The Ultimate Guide to Small Business Digital Marketing

At any given moment your potential customers are online looking for your business but if you’re nowhere to be found, they just might be finding your competition instead. It shouldn’t be too hard for me to convince you that virtually everyone is searching for products and services online like they never have before. So what’s stopping you from being in front of your customers online? Well, maybe because it’s a lot of work and you don’t know how, when, or where to start…sound familiar? Don’t worry, you’ve come to the right place.



Over the next few months, we’re going to bring you actionable items and advice that you can take one week at a time to get more comfortable with where to start, how to consistently deliver great content, and how to get in front of the right customer at just the right time. Here’s a quick overview of what we’re going to cover. 



Creating Your Website

Your website is your corner of the online marketplace, so it needs to be a fine-tuned machine. When customers visit your website, it’s the only time you’ll have their full attention and every second is crucial. This means that your website design, page architecture, and content placement needs to be thought out and planned. If you’re serious about growing your business online, your website needs to be at the top of the to-do list. We’ll go over anything and everything about your website in the first month of blog posts.



How to get traffic to your website

Now that your website is off and running, it’s time to work on driving traffic to your site because what good is the best website in the world if your customers aren’t seeing it? Your website should already be setup properly to support your efforts at this step. It’s worth mentioning that getting the right traffic to your site won’t come overnight, it’s a constant process. Be prepared to be thoughtful about your business and break down your goals and vision to find how to reach out to your potential and existing customers in the most efficient manner possible. Getting traffic to your site is going to come from different efforts including SEO, social media, and content marketing (just to name a few). We’ll show you everything you need to know to spark your website’s traffic at this point in the series.



Social Media

Social media marketing can be an integral part of your marketing efforts but it needs to have a purpose. The primary focus of your social media campaigns should be decided before making your first post. A good place to start with social media is asking the simple question of “what action can a user take on our posts that we would consider a successful transaction?”. Sure, your social media presence could simply be to grow your outreach, but why not take it a few steps further? If you can convince your potential customers to navigate to your site from social media platforms, you’re headed in the right direction. Ultimately, your social media presence should drive customers back to your site (your most important online marketing asset, remember?). We’ll go over some practical examples of how this can be done when we get into the social media marketing stages of this guide.



Summary

So we know it’s going to take some work to establish your business as an authority online, but if we break down this process into actionable steps it becomes easier to understand and follow through. Starting with your website is where we’ll begin and then we’ll focus on generating traffic and converting potential customers into satisfied buyers through social media and other channels.