From Zero to Hero: 4 Tips to Boost Your Online Business

Posted by George W on in Hosting Tips

Digital marketing is the modern method to achieve results that bring your business success if you want to expand your small business. This is particularly true given the ongoing development of social media, online communication, and technological platforms.

Paid advertisements and social media posting are just two examples of digital marketing for small businesses. It’s essential to incorporate SEO, content marketing, and email marketing into a comprehensively effective strategy.

These digital marketing suggestions will assist you in increasing online audience engagement and conversions, regardless of whether you operate a fully fledged e-commerce business or a brick-and-mortar store.

1. Make Interesting Content

As a marketer, you’ve probably heard the adage “content is king.”

Building trust with your audience, generating leads, and establishing your company as an authority in your niche are just a few of the many advantages of content marketing.

In fact, according to Demand Metric, content marketing produces three times as many leads as outbound marketing, increases conversion rates by six times, and may even increase web traffic by 7.8 times.

Brands and customers are too dependent on content marketing for it to ever disappear. Scaling your content marketing is, therefore, a successful digital marketing strategy for your company.

What precisely does content marketing entail?

1. Blog Content Marketing

A potent form of inbound marketing, blogs offer flexibility in terms of topics and goals. They can be used to incorporate product information, add social share buttons, and promote both internal and external content and blog posts.

Your business will benefit long-term from writing articles that are longer and more in-depth because it fosters reader trust and they typically favor this kind of content.

Additionally, using a content calendar and keyword mapping, you can establish a regular schedule for your blog posts. You’ll be able to see your projects more clearly and keep your publishing schedule.

2. Social Media Marketing

According to Kepios, social media has grown to have a total user base of 4.65 billion people worldwide. Having said that, shrewd marketers understand the importance of including social media in their digital marketing plans for small businesses.

Numerous platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even Snapchat, are available. Through posts and stories, you can advertise current sales, announce new products, and showcase your brand’s culture. Additionally, social media is a fantastic platform for increasing audience engagement and brand awareness.

A small business’s social media marketing strategy brought in $1.2 million in revenue, according to a HubSpot case study. An excellent motivator to begin a social media marketing strategy is the $1.2 million results. The biggest obstacle is time because developing and implementing a social media strategy takes time. Results don’t appear right away.

3. Video Content Marketing

Video content marketing is a relatively new tactic that is based on the idea of creating and disseminating pertinent video content to your target audience in order to spark interest and draw in leads.

Over the past few years, video content has grown in popularity. For instance, according to a study by BusinessofApps, YouTube now has 2.3 billion monthly users. Furthermore, according to Wyzowl’s statistics, a whopping 69% of consumers say they prefer watching videos to reading about a brand’s goods or services.

Keep in mind that the purpose of making videos for your marketing campaigns is to inform your audience. Inform them about the operation of your product, its advantages, potential applications, case studies, client success tales, etc.

Here are some additional pointers for producing effective video marketing campaigns:

  • Center your videos around the story, not the sale
  • Hook the viewers in the first ten seconds with a captivating intro
  • Use humor, animations, and effects 
  • Upload your videos on your own domain before uploading on sharing sites to drive maximum SEO value
  • Use video to educate and prove yourself 

Your videos can be posted on landing pages or social media sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram. A good camera (the iPhone works great for this) and editing software like iMovie or Adobe Premiere Pro are all you need.

4. Podcast Marketing

Your brand and content marketing strategy can take on a new dimension with the help of podcasting. You can approach podcasting in a variety of ways using a range of platforms, channels, and distribution strategies.

The following are some of the top advantages of podcasting for your brand:

  • The widespread use of podcasts today
  • inexpensive equipment and free uploading make it simple to get started
  • You can create podcasts out of any content, including blogs and videos.
  • There is a great deal of room for cooperation.
  • reach out to new demographics

With those advantages in mind, considering podcasting as a new marketing channel is the best way to approach it for content marketing. The objective of content marketing is always the same: to reach people and produce new leads. This could entail answering queries (important for SEO) or providing entertainment through podcasting.

2. Your Email List is IMPORTANT!

Your company wouldn’t function without its email list, which is its beating heart. In general, email marketing is still one of the best digital marketing techniques for small businesses.

Sadly, there are a lot of factors that can cause your email list to get smaller, like:

  • The subscriber has a new email because they switched companies.
  • You received the subscriber’s spam email, which they hardly ever check.
  • Unfortunately, the subscriber has decided that your content is no longer appropriate for them and has unsubscribed.

Did you know that, according to Marketing Sherpas, the average email list deteriorates by about 22.5% annually? That amounts to roughly 25% of what you have.

As depressing as it all sounds, it’s actually inevitable and a part of the life cycle of your content.

Let’s talk about some ways to expand and keep up your email list, no matter where you are with it at the moment in terms of size.

1. Insert Social Share Buttons on Your Website or Blog

Don’t limit yourself to including only social share and subscribe buttons on your homepage. It can be added to every content page. In addition, visitors are unlikely to return to the homepage once they have explored more of your blog’s pages.

They can be incorporated in a variety of locations, including the header, footer, and sidebar. Every page of your website or blog can have a subscribe bar added. or add social sharing buttons to the header to increase visibility.

Even on the same page, you can place your social sharing buttons in multiple locations. The idea is to make it noticeable to your audience and offer a variety of platform choices. It might turn out that different platforms are preferred by your audience.

2. Give Something to Your Customers

You might not always get the desired conversions by simply asking people for their email addresses. Offer your audience a lead magnet if you want better and quicker results.

Make sure it will be useful to your subscribers even if it doesn’t take much time or money to create.

Additional illustrations of opt-in incentives are provided below:

  • Downloadable articles
  • Access to a private Facebook group
  • Templates
  • Stock Photos
  • Live call with you
  • Demo coaching session 
  • Free newsletter 
  • White papers

These are merely a few suggestions, but there are countless others.

For instance, if you run a cooking blog, you could give away a free cookbook in exchange for email addresses. A great lead magnet addresses a customer’s issue, guarantees an immediate benefit, is focused, easy to understand, highly valuable, readily available, and shows your subject matter expertise.

3. Use Call to Action (CTA) on Your Blog

A strong CTA is where most signups are generated. Better yet, clickable CTA buttons have consistently been shown to boost conversions. Adding a CTA button to their article templates increased conversions by 83% and boosted e-Commerce conversions by 22%, according to a Protocol 80 study.

Users are assisted in navigating your website and taking specific actions by clickable CTA buttons. Both your home page and high-converting landing pages require it.

A good CTA should have contrasting colors, a clickable button, text that provides context for the button, and be placed in a prominent location.

Always test your CTAs on various devices to look for bugs and make improvements. Now that you understand how to build and maintain your email list, you can use your email marketing strategies to turn your audience into clients.

3. Optimize Your SEO Strategy

To help you rank your small business on top of Google search results, we’ve written an extensive blog post you can refer to. Once you’ve nailed your SEO rankings, you can now fine-tune your strategy with some additional tips:

1. Use Local Search Engine Optimization

When compared to massive corporations, many smaller brick and mortar businesses feel insignificant. Local businesses, on the other hand, have the advantage of focusing on a local market, unlike their global competitors. Local SEO for small businesses can help them rank in the (Snack) Pack Rankings and organic page rankings.

Being in the Snack Pack Ratings is the aim of local SEO. The tiny box that appears at the top of the Google search results is this.

Within this box, you can usually find a business’s:

  • Hours of operation
  • Phone number, email, etc.
  • Address
  • Link to website
  • Reviews and star rating
  • Google map result

You should enter all of this data into your Google My Business (GMB) account. In the end, it may convince a prospective client to use your services while boosting your company’s SEO standing.

Even further, to optimize your GMB, make sure:

  • The category is correct
  • The website link is active and functional
  • Relevant keywords are included in the title tag
  • Perform regular post updates

It should take a couple of weeks after you complete the form and optimize it before you start seeing results. Keep in mind that SEO takes time, but it’s worth the wait!

2. Increase Your Website Speed

Make sure your site is always operating quickly as search engines prefer when page loading times are quicker. This is a technical SEO tip.

You can take a few actions to get fast website speeds, such as:

  • Minimize ‘HTTP requests’ and keep use of scripts and plugins to a minimum.
  • Use a CSS stylesheet instead of multiple CSS stylesheets or inline CSS. CSS stylesheets tell a website browser how to display your website.
  • Make your image files as small as possible. 
  • Compress your web pages. 
  • Shrink your site’s code by deleting unnecessary spaces, line breaks, or identification in your HTML, CSS, and Javascript. 

The best way to guarantee that your website loads quickly is, perhaps, to select a reliable hosting provider. This is simple to obtain with HostForLIFE Hosting. We utilize all of the most recent technologies, such as extremely fast networks, extremely fast ASP.NET, multiple server software, etc.

4. Use Paid Ads

Paid ads have a lot to offer in addition to SEO and content marketing, which can attract a lot of new customers. In fact, according to a Trend Statistics study, 80% of marketers use Google Ads for PPC, demonstrating that they are aware of their value.

The leads from paid advertisements are far more likely to convert than those from organic traffic because they typically show up in front of customers who have already shown an interest in the product through their online behavior. Paid advertisements are useful for increasing brand awareness.

Although SEO and content marketing are always effective strategies, you may have noticed that the market is extremely cutthroat. Businesses of all sizes can be found online, and they are all competing to rank highly in search results. You will always require pre-existing domain authority, that much is certain.

The five most common types of paid ads include:

  • Search ads: Above all organic rankings, these advertisements are displayed first in Google’s search results. With the exception of the tiny “Ad” text in the corner, they appear identical to regular search results.
  • Display ads: These banner ads are displayed in the headers, footers, sidebars, and in-text areas of content pages like blogs and product profiles.
  • Google shopping ads: When users conduct a specific product search, the results are displayed in a carousel by e-Commerce owners.
  • Socia media ads: These advertisements can be set up on social media platforms. Each platform will have a specific goal, but the ads are typically very targeted and offer a lot of programming flexibility.

There are many different types of advertisements; this list is only comprised of the most prevalent ones. The ad you use will depend on the requirements and target market of your company.

Regardless of the kind of advertisement you choose, there are a few general success tips.

To start, narrow down your audience to get to your ultimate goal. You obviously want as many people to see your advertisement as you can when you program and launch it. But it’s crucial that the right people see it.

The majority of ad tools let you narrow down your buyer personas by demographics, location, needs, interests, etc. To maximize your budget, you should use more specific keywords.

Are Pay-Per-Click Ads a Valuable Substitute for SEO?

Now, you might be wondering if using paid advertising can replace SEO spending. The reality is that there is never a black-and-white choice when it comes to small business advertisements. In addition to complementary campaigns that help you find your audience (and help them find you), your strategy should include both paid and organic advertising.

Paid advertising does produce results more quickly, but the real issue is whether or not those results will be long-lasting for your company.

Paid advertising can significantly reduce your budget, especially if you frequently use it in place of SEO. The fact that clicks never guarantee sales is another drawback. Getting people to click on your advertisement is one thing, but you also need to persuade them that your product is worthwhile.

But if you’re willing to be patient, SEO is a long-term investment that will pay off in the long run.

Conclusion

These digital marketing suggestions should be used by small business owners as part of their marketing strategies. Depending on your type of business, some of these suggestions may be more useful.

Despite this, it’s crucial to think creatively and explore options you believe will work best for your company. This is particularly true today, when businesses are compelled to change in order to maintain a competitive edge and attract new clients due to the rapid change in the digital landscape.