This clip from one of StartupWind’s premium courses goes over the importance of Digital Marketing for startups and small businesses, along with the challenges that many startups face when it comes to Digital Marketing.
“Americans spend around 23 hours per week online” - Business News Daily.
With consumers spending such a huge chunk of their time online, small businesses can benefit greatly by focusing on online marketing as compared to other tactics.
However, most small business owners neither have the skills to organically drive traffic to their website nor do they have the budget to hire a marketing agency.
Additionally, the pandemic has made the matter worse since majority of the small businesses are hurting badly, are cash strapped and are looking for creative ways to climb out of this hole.
Internet is littered with a lot of fragmented business content that is not actionable. The small business owners don't know where to start, how far to go and how to leverage these fragmented resources into a concrete action plan and drive results.
Today, we are going to burst this bubble and provide you with a step-by-step guide for Digital Marketing with simple and actionable tools, strategies and tactics to increase organic traffic for your small business.
Download the Free Guide to help you in creating an online marketing strategy for your business.
As a small business owner, you are aware that digital marketing can help increase traffic to your business. However, most of you struggle with “how to get there with small money”.
As daunting as it sounds, getting there is a fairly systematic process. If followed consistently, your business can start seeing positive results within 12 to 24 weeks.
The systematic process involves 7 steps to create your online marketing strategy:
This clip from one of StartupWind’s premium courses explains the 7 steps to form an ideal marketing strategy. As you scroll down you’ll find more information about each step.
This clip from one of StartupWind’s premium courses goes over what a buyer persona is, the importance of buyer personas to your business, and a template of an ideal buyer persona.
42% small businesses and startups fail since there is no market for their product or service.
To avoid this fate, it is important for you to deeply understand who your buyer is, what their pain points are and their willingness and ability to pay for your products.
Building buyer persona is a great tool that you can use to get insights about your buyer before you start spending your marketing dollars and your precious time. The buyer persona tells you:
Here is an example of a buyer persona that you can use as an inspiration to build your own.
As a small business owner, you would be wondering, “how do I make this fictional persona close to reality?” Wouldn't the guesswork of a fictional persona increase my risk of failure?
To avoid this risk, the fastest way to gain insights about your buyer is to start doing 1-1 interviews of your prospective (or existing customers if you are already in a business) buyers. If you talk to about 20 to 30 potential buyers, you will identify the common challenges, needs, wants and other profile attributes that you need to create the buyer persona.
If you have never interviewed prospects and customers and would like to do this in an effective manner, you can quickly learn with StartupWind's free, video-based course on the Entrepreneur's Guide to Effective Customer Interviews.
You can also learn more about market research with StartupWind's free, video-based course on Best Practices for Market Research and learn about validating your market using StartupWind's Ideation and Customer Discovery framework.
This clip from one of StartupWind’s premium courses goes over what a customer segment is, the importance of segmentation, and how to identify the right customer segments for your business.
“If you serve everyone, you serve no one” – Sarah Pearson Wood
“Spray and pray” marketing without proper segmentation and targeting will simply waste your time and money.
How can you find out which customers (or group of consumers) are the best targets for your business?
First, build the buyer persona.
Once you have built the buyer persona and done your market research by conducting 20 to 30 customer interviews, you will have a pretty good idea about what are the common challenges, needs, wants and the demographics of the ideal customers for your small business. This would help you define your customer segment further.
You can learn more by watching a short video on Customer Segmentation which is included in StartupWind's FREE course on “How to create an effective marketing plan for your startup or small business”.
Every product Apple launches gets an almost instant traction. What do they do differently? Apple focuses on the segment of 'High Incomers'. Another segment Apple targets is 'Aspirers', who aspire to have a certain lifestyle that portrays their social class.
This chart further elaborates Apple's Segmentation & Targeting strategy.
Once you know your target customer segment, creating content, writing blogs, creating videos, and choosing where to promote those start becoming easier.
You know the biggest pain points for your segment. You know what they value the most in your product. You know how and where they consume content. You also know how they make decisions.
Based on this deep knowledge, you can start creating content (blogs, videos, and social media posts) that would be useful for your buyer in all 3 stages of their interactions with your business:
Every product Apple launches gets almost instant traction. What do they do differently? Apple focuses on the segment of 'High Incomers'. Another segment Apple targets is 'Aspirers', who aspire to have a certain lifestyle that portrays their social class.
This clip from one of StartupWind’s premium courses explains the basics of positioning and how to focus on the few unique aspects that differentiate your business and deliver maximum value to your customers.
“There are only two ways to compete. You can either be cheap or be different” -Michael Porter, Professor at Harvard Business School.
A positioning statement describes your product and the benefits it uniquely delivers to your target market.
Once you know your target customer segment, creating content, creating videos, selecting where to promote those start becoming easier.
You know the biggest pinpoints for your segment. You know what they value the most in your product. You also know what is unique about your product against the competitors. You know how and where they consume content. You also know how they make decisions.
This gives you all the ingredients to create a compelling and differentiated messaging for your content.
Here is the template to create your positioning statement:
For (your target customer segment)
(your company) is the (category in which you are unique)
which provides (main benefits you offer)
Unlike (your competition),
(your company) provides (your differentiators).
For foodies in New York City, Veeray Da Dhaaba is an Indian restaurant which provides mouthwatering roadside Punjabi food. Unlike most Indian restaurants in NYC, Veeray Da Dhaaba provides delicious food by a Michelin Starred team at an affordable price.
If your positioning and messaging sounds similar to any of your competitors then it's a “me-too” positioning.
Me-too positioning generally leaves you no choice but to compete on the basis of price. There are no winners in price wars. Only thing that is certain about a price war is that you and your competitors will destroy the profitability of your businesses.
Five keys to a great positioning statement:
Me-too positioning generally leaves you no choice but to compete on the basis of price. There are no winners in price wars. Only thing that is certain about a price war is that you and your competitors will destroy the profitability of your businesses.
“ABC Applications leverage industry standards and technologies to transform organizations into next-generation enterprises.”
In this example, it is unclear who the target segment is? What category the company is playing in? What benefits do its products offer? How the products are different from their competition? None of this is clear. It is just a combination of fluffy words without any substance.
In a nutshell, keep it simple and follow the framework to have a clear positioning statement and avoid the urge to add big words that may not mean anything.
Once you have a right positioning statement, when you start creating blogs, videos and other content, make sure all of those are consistent and aligned with your positioning statement.
“Don't focus on having a great blog. Focus on producing a blog that's great for your readers.” –Brian Clark, creator of the most influential content marketing blog.
Blogging is one of the most inexpensive and effective way to drive organic traffic to your small business website.
7 reasons why blogging is prefect to drive organic traffic for your small business:
–Brian Clark, creator of the most influential content marketing blog.
By consistently writing on specific topics on a weekly basis, your site will start gaining authority around that topic.
Every week, on the selected days, if you start publishing fresh blogs focused on the topics that your small business or startup cares about, you will start seeing growth in your traffic. It will also start improving your ranking with Google search engine.
In the end, more consumers will find and read your blogs and start engaging with your business and will ultimately purchase your products.
So, what's stopping us from getting started? You can learn more about how to get started with your blogging strategy and execution in a systematic manner by reading our Step-by-step Guide for Defining & Executing your Blogging Strategy.
“Google only loves you when everyone else loves you first.” – Wendy Piersall.
What is an SEO optimized web page? It is nothing but a web page that is structured in a way that helps the search engine crawlers find and access the content on the web page or blog.
The content must focus on solving the readers problem and should be actionable so that the reader can get some key tasks accomplished in a systematic manner.
By solving the customer problem, your content will enable you to establish authority around the topic that you are writing about.
The content must be written using your target keywords including your long tail keywords.
For example, if your article has the title “10 benefits of using turmeric in cooking”, the body of your article should mention the benefits of using turmeric and perhaps recipes of some delicious yet simple food that can be infused with turmeric. The reader, in this case, can make a turmeric latte using the expresso machine at home within minutes.
Additionally, your content should use proper citations and links to relevant research to give your content more credibility. If those other sites find you linking them and choose to link you back, you get a boost to your blog's authority since the credible source is backlinking you.
Lastly, the content must be original. Copying some article from the web and changing a couple of words here and there will alert crawlers of duplicate content and in turn will hurt your ranking and authority. It can also be very bad for your reputation.
You may write a fantastic blog but then may not publish anything for weeks or months. In this case, you won't get any results. You will have to write consistently on a weekly basis to continue to build authority on topics that are interesting to your customers and your business. Consistently publishing high quality, relevant, actionable and SEO friendly content would eventually help in ranking your website towards the top of the search results.
If you post on a certain day of the week regularly for 4-5 weeks, the crawlers consider your website as constantly updated and active. This would increase your chances of coming up in the top results of search engines significantly since the search engines want to showcase fresh, updated and high quality content to the readers.
The SEO friendly structure makes it easy for the search engine crawlers to find, access and make sense of your content. A proper SEO friendly structure of a blog would consist of the following items:
What does Neil Patel do right in this blog?
In a nutshell, if your blog helps solve a problem for the reader, provides SEO friendly structure which makes it more easy to be found by the search engines, is easy to read and if you do that consistently for over 6 months, you will start seeing growth in organic traffic to your website.
To gain an in-depth understanding of the process of making your website SEO friendly, you can read Small Business SEO: 7 Steps to Drive Organic Traffic.
Email marketing gives you 4400% ROI (Return on Investment) delivering you $44 in revenue for each $1 you spend.
Emails campaigns, when done right, are the most effective way to drive traction and build a revenue pipeline for your small business or startup. In this section, we will look deeper into:
About 90% of Americans over the age of 15 use email. In fact, the working population checks email about 20 times in a day!
Average rate of engagement for businesses on Instagram is about 1%, on Facebook about 0.27% and on Twitter a meager 0.07%.
On the other hand, average open rate for emails is over 18% and click-to-open ratio is 14%.
Clearly, email still is one of the most effective tactice for online marketing.
In this section, we will look into three important element of an email that will help you drive higher open rates, and higher click rates to ultimately drive sales.
We all are emotional beings. You can make the subject lines emotionally compelling by checking its EMV (Emotional Marketing Value) score.
You should be aiming for the EMV score that is greater than 30. Average open rates are between 12 to 25% with 30%+ being realty good.
Your goal is for the reader to quickly review your email, make their mind and take your offer by clicking on the “Call to Action”.
The body of your email could be in different forms such as text, images, infographics or a video so that there is content variability across different campaigns which helps keeping your subscribers engaged.
Content variability could be in terms of different yet relevant topics. You can use multiple use cases, new product releases, special events, newsletters, and seasonal promotions in your emails.
Typically a call to action could be download an eBook, read a blog post, register for a webinar, subscribe for your newsletters, purchase your product or request a consultation with your sales team.
Average click-to-open rates are 10-25% while the average click through rate (CTR) is 2-5%. If your click-to-open rate is below 10%, you clearly need better and more engaging content.
The ideal email frequency for most businesses is once per week. If the subscribers are familiar with your business for some time, and if you have compelling content that is time sensitive, then you can occasionally send two emails per week.
If you are just starting out with email, and you are new to the recipients, then you are better off by sending them email once every two weeks, build a brand impression and then get to the weekly cadence.
Sending emails every day or more than 2 times a week would tune the recipients out and also lead to higher number of opt outs.
Your email marketing service provider (such as Mailchimp or Marketo) will provide you metrics that you can track and see what is working and what isn't:
You can learn more about email marketing on our special blog focused on the Email Marketing for small businesses (coming soon).
As a small business owner or a startup with limited budget and time, email provides a cost effective channel for you to market to your existing and prospective customers.
Let's look at BuzzFeed. They have crushed it using email marketing as a tool. They have over 20 newsletters that are designed to target their different set of customers. In fact, email marketing accounts to the top 5 referrers of Buzzfeed's website traffic.
But why Buzzfeed emails work? Why do they compel people to subscribe to them? Here are some points that you will notice whenever you read an email from Buzzfeed:
There are several email marketing tools (Mailchimp or HubSpot) that offer FREE subscriptions for up to 2,000 email contacts and the cost remains fairly reasonable at around $300 per month for up to 10,000 contacts.
In a nutshell, a good subject line, a compelling offer in the email body and a clear call to action coupled with an email marketing tool will get you off the ground for your email marketing initiatives and start showcasing measurable results.
A good subject line, a compelling offer in the email body and a clear call to action coupled with an email marketing tool will get you off the ground.
Research says that on an average, people spend over 2 hours per day on Social Media.
Remember the DKNY PR Girl? She embodied the entire brand in a single twitter account and had over a million followers back in 2014.
For the first time, a fashion house garnered such a huge response on a portal like Twitter.
Bottom line is, social media can be an effective channel to drive traffic to your website and to grow your business.
Here are 5 keys to remember before starting your social media campaigns:
It is important to know where your target customer consumes content.
If your target segment is 50+ age group, they are more likely to consume the content on Facebook. On Facebook, people consume content that uses videos and images along with text.
If your targets are millennials, they are more likely to consume content on Instagram and consume high quality image-driven content.
If you are posting about politics or education, Twitter could be one of the target platforms for you and it is dominated by text-based content.
If you are offering white collar professional services, LinkedIn may be a better alternative for you.
Many small businesses use Yelp as their consumers would like to check the reviews about their products and services and hence it could be an important platform for most small businesses.
If you are a technology startup, LinkedIn, YouTube and to a lesser extent Facebook are great choices as your target platforms.
Irrespective of the social media platform you use or the frequency of your posts, without high quality of content, you are simply going to spin the wheel without much traction.
You may even tune the audience out if your content is not relevant, doesn't deliver something useful to the reader and isn't engaging enough to hold reader's attention.
You don't have to create new content from scratch, just because you decided to use Social Media as a channel to get the word out.
You can re-purpose the quality content you produce as a part of your blogs, webinars, events, infographics and videos to post it on your chosen social media channel.
If you simply post your social media posts on your walls, it will be noticeable only to your followers. As a small business, in most cases, you are likely to have a small number of followers. So, this won't make any dent in driving the traffic to your website.
You need to go to the groups where your target customers are. For example, if your target customers are manufacturing companies, you join the “Lean Manufacturing” group on LinkedIn (118K members) and then post your content so that the members will see it on the wall and will also likely receive it in the weekly or daily update emails they receive from LinkedIn.
And then you do the same for all other sizable groups on LinkedIn or Facebook to reach to a much broader audience without spending any direct campaign dollars.
You also use hash tags and keywords to get more exposure and reach. For example, if your content talks about Entrepreneurship then your hash tags could be #SmallBusiness #startups #SMB #Entrepreneurship #Entrepreneur etc.
Your Instagram post is different from your tweet even if you are talking about the same topic. Your Facebook post and LinkedIn posts are also somewhat different.
You may be communicating the same news or promoting the same campaign on different platforms but content created for one won't be effective on all others without some tweaks.
The form factor (if you are using images), the level or text, the style of your messages usually is different based on what platform you use.
Look at the popular posts in your industry on your target platforms for best practices so that you can tweak your content and cater towards the platform that you are using.
Lastly, you don't have to post content on all platforms. Pick the ones that are more suitable for your industry, do some tests with initial few campaigns, measure the traction and then stick to one or two platform that yield you the most traction.
You can re-publish a great blog that you already published as an article on LinkedIn or Medium. High quality, fresh articles are visible to a large number of users on these platforms who have shown interest in similar topics.
With very tiny additional effort, you can get more bang from the blogs you published on your website.
For example, you can turn a single pillar page blog into multiple sub-topic blogs, an eBook, an infographic, a concept video, a slide deck, multiple email campaigns and possibly a webinar.
You can also turn all the email or web campaigns you are running and the assets you are creating for them into posts suitable for the social media platforms. Of course, you would do that by tweaking the content for each platform.
You can publish posts about your blogs, videos, eBooks, infographics, webinars, offers and events to get additional exposure and potentially drive further traffic.
Occasionally posting on social media or onto any group walls neither would give you any brand recognition, nor will it drive any traffic.
Just like blogging, you do this every single week and often multiple times in a week.
For example, in a single week, you can post about a customer success story, a blog, a video, news about a new product release and an upcoming event. You post each one of these on different days of the week.
The variety and variability in the content will ensure that your posts are not repetitive and boring.
Lastly, keep everything you are posting consistent and aligned with your positioning statement so that consumers start remembering who you are, what you stand for, what you can help them with and start visiting your website again and again.
In a nutshell, social media marketing can enhance your email and web marketing campaigns by providing an additional channel to reach the consumers you are targeting.
Since your email lists are likely to be smaller in the early stages, social media marketing when combined with content/blog marketing will increase your reach as people start subscribing to your blogs and you start growing your email list. In the end, it will help you drive traffic to your website.
This blog and our comprehensive eBook, A definitive guide to Digital Marketing for Small Businesses & Startups will give you the skills and tools you need to create the digital marketing strategy for your small business and help you get off the ground.
With this step-by-step guide for Digital Marketing, you won't have to spend tens of thousands of dollars on marketing agencies that may not deliver any tangible results.
You can take charge and start doing it yourself with very little direct spend!
By focusing on your customers, delivering content that solves your consumer's problem, staying aligned with your positioning statement, re-purposing the content for different channels & tactics, by SEO-enabling your content and by doing this consistently on a weekly basis, you will start seeing positive results in 12 to 24 weeks.
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