Digital marketing shouldn’t be so scary!

People often get scared off by marketing because they see it as costly and time-consuming. There can also be guilt associated with marketing because for many small business owners, no matter how much they’re doing, someone will always tell them they’re doing it wrong or it’s not enough. This is because marketing is not black and white. There isn’t a set formula to getting it right. It’s not like “doing your taxes” where once they’re done you can check it off the list.

Marketing can be done well and with confidence, even when it’s not your area of expertise. You don’t need to know everything before you start. While it’s not something you can ever finish and check off your list, it doesn’t have to be daunting. You can start slowly and continually add to it over time.

Marketing is a practice - an ever-evolving process that is integral to the success of your business.

So let’s dig into how digital marketing helps small businesses!

Marketing is promoting your goods or services, so “Digital Marketing” is just the promotion of your business, products, and services online. You can market your products through a website, social media, blogging, email campaigns, digital advertisements, and third-party websites (like Yelp or Angi’s list) – and that’s just the start.

Whether you sell online or not, having a digital presence is imperative these days. There’s no way around it. As long as you plan to keep selling, you need to keep marketing your products both online and off.

Unfortunately, it’s also something that scares off a lot of small business owners because it can feel like learning a new language. Especially those of us who didn’t grow up with iPads and cell phones.

As technology changes, products and services evolve and people’s needs change – your digital marketing needs to grow and adapt. But for many small business owners with too much on their plates already, and no budget for a marketing agency, it’s hard to make sense of the overabundance of information out there telling you about all the new ways you should be marketing your business. So I’m going to try to set the record straight and give you some no-frills tips to make it less overwhelming.

Your Website is the Foundation For Digital Marketing

When I first got started building websites (before I launched my business), I discovered that building a website well, required the business to establish its marketing foundation first.

Questions like, who is your target market?
What sets your business apart from your competitors?
What are your core business offerings?
How should you promote them to your ideal clients?
How does digital marketing help small businesses?

All these concepts are foundational and should be established before launching other marketing efforts.

What’s so cool, is that by incorporating all these elements into a powerhouse website, you’ll now have an amazing tool that you can use to jump-start all your other marketing projects. From branding to images, to design aesthetics and copywriting, having a well-thought-out website will funnel more strategy and focus into every marketing effort you make going forward.

So what does this look like in real life?

Reach Your Targeted Audience

Defining who your target audience is, should be one of the starting questions for every new website strategy session. By identifying who is most likely to benefit from or need your product or service, you have the ability to spend more focused effort toward that audience. For your website, it’s critical to know who you’re writing the website for, who will be looking online for your services, and what their greatest motivating fears or desires are.

Once you’ve established who they are and what they want in regard to your website, you can take that information and build out targeted ads to reach them, and build a social media campaign on the right social media platforms to bring more awareness to your business and its offerings. This is key so that you don’t waste your precious time and resources trying to build a following on TikTok if your primary audience is on Facebook.

Connect with customers through Multiple Channels

Once your website is built to properly promote and sell your products or services, you can use it as a place to bring people you're your digital marketing channels should all point to your website. Even if you have a successful Instagram following and you can sell products through Facebook, those aren’t platforms you own. Your website is the only platform you own and have maximum control over.

So whether you’re passing out business cards with your website address on them, people are searching for your services online (plumbers near me), or you’re using an email marketing campaign to keep followers aware of your recent offerings, it all comes back to the website as your primary point of sale or they way customers find you to book your services. And that’s just part of how digital marketing helps small businesses. There’s more!

Efforts that Grow With Your Business.

While there are a lot of ways you CAN market your business, you don’t have to do all of them. Let me say that again…

You don’t have to use all available channels to market your business.

In fact, unless you have a massive budget, it usually makes sense to focus on fewer avenues where you can really make an impact. It’s best to do one thing well, than a bunch of things halfway.

But by understanding your foundational marketing elements:

· The 4Ps (product, price, promotion, place)

· SWOT Analysis (Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats)

· Target Audience – who is most likely to benefit from and spend money on your product or service?

· Differentiating factor – what sets you apart from the competition?

Having a good outline of your offerings and their features, benefits, and value to your target audience will give you the foundation needed to pursue other digital marketing channels.

The good news is that I’m very much all about the 80/20 principle – where 80 percent of your results will come from 20 percent of your efforts. So let’s be strategic and focus upfront on what efforts can yield the highest results, and start there.

So this means that you don’t have to do it all. In fact, I strongly recommend that you don’t spread yourself and your employees too thin. Rather, using the information gathered to build your website, determine the next 1 or 2 marketing channels that will make the biggest impact on your business and start there.

This is how, with a good foundation, your marketing efforts can grow with your business.

Digital Marketing You Can Start Today

The Hunch Theory blog is designed to simplify digital marketing and web design so you can understand it and take practical steps to grow your small business. Questions like…

· How do I set up Google my business?

· What are some easy ways to make my website more effective?

· How do I find good images to use on my website?

· How do I write a good site headline?

· What makes a website mobile-friendly?

These are the sorts of practical questions I plan to explore in my blog. I want you to feel like you can spend your lunch break reading about something and then take that and implement it into your business. These posts will gradually build on each other so that you have a cohesive, well-rounded marketing strategy in place. But like watching a good episode of Friends, you can also just drop in once in a while and spend 20 minutes without feeling like you missed the first half of the movie.

Each blog post will stand alone and if you read one post that helps your business just a little bit, I will feel like I’m doing my job.