Marketing Ideas For Small Business: Digital Marketing in 2020

Have you ever seen an advertisement on a bus stop bench? It's likely that you have. How many times have you called the number printed on the seat?

Now ask yourself: how many times have you clicked through to an eye-catching Instagram page? How many times have you searched for a restaurant on your phone? How many times have you shared a video on Facebook?

The answers to that first question and the following ones probably differ by a lot, don't they? In 2020, marketing is all about your digital presence. Your customer base spends 69% of their media time on their smartphone.

In other words, it pays nowadays to focus on your marketing techniques. Organic traffic is the name of the game, and you need to learn everything you can about how to drive it.

Keep reading for the ultimate guide to your must-have marketing techniques in 2020.

Email & Website

The cornerstone of your internet presence: your website and your digital communication methods.

Your Website

Your website acts as two things for you in the world of digital marketing techniques: a landing page for details about your business, and your platform for content marketing. We'll get into content marketing later. For now, let's focus on how to market your website the best you can.

Search engine optimizing your website is key to good marketing techniques.

First of all, make sure your URL is straightforward and easy to remember. You want to make sure your customers will be able to find you easily.

When designing your pages, be sure to name them all, create descriptions for them, and include metadata. Even though the descriptions and metadata don't always show up on the page itself, Google uses these in its ranking algorithms.

When writing content for your site, don't forget to use anchor links! Anchor links are simple: they're internal links that direct your users to other parts of your site. For instance, if you have a shop, you can link to that shop in your content conversationally.

Anchor links not only help drive traffic to multiple areas of your site, but Google considers these in its ranking algorithm, too. Be careful, though; too many links and you'll get flagged.

If your site is image-heavy, be sure to add alt text to all of your images. Google can't tell what's in an image (yet!), but it does look to the alt text for information on the image's content. If you want Google to include this information in its ranking, you need to give the search engine something to work with.

Once you've taken these steps to SEO optimize your site, have it checked out by an SEO expert to analyze how well you did. They'll help you implement even better SEO. SEO optimizing your website is one of the best marketing techniques out there, besides email marketing!

Email

Email marketing is used by 82% of companies today. Are you among them?

It's a surefire way to turn leads into customers and keep customers loyal once they've already patronized your business.

The most important thing about email marketing is making sure you're providing good content to those on your mailing list. Give them a great reason to put their email down. What are you going to send them that's useful and entertaining for them?

That's the kind of email content that keeps customers from clicking “unsubscribe.” You can include news about your business and promotions you're running, but be sure you've got some other engaging content in there, too.

Email marketing is all well and good to gain new customers, but what happens once you've got them? How do you keep them? The answer is the same.

Your customers gave you their email addresses for a reason. Use them. Follow up with them about the goods or services you provided, and ask for their feedback.

This kind of person-to-person customer service is rare these days, and it's an excellent marketing tool that often falls by the wayside. Embrace it.

Local SEO

When SEO optimizing your website, you should also consider the importance of local SEO. Local SEO is the practice of optimizing your website for your local consumer base. This is super helpful for businesses like restaurants that run brick and mortar storefronts.

The first line of local SEO is making sure your website is 100% accurate in terms of your business address, contact information, and hours of operation. Nothing stops a hungry potential customer faster than a website that says you're open an hour later than you actually are. That bond of trust is essential for creating loyal customers on your home turf.

Next up: Google reviews. These are the reviews that come up when someone types your business name into Google. They're the first thing your potential customer sees.

Make sure it doesn't scare them away.

Engage with your reviews, showing that you're a business who cares about your customers' experiences. Make sure your hours and phone number are listed correctly here, too.

Reviews are pretty important in today's business landscape: 92% of consumers read online reviews before deciding on a product or service. Make sure you have profiles on Yelp, Angie's List, or the Better Business Bureau in addition to your Google reviews profile.

A responsive website is also key to good local SEO. Over half of American consumers use their smartphones to conduct local searches, and 78% of those searches result in a purchase. If your site isn't smartphone-optimized, you're missing out on a huge chunk of your customer base.

Need help creating your local SEO marketing campaign?  Check this out:
A Guide To Creating a Marketing Campaign

Content Marketing Techniques

The key to good content marketing is to approach it with that same person-to-person mindset that you use in your follow up email marketing techniques. First, what exactly is content marketing?

Content marketing is the newest trend in marketing techniques that don't explicitly market your brand, but rather promotes interest in it through the sharing of valuable digital content. This can include videos and social media posts, but on your website, it means one thing: your blog.

Curating a blog on your site is one of the best ways to land organic traffic. That organic traffic turns into a lead, which then turns into a customer.

How Does It Work?

Say you own and operate a small butcher shop, and you want to engage in some content marketing techniques. You put a blog on your website and begin to start creating blog articles.

What kind of content should you share? If you write explicitly about why the customer should choose your butcher shop, it seems inauthentic, and it's not really helpful for the customer.

Instead, you should assess your target customer base. Perhaps you determine that your target customer base is adults between the ages of 25 and 50 who are health-conscious, seek alternatives to the typical grocery store, and are adventurous eaters.

That's a lot to work with! Now, you can really begin to hone in on the type of content this customer wants to read. Maybe your first post is something along the lines of: “How to Cure Your Own Bacon.”

That'll turn some of your target customers' heads. Then, at the end of the article, you'll post an anchor link to your sales page where you happen to sell uncured pork belly by the pound.

See how that works? You've created a customer without the customer having ever felt sold to in any way. In fact, you've informed them and helped them with your unique content.

The Three Pillars

There are three pillars of good content marketing. Your content should be:

• Unique: the content should set you apart from all the other similar content out there.
• Quality: the content should be engaging, and not full of filler words just to meet a word count.
• Helpful: the content should help or inform the customer in some way.

If you follow these guidelines when creating content for your blog, you'll be sure to attract more and more organic traffic every day.

Need help creating your content marketing strategy?  Don't worry, we have you covered. Check out:
How to Develop a Content Marketing Strategy: A Start-to-Finish Guide

Social Media Marketing Techniques

If you're at all familiar with the world of marketing, you've probably wondered whether or not social media marketing is as important as it's made out to be. The answer is yes.

In today's marketing landscape, consumers are wising up. They don't want to feel sold to, they don't rely on a brand's reputation, and they're more than willing to do their own research before buying.

So how do you market to this intelligent consumer? How do you get your brand out there without seeming like you're trying too hard?

Answer: social media. It's a great way to engage customers on an even playing field, so they feel more comfortable with you. It's also a great atmosphere to promote certain aspects of your brand to appeal to your customers' pathos.

Tips and Tricks

Post about what your company does to give back to the community. Post employee spotlights to show that your brand is employee-centric. Post something humorous to lighten up your customers' feed on a gloomy day.

Regardless of what your approach to social media is, the important thing is that you're active. You should be posting to your social media pages at least once per day. This is the best way to get ahead within Instagram's new algorithm.

You should also come up with a posting schedule, and be sure to stick to it. Studies say that 5 PM on Wednesday is the absolute best time of the week to post to the social media platform.

Engagement

Engagement is also key for your social media marketing techniques. Instagram's latest algorithm change has made it so that your content is only released to 10% of your followers. Unless your content receives significant engagement, it won't be released to the remaining 90%.

How much engagement the post receives is important. This includes likes, comments, and direct messages within a certain time frame after the post was initially published.

This new update makes it so that engagement isn't just a booster, it's absolutely necessary to make it so that the majority of your followers even see your content in the first place.

The easiest thing you can do to get more engagement on your posts is first learning how the Instagram algorithm actually works.

Influencers

Influencer marketing techniques are also a great way to increase engagement. How it works: you send your product to a social media influencer, and they post themselves using the product. This endorsement comes off as natural and drives tons of organic traffic to your profile.

Influencer marketing is more or less effective depending on your target customer base. If your target audience includes millennials, then you should absolutely engage in influencer marketing techniques. Recommendations by peers influence 70% of millennial consumers today.

If your target audience doesn't use social media too much, this sort of campaign might not be as effective. You might want to refer to another platform, like Facebook, that your target audience does use.

Viral videos on Facebook are being shared like hotcakes today. People are actually 27 times more likely to click on a video ad than a standard, nonmoving ad. This is the future of content marketing.

If you're going to go the paid ad route on Facebook, which is also a great option, consider the benefit of video content first! This also goes for other social media platforms, like Snapchat and Twitter.

For more tips on how to leverage your social media accounts, check out:
Social Media Management Tips

Your Marketing Techniques

In 2020, digital marketing techniques have long replaced advertising as the key to driving new customers and retaining your current ones.

What sort of marketing techniques do you have in place for your business? Are you set up for success in today's digital marketplace?

If not, get in touch for help planting your business more firmly on the map!