWAYS know your audience 

Quality marketing means more than knowing engaging techniques and what you want to achieve. One crucial ingredient for achieving your goals is knowing your audience inside out. 

Think about it: How can you implement engaging and efficient marketing tactics if you have no idea who you’re trying to convince? Truth be told: you can’t! It’s impossible to create messages that consumers can resonate with and feel engaged by if you don’t know who those consumers are. 

So, one of the first steps you should follow when starting your marketing strategy is to understand your target audience and ideal buyer persona. Research the audience and learn things like gender, age, values, purchasing behaviours, and needs. You should also focus on finding out your audience’s pain points and identify how your product/ service could be a solution to their problems. 

3. Build a UX-friendly website 

In today’s highly digitalized business arena, having a website for your business is of utmost importance. 

As the digital marketing experts from Passion Digital explain, “Think of your website as your online business card. Your website is the first thing consumers see when they look for your business or products.”

 And, how your audience interacts with your platform can significantly impact how they perceive your business. Don’t believe us? Here’s some data to support the importance of a good business website: 

• 38.5% of consumers judge a business by the looks of its website at first glance. 
• 40% of consumers would stop engaging with a website that has a slow loading time. 
• Over 50% of users choose a competitor instead if they have a poor user experience with a website. 

That being said, you should make sure that you build a truly fantastic website that offers excellent experiences to users. More precisely, your website should: 

• Be mobile-friendly
• Be easy to navigate
• Load fast
• Be accessible
• Have relevant content 
• Include engaging design elements. 

Overall, a good UX website allows consumers to navigate it quickly and have excellent experiences, whether that means finding what they need fast, being able to access it from their mobile devices, and so on. 

4. Use SEO techniques

What’s the use of having an excellent website if no one can find it? That’s why you need to implement specific SEO techniques and make your content easy to find in search result pages. However, we know that SEO is a more complex and intimidating domain for beginners, but you always have the option of looking for an seo company London and asking experts for help.  

Here are some general SEO practises that you should follow: 

• Develop content based on target keyword research.
• Use relevant keywords for your industry and business. 
• Write about topics your potential customers might be searching for on search engines. 
• Write strong meta descriptions. 
• Format your content to make it easier to read. 
• Optimise all your images. 

5. Optimise your social media profiles 

Another essential area in digital marketing that you also need to get right is related to social media networks. Social media marketing is huge these days because that’s where you can meet most consumers and reach out to them in a fun and engaging way. 

You can use social media for so many goals your business may have, from driving traffic to a website to increasing the visibility of a product, gaining more followers, and, obviously, finding more customers. 

Now, once you decide which channels you want to use for your marketing efforts, a decision you should take based on several factors like audience and business goals, it is time to optimise your social media profiles. 

Here are some important general practises for optimising social media profiles to keep in mind: 

• Use high-quality and professional-looking photos for your profile pictures. 
• Write compelling and engaging descriptions of your company.
• Add links to your website and other social media accounts to your description. 
• Use hashtags. 
• Use your brand’s name and design elements. 

6. Create quality content 

Creating quality content needs to be one of the most important aspects of your digital marketing efforts. Whether it is website content, blog posts, social media posts, visual content, or email marketing content, you need to make sure that it is compelling to engage your audience. 

Quality content must: 

• Be relevant to the target audience
• Answer your customers’ questions. 
• Include facts that reinforce credibility. 
• Be original. 
• Match search intent.