A definitive guide to Digital Marketing
for Small Businesses & Startups

Learn how you can organically drive traffic and grow your small business in a systematic manner!

Download NOW!

Introduction

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.

Why Care about 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:

Buyer persona

Buyer persona

Segmentation & targeting

Segmentation & targeting

Positioning

Positioning & messaging

Content marketing

Content marketing

Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization

Email marketing

Email marketing

Social media marketing

Social media marketing


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.

7 Steps to Create your Online Marketing Strategy

Buyer persona

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.

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.

42% small businesses fail since nobody wants their product or service.

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:

  • Who your typical buyer is? – her profile, her demographic information such as age, marital status, location, job, income and more.
  • What are her pain points, challenges, needs and wants?
  • What she wants to accomplish? Her goals and aspirations?
  • How does she make decisions? How often she purchases products such as yours? Based on data or based on stories from other people like her?
  • How does she consume content? What channels (Email, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Twitter) does she use to consume content?

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.

Segmentation and targeting

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.

Segmentation & Targeting

“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?

“If you serve everyone, you serve no one”
-Sarah Pearson Wood

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.

10 questions to ask while defining your target customer segment:

  • Who has the biggest pain points?
  • What are these big pain points?
  • What are the common attributes of these buyers? Demographics, needs, challenges etc.
  • Who would benefit the most from a product like yours? Why?
  • What are the alternatives (to your product) that these buyers currently use?
  • How are you different from these alternatives or competitors?
  • Is your differentiation defensible? Or can someone copy it easily? How can you find a more sustainable differentiator? It could be a patent, it could be a unique process if you are a manufacturer or a unique recipe if you are a restaurant.
  • Can these buyers pay for your product? How much?
  • How big is this segment? Is it large enough for you to have a reasonable market share and build a viable business?
  • Is this segment reachable? Via which channels?
  • Is this segment profitable?

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”.

Example of Customer Segmentation:

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:

  • Awareness
  • Engagement
  • Intent or Action
Example of Customer Segmentation:

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.

Positioning & messaging

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.

Positioning & Messaging

“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.

“There are only two ways to compete. You can either be cheap or be different”
-Michael Porter, Professor at Harvard Business School.

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).

Example of a Good Positioning Statement:
Me-too positioning

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:

  1. Focus on your buyer persona and market research from your customer interviews.
  2. Don't forget your Point of Parity (PoP). For you to be a player in a category, you need to communicate some attributes of your product that you need just to be a player in the market. For example, delicious Indian food are the essentials if you are targeting a segment that loves Indian food.
  3. Highlight one or two Point of Differences (PoD). In our example, two differentiators are highlighted: (1) Roadside Punjabi Food which is not very commonly available (2) By a Michelin starred-team.
  4. Don't position on too many attributes to make the message confusing.
  5. Do a litmus test for not being “me-too”. In your positioning statement, replace your business's name by your competitor's name and see if the positioning still rings true. If it does, you are in for a price war and razor thin profit margins.

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.


Example of Bad a Positioning Statement:

“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.

Content marketing

“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:

“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.

  • Blogs help customers find your business when searching about related topics on Google.
  • They help your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) effort in a very inexpensive manner.
  • Blogs generate quality leads that can result into sales.
  • They help in building the trust about your business in the minds of the consumers.
  • Blogs engage customers and help develop their interest into your product.
  • They lead customers to a decision or an action stage about purchasing your product.
  • Blogs provide a low-cost yet effective alternative to spending large sums of money to marketing agencies.
  • They help you build reputation and authority in your field.

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.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

“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.

“Google only loves you when everyone else loves you first.”
–Wendy Piersall.

3 things to make your website SEO friendly


1. High quality content

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.

2. High frequency, fresh content

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.

3. SEO friendly structure

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:

  1. Title/Heading: The title/heading of your blog should have the topic and the keywords you are targeting for the blog. The title of your blog should use the H1 tag.

  2. Sub-topics/headings: The sub-topic headings in your blogs should use H2 tags so that the important topics are recognized by the search engines.

    Understand that the H1 and H2 tags are informing the search engines and website visitors about important topics and sub-topics of your blog. These tags should be used only in heading and sub- headings to make the job of the search engines and readers easy.

  3. Bullet points, snippets: A blog must look pleasing to the eyes of the reader. There should be less clutter and more white space. Instead of writing a long paragraph that highlights 5 key elements of a sub-topic, making them as 5 bullet points will make them more recognizable to the search engines and will make them more readable for your readers.

    You can use the H3 tags for the bullet points to highlight the importance. To help highlight important points, H3 tag, bullet points and making some phrases bold is great idea.

    Additionally, more white space on the page is better for readability. Your paragraphs should be short – 2 to 3 lines so that the reader can quickly glance.

  4. Meta description: Meta description should ideally consist of a brief summary of your page. In essence, you are telling what (benefits) the reader will get out of this blog if they read it. The more relevant your meta description is to the topic and the content of the blog, the more chances you have of getting a higher ranking on the search engine. You must make sure your long-tail keywords (topic) and the primary keyword you are targeting are included in the meta description.

  5. Relevant and appropriate use of keywords: Your article should contain relevant primary keywords and long tail keywords (which is your topic). These primary keywords should be aligned with the topic of your article. For each blog, you should target only one or two primary keywords for better discoverability and focus.

  6. Keyword density: Don't stuff the article/blog with keywords or overuse them. As per the SEO experts, the ideal usage of a keyword in an article should be 1-2% of the number of total words of your article. This means that there must be only 1-2 keywords in every 100 words of your article. Search engines would penalize you for stuffing the keywords. If you have to use keywords at a higher frequency, then use a combination of the target keywords and their synonyms to avoid keyword stuffing.

  7. Call to actions (CTA): There can be multiple call to actions in your blogs. The most popular ones are 'Buy now', or 'Download now'. These call to actions should be made available to the users at appropriate places in the blogs.

    As a best practice, near the banner image of your blog (top section of your blog) is a great place to offer a CTA to download an eBook or a guide.

    Once you have introduced the topic and got the user hooked, your next CTA could be more subtle (after first 1 or 2 paragraphs) which could just be a hyperlink to the blog text.

    Lastly, towards the end of the blog, you should have a prominent CTA with a proper banner image.

    For example, if you are talking about using headphones to listen to a certain style of music, the link to buy the headphones should be provided in the same sentence. This CTA will encourage the reader to take action, fill a form, download an eBook or even make a purchase!

    You should avoid “Find more information here” or “Click here” type of CTAs. Adding hyperlinks to the text within the blog that is highlighting the blog topic and keyword is a much better alternative.

  8. Videos, Banners, Images: Instead of long monotonous text, adding videos, banners and images in the blog will keep your readers engaged and lower your bounce rate substantially.

    For certain topics, Google tends to show videos near the top of the page 1. That gives an opportunity for you to improve the ranking of your blogs.

    Additionally, having images and videos will provide you with an opportunity to add Alt text which is great for SEO.

    For example, if the reader is specifically looking for “how to assemble a floor lamp” on a search engine, then the search engine is more likely to show the videos and photo based instructive blogs ahead of purely text based articles.

  9. Alt text: Alt text is the small description like a caption written for images in your blog. This text becomes very important to make sense of the image when the user cannot see the image for some reason.

    A well descriptive short alt text is important for the website's accessibility and SEO. The alt text should capture the essence of the topic of the blog and also should have the primary keywords you are targeting.

    As an example, Neil Patel has done a fabulous job when it comes to using SEO to promote his agency. He ranks number one for multiple SEO based articles and blogs. Let's dive deeper into one of Neil Patel's SEO blog.

As an example, Neil Patel has done a fabulous job when it comes to using SEO to promote his agency. He ranks number one for multiple SEO based articles and blogs. Let's dive deeper into one of Neil Patel's SEO blog.

What does Neil Patel do right in this blog?

  • The blog uses proper H1 tag in the title.
  • The blog uses H2 tag for subtopics and H3 to highlight points in the subtopic.
  • The blog has a video in the initial 2 scrolls to explain certain fundamentals about the key topic of the blog.
  • The blog offers a CTA several times in the entire blog – Once at the beginning, once in the middle and lastly at the end of the blog.
  • The blog uses multiple internal links that redirect the readers to another blog on the same website.
  • The blog has very relevant pictures that demonstrate what the writer wants to communicate.
  • All the pictures have appropriate Alt Text that describe what the pictures are to improve SEO.
  • The blog has multiple keywords and long tail keywords used to improve the SEO.

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

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:

Email marketing gives you 4400% ROI (Return on Investment) delivering you $44 in revenue for each $1 you spend.
  • Why email marketing is still the most effective channel for online marketing?
  • 3 steps to create compelling email content that drives results.
  • Optimal frequency for your email campaigns.
  • How to measure the success of your email campaigns?
  • How you can get off the ground at a relatively low cost?

Why is email still the most effective tactic for online marketing?

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%.

Average open rate for emails is over 18% and click-to-open ratio is 14%.

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.

3 steps to create compelling email content that drives results

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.

Subject line: If your subject line is not compelling, your email won't be opened and that's the end of your campaign. Subject lines that are relevant to your recipient and your brand, signals benefits for them, are personalized and short usually lead to good open rates.

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.

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.


Body content: The body of the email should focus on what is relevant to the prospect, what problem you are solving and how they can benefit. A simple email template you can standardize would include:
  • What are you offering?
  • Why should they care?
  • What challenges your offer will solve for the prospects?
  • What benefits they would realize?
  • Testimonials or proof points from people like them.

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.

Call to action: A clear call to action or offer towards the end of the email, typically in the form of a “button” to click, will prompt your prospect to take/click your offer.

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.

Optimal frequency for your email campaigns

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.

3 metrices to measure the success of your email campaigns

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:

  • Open rate: Open rate will tell you what percentage of emails are opened by the prospects. Average open rates are between 10 to 25%. Your email subject line is critical for driving the open rates. If the reader finds your subject line interesting, she will open the email. The more your open rate is, the more successful your email campaign is.

  • Click-through rate (CTR): This indicates the percentage of clicks your offers/links within the emails by the reader. If the content body and the offers you are sending in the email are compelling, your CTR will be higher. If you have a good open rate but bad CTR then you need to work on the email body content to make it more compelling.

  • Conversion rate: This indicates the percentage of people who actually performed the activity that you were hoping them to do. For example, fill a form, download an eBook, register for a webinar, buy your product, subscribe for your newsletters, or request a consultation. The average conversion rate for emails is 1.22%. If your conversion rate is bad (but CTR and Open rates are good), then you need to fix the content on the landing page where you are presenting the offer or you need to make sure your offer is compelling.

You can learn more about email marketing on our special blog focused on the Email Marketing for small businesses (coming soon).

How you can get off the ground at a relatively low cost?

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:

  • They have a very precise subject line and pre-header that describes clearly what is inside the email.
  • Their emails always read to a person, and not an audience. When they send an email, they think about the person who they are sending it to and tailor their email content and headline accordingly.
  • Inside the email, they have really catchy, honest and compelling body content.
  • They use photographs or gifs in almost every email to break the monotony of text.

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.

Social media marketing

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.

Research says that on an average, people spend over 2 hours per day on Social Media.

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:

What platform is better suitable for your business?

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.

Quality content that delivers value to the viewer

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.

Go where the customers are

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.

If you simply post your social media posts on your walls, it will simply be noticeable 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.

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.

Tweak your content to suite the social media platform

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.

Re-purpose the great content you already have

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.

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.

Consistent weekly cadence

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.

Conclusion

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.

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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