Digital Solutions for Small Business

It is important to have a high level overview, as well as the low level specifics combined to find which combination or two, three, or these are really going to drive the point home for your business.

The goal here is simply to have actually proven in the real world and helping business just like yours, grow and generate more leads and do all the things that a business is supposed to do. Because at the end of the day, it's less about the tactic and more about the overall strategy behind that tactic. A well-executed average strategy will almost always outperform a terribly executed, phenomenal strategy. The point is, it is what gets done and what gets done well, that really matters. Also make sure to read to the end of the post, because while I've listed the first 18 points in no particular order, it's the final two points that I believe are the most important for small businesses to consider today. Alright. All that said let's dive into tip number one. All right.

1.Come up with an irresistible offer. Now what an irresistible offer is, is pretty much exactly like it sounds it's an offer that is too good to be true. Now, sometimes these are referred to as godfather offers. And what it is, is it some kind of offer that you can put in front of your ideal target market that directly speaks to them and compels them to take action.

Now, here's the thing. When we say irresistible offer, we’re n't necessarily referring to low price. Like we’re not asking you to give anything away for free here. What is important here is for you to reflect on the fact that you do understand where the customer is coming from, meaning we know their pains, their problems, their frustrations.

Position your business as one that is uniquely capable to solve the customers problem. One of the most important points to consider when you're constructing an irresistible offer is that you want to be selling a painkiller, not a vitamin meaning. What you want to do here is you want to solve a pain rather than prevent a future problem because people are a lot more likely to act and take action when they're trying to solve an actual pain and problem that they're experiencing right now.

I like to describe these pains and problems as miseries, and basically what it is, is it some kind of pain or problem or fear or frustration that they're trying to get over, but this can also be referred to as a bleeding neck, which really stresses the importance of getting this thing solved fast, meaning you can either display this irresistible offer in an ad or as a call to action on a blog post, or right on the homepage of your business. The only thing to really remember here is the importance of actually having it so that you can compel someone to take action.

2. Have a lead magnet. Now, a really high level overview, just in case you haven't heard of a lead magnet before, it is some kind of piece of valuable content or information, or could even be something tangible or physical, like a book or a trinket or a widget or whatever it is. You're going to use this in exchange for your customer's contact details, meaning maybe their name or email address.

Now the reason it's so important and so valuable for your business to have a lead magnet is two-fold. Number one is having an appropriate lead magnet positions, you as the authority, and actually shows that you know what you're doing by solving one of their problems through your content.

The second reason is you're going to use this lead magnet in order to attract leads not surprising right now, the way lead magnets traditionally work is you're going to want to put this offer for the lead magnet in front of your ideal target market. You can do this through an ad or maybe even a link on your website, and you're going to direct them to where they can download their free PDF or their free guide, or get their free book plus shipping, whatever it is once they get to that actual landing page, they'll input their name and email address. And in turn, if they're going to get the guide and you're going to get their contact details, which you can use to follow up with. My final point on lead magnets is this. You don't need to limit yourself to just one lead magnet. After all the odds of your customers, having just one single problem might be pretty slim. Note that you want to approach their pains or frustrations from a number of different angles, which is what your lead magnets allow you to do.

3. Utilize Search Engine Optimization( SEO). In one of the top digital marketing strategies that I've seen work for small business is none other than SEO. In fact, SEO is largely responsible for the growth our marketing agency as we in content marketing. But again, there some overlap because content marketing and SEO kind of work nicely. Anyway, the point is this search engine optimization. SEO is incredibly valuable. Now we obviously don't have the time to get into all the specifics and details here, but the point is you may want to start allocating more resources to SEO, especially if people tend to be searching for one of the problems that your business.

When it comes to SEO, there's a number of different factors that influence it, including OnPage rankings and off-page signals. Now, when we're talking about on-page, these are things like the keywords you use in your URL, your title, your headings on page content, all sorts of things like that. And when we're talking about off-page ranking signals, it really has to do with the number and the kind of links that are linking back to your content, which is sending signals to the search engines that this is valuable. The goal here isn't to dive into the technicalities of SEO, but rather just to educate you, being a valuable strategy. And if you want to pursue it, there's a ton of great content available. I'll make sure to link to some in the description below.

4. Google three-pack SEO. Now this point is only really valuable if you've got a local business or an actual storefront or actual physical location, because what you're going to be doing here is ranking in the map. And this is incredibly important, especially on mobile now where most searches are. Now the way to find out if your ranking in the three-pack is pretty simple.

First of all, open an incognito or private browser, just so your history doesn't influence the results, then type in whatever industry that you're searching for and your city name and see what appears in the map results. If you're not in the top three you're missing out, which means you really need to spend some time, some energy and some money optimizing that Google three-pack listing because they get a ton of traffic, especially for mobile.

5. Audion marketing: Now, to decide if audio marketing is something you want to pursue, you first need to really clearly identify your ideal target market. But we're going to talk about that a little bit later. Now, when we're talking specifically about digital marketing strategies, obviously things like podcasts and Spotify ads and things like that are going to come to the forefront of your mind. That said, I also want you to get. Offline audio channels, like maybe even good old fashioned radio. Now radio in my experience certainly doesn't provide the same return on investment that some of these digital channels do, but as a supplement or accessory or even worth considering because you never know, it might still provide enough of a bump to make everything.

6. Email marketing: Fortunately, we already covered lead magnets and the importance of acquiring customer contact information, like their name and their email address. Well, with email marketing, it gives you that opportunity to follow up and provide more value and make offers again and again. I know that there's a lot of people out there complaining about lower open rates and how email marketing is losing its effectiveness. And while this is true to some degree, just think about yourself and how you personally interact with content and how you consume information. Odds are pretty good you check your email, the same goes for your customers. Of course, like all the strategies we're talking about here, the devil's in the details, which means you can't just spam only promote all kinds of offers and all kinds of garbage to your audience.

7. Content marketing. As I've already discussed between SEO and content marketing, this is really how I built up my first marketing. It's a fantastic tool because content marketing allows you to educate, to inform, to provide value and to show that you're the authority in your field by teaching people. What you know now, again, content marketing is kind of a high level macro overview, which entails all sorts of things below it, like podcasts and videos and blogs and interviews and lead magnets and resource guides and all sorts of stuff like that. So it really is, again, that high level. The point is if you're not creating content for your target market, you really should be in one way, shape or form.

The key with content marketing is to choose the right format and the right style for you and your audience. Meaning if you hate the idea of being on video video is probably not going to be for you. If you hate the sound of your voice, maybe audio content you're going to want to stay away from. And if you hate the thought of writing, well, then obviously a blog isn't going to be the best for yours.

8. Video marketing: Video marketing is a phenomenal tool for small businesses in order to generate more leads customers and sales and prove your authority in the market. Next to having an in-person conversation or meeting face-to-face video really is the next best thing in order to establish trust and show your personality and really humanize your brand and your business. Also, the fact that video has a relatively high barrier to entry, especially considering just typing up a blog post. I think video marketing is one of the most powerful forms of content and it's only going to grow in importance as we move on through the new year and into the next year. So if you haven't yet, now's the time to start investing in creating more video content for your.

9. Copywriting. And when we're talking about copywriting, we're not talking about copyright or the legal aspect of protecting your work, but rather about creating influential and persuasive sales copy. The reason copywriting is so important is because if you've got a small business, then it's important to communicate and to persuade and to influence the perceptions of those who are communicating and dealing with your business. There are a number of different formulas out there to help you get started with copywriting, but the biggest takeaway and the strongest and most important point I want to make is really try to be empathetic to your customers, understand where they're coming from, understand their problems and their pains and their frustrations, their dreams, their wants their goals and their desires. Then put yourself in their shoes and really seek to understand. And your copy will become significantly more effective, allowing you to make a lot more.

10. YouTube marketing. I obviously believe YouTube is a phenomenal tool in order to communicate your message provides some value to your marketplace and help to grow your business after all. Now there's two sides when it comes to marketing with YouTube, the organic side and the advertising side, which spoiler alert we're going to cover in just the next point. But first let's touch on the organic. Now to succeed in the YouTube organic side, it's all about understanding that YouTube acts like a search engine, meaning one of the best ways to initially get liftoff for your YouTube channel is to create content that your ideal customers are actively searching for.

Now, whether your video gets watched or not comes down to a number of different factors, like the thumbnail, you choose the title, the competitiveness of the keyword, and just how good the video is overall. There's no better way to get started and really just to get. In fact, even if you have no intention of ranking for different search terms or becoming a YouTube celebrity, it's still worth uploading your content to YouTube because this can be a valuable resource for you to direct current or potential customers to, in order to answer questions, solve problems, even provide some troubleshooting information for your product or service that they may have. Overall, Video marketing is a great part of content marketing.

Now as I just touched on, obviously the next part of YouTube marketing is the advertising platform and YouTube ads are quickly becoming one of the most profitable and powerful forms of advertising available online. You see, just like we saw Google ads, exploding costs over the years. Well, we're seeing the same thing happen with Facebook ads, but this hasn't happened yet with YouTube ads, meaning we're still able to get in there and get views for pennies on the. The thing is the YouTube advertising platform is a little more complicated than the Facebook ad platform again, which creates that barrier to entry. But YouTube is making it a lot easier to get your ads in front of relevant and ideal target markets.

11. Using your Facebook personal page in order to market and grow your business. Now, the objections I get are always. They range from, I'm not even on Facebook or I don't use Facebook too. I don't want to be spammy and promotional on my personal page and pretty much everything in between. But the reality is is that if you're good at what you do, your business offers a valuable service and really helps people. Well, then you're kind of doing a disservice to people by not educating and informing them of what you have. Also in today's world where people don't like to do business with businesses, but like to do business with people, it really helps and goes a long way to humanize your brand and to basically become a lot more authentic in your business doings.

How do you use your Facebook personal page to promote your business? Well, it's actually pretty simple. You really just need to be yourself and talk about things that are of interest. All the more power. If you're able to do this in a way that ties into your business in some way, shape or form, maybe by telling customer stories or talking about things that are of interest to your market or sharing successes or highlights, or even new developments that are going on in your world.

No video on digital marketing strategies for small business would be complete without talking about Facebook advertising. Now I know we talked about how YouTube ads are quickly becoming one of the most powerful forms of ads available today, but that doesn't mean Facebook is out of the running yet. In fact, it's still a phenomenally powerful tool in order to get in front of your ideal target. If you've got a small business, you need to be using Facebook ads, you can use them to create brand awareness. You can use them to promote your videos. You can use them to generate leads and give away your lead magnet.

Facebook is trying to promote videos as much as possible, which makes this a great time to start using videos. You are even able to retarget people who watch a certain percentage of your video. Meaning if someone watches say 25 or 50% of your video, they've shown some intent and they've taken some action by staying involved up to that point where you can now create an audience of these viewers to retarget later with other relevant offers other videos, and essentially continue to build trust for pennies on.

Instagram is now the thing with Instagram ads really comes down to the fact is your target market on Instagram. If they are, you obviously want to be using Instagram ads as well. The beauty is, is you've got a couple of different formats to choose from, including feed ads and stories ads. The key is choosing the right one for you and your business, and then designing them accordingly, the beauty of Instagram ads, along with Facebook ads and along with pretty much any other kind of advertising is that allows you to instantly put your message in front of your ideal target market, which means you don't need to spend weeks or months or years building up an organic audience.

12. Retargeting: Retargeting is essentially your chance to show ads to people who have engaged with your content in some way. Now retargeting is amazingly powerful for just a number of different reasons. The beauty of retargeting is that you can follow up again and again and again, which allows you to increase the frequency with which you're showing your message to someone. As human beings, we've been kind of conditioned to associate frequency with trust. Meaning the more touch points are able to go out there and get in front of your ideal target market. The more they're going to trust you, Andrew. Now here's the beauty, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and the Google display network. if you can get someone from Facebook to go to your website, well, then you can retarget them on Instagram or on the Google display network. Same thing goes with YouTube. If you can get them to go from YouTube to your website, well, then you can retarget them on Facebook or Instagram or back on YouTube again, if you want.

Banner ads. Pretty much everyone's familiar with Google as well as Google ads. Those things that appear at the top of the search engines and show the little add button beside them. Google also has real estate on all sorts of different websites, allowing you to put banner ads anywhere. The beauty of the Google display network is that it's really cost-effective meaning you can go out there and show your banner ads to people who've engaged with your content and only people who have engaged with your content for really, really.

13. Testimonial and case studies: Now testimonials and case studies have been around since basically the beginning of business. When someone said, Hey, how's that business? And they said, oh, that's pretty good. Well, that right there is a testimonial. What you want to do is you want to capture these and then display them in order to prove that you actually know what you're doing. To your prospective customers. Now there's been a ton written about testimonials, and everybody says that you need them in fact so much so that it's often just kind of ignored because it's assumed to be just something you need. So everybody ignores it counter-intuitive, but that's the way it works. So don't be one of those people rather make sure to be one of those people that actually understands the true value and importance of a testimonial and a case study. By displaying these and demonstrating them, it provides an enormous amount of social proof, and this is going to become increasingly more important as we move into the next year and years beyond where skepticism and cynicism and doubt about businesses and companies is at an all-time high.

Social proof is one of the most important influential factors in getting someone to actually trust your business and do business with. Testimonials and case studies are that social proof that you need in order to do this, they can then also be leveraged across all your different social platforms, as well as on your website to clearly demonstrate that you're the one for the job.

14. Having a really clear, really identified and really thoroughly built out ideal customer avatar. Now, when we're talking about an ideal customer avatar, we're talking about building either a fictional representation of your best customers or really picking kind of like that one or two of your ideal, most perfect customers and really describing who they are and what makes them different. We're talking about demographic details, like age, gender, income, occupation, title, geographic details. Like what city state province, country, neighborhood, wherever they are. And psychographic details like attitudes, interests, opinions, beliefs, affiliations, organizations, things of that nature, the better you understand your ideal customer avatar, the better you're going to be able to make them feel understood when you're creating your marketing material.

When you have this ideal customer avatar in mind, you know who they are, you know what they like, you know, how they speak, how they dress, what they do well, then you're able to make strategically aligned marketing decisions. Meaning you're able to identify which social media platforms, your ideal customer avatar is active and which ones they're not, you're able to identify what messages are going to resonate with them and which ones are going to fall flat. And you're able to determine what types of campaigns to launch and which ones to completely ignore. When you look at your digital marketing strategically and holistically through the eyes of your ideal customer, avatar, everything gets a lot easier, a lot more clear and a lot more effective, which is why it's my top tip and my top digital marketing strategy for small.

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