Digital Marketing Tips for Boosting Small Business Sales

The most viable way small businesses can manage to stay ahead competition and make good sales is through effective digital marketing. With digital marketing, it is easier for them to reach more customers and potential customers where they are and pitch for business. Digital marketing channels provide the best opportunities for small businesses to leverage on, get leads, customers and make better sales.

These here digital marketing ideas and tips can help small businesses boost sales.

Prioritize Video Marketing: Consumers respond better to video content than text content. Creating marketing videos these days is not a very complicated enterprise. Marketers don’t really need heavy equipment or professionals to shoot a marketing video footage. If they want to make authentic “how-to” videos, marketers can even use their smartphones with quality cameras to shoot and share marketing videos instantly. These videos can be effective enough to make consumers take desirable actions. Such actions can help boost sales for your business. With more than 5 billion videos being watched daily on YouTube alone, video marketing can be an effective marketing strategy to boost small business sales. Just make your own short marketing video and get it out there on YouTube and elsewhere and your business will be better for it.

Market with Live Videos: Marketers can now make live videos showing them directly speaking to their customers and potential customers. These videos help to promote products by showing how to use products and what the products can do for consumers. They invite consumers to try out the products sometimes for free. Doing this is one great way to reach and maintain personal contact with consumers and to build trust. Live videos are increasingly becoming popular on social platforms where they are shared easily and very widely. Popular social media platforms like YouTube, Facebook and TikTok report that live videos have higher engagement rates when compared to non-live videos. For this reason, if marketers add live videos to their digital marketing strategies, it leads to more positive engagement. That is good for business.
 
Build a Solid Social Media Presence: These days, social media appears to be where nearly everyone is at doing their own things. Making a solid presence on social media is therefore a very smart business idea. With in-person and physical communication opportunities now becoming severely limited because of global pandemic restrictions, it is a very smart for small businesses to take to using social media platforms to reach prospects and customers. That calls for building a strong social media presence for your business. Over time, you can grow your audience and directly market to it through segmentation. Very popular social platforms, such as TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, provide in-house analytics and many other opportunities for effective business marketing and connecting with new audiences.

Have a Social Media Strategy: Social media is for everyone, but with a majority just out there seeking fun. To market effectively in such scenario, you need a well-thought out social media strategy. Aside from taking advantage of the in-house analytics of some social media platforms, small businesses can leverage some of the platforms particularly LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter to showcase customer testimonials. They can also take advantage of some of the business apps they can find on the platforms. Doing so efficiently requires a workable social media strategy since the demographics of audiences on the platforms are not the same. It is only with such strategy you can get your business to effectively use the platforms for customer engagement, communication and promote brand exposure.

Include a Live Chat Feature on your Website: In business, any business, communication is key. The more effective your business communication, the better the business you can do. Quick and timely communications too is an advantage. Good communication helps to maintain good online presence for your business. You can communicate with emails, Skype, telephone and social media communication apps as well as live chats. However, a live chat app on a website is one of the best ways that small businesses can maintain their online presence. Why? Because, many customers have varying schedules, with some working part-time or full-time, while engaging in their day-to-day activities. Therefore, customers can only have varying shopping times depending on their own schedules. That’s where live chats become handy. Live chats are efficient because they can be timed and scheduled for the convenience of all parties. Aside from providing business support, live chats are also very effective sales tools for prospects that otherwise would simply just leave your website without engaging.

Leverage Email Marketing: Make no mistake about it, no matter what others are saying, email marketing is still a very effective marketing tool because it still manages to help businesses to get significant engagement. For that reason, small businesses can still leverage the power of email marketing to boost personal connections with customers. It is indeed effective in amplifying customer retention and can influence customers’ purchase behavior. However, the most effective emails are optimized emails. For good results therefore, be sure your emails are optimized.

To optimize your emails for better results, here is what to do.
• Personalize your email content as much as practicable.
• Use “send-time” optimization to make sure your readers receive your emails at the most appropriate time.
• Segment your contacts so your emails only go to the contacts who will find the specific piece of content most valuable.
• Shorten your subject lines and be clear about the email content's value proposition to encourage open rates.
• Ensure your emails are concise and include a Call-to-Action, CTA, to take the reader to the next stage in your sales funnel.
• Ensure your photos, graphics and videos are sharp and aesthetically appealing.

Email marketing helps in customer retention primarily because emails provide space to enable marketers customize and personalize their marketing messages. As an effective digital marketing strategy therefore, emails help marketers to significantly boost their businesses and grow sales.

Final Thoughts

Every small business needs good marketing strategy just as well as quality products/services to boost business and grow sales. Digital marketing strategies are cost-effective and hugely beneficial to small businesses.  The reason they are especially beneficial for small businesses with limited marketing budgets. Small businesses can significantly boost their businesses and grow sales with these ideas/tips, in addition to improving their Google listings, improving their local SEO, and expanding their website marketing activities. 

Content Marketing Tools that Get Quick Results

Content marketing is a digital marketing strategy that involves creating and promoting any marketing content online. Marketers use content marketing primarily to generate brand awareness, increase social media following, increase website traffic, and ultimately to generate customer leads and sales. A good content is one that is educational, engaging, informational and even entertaining. Such good content helps marketers to attract traffic, get leads and customers. Practical examples of the types of content tools used by content marketers are e-books, blogs, online courses, infographics, case studies, how-to guides, glossaries, industry news, videos, images/graphics and banners, podcasts, and webinars. Digital marketers try to capture the attention of their target customers by publishing these content tools on their business websites, promoting them through social media, through email marketing, SEO, and even paid ads.

As pointed out by experienced marketers, some of the most popular content marketing tools that get quick results are:

Video Marketing: The use of videos online is hugely popular and widespread among marketers because it gets quick results particularly when promoted on social media. Many popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, Snapchat and Instagram encourage video content on their platforms. Now, videos are so important on YouTube that it has become the second most popular search engine after Google. Many shoppers now use it to find information about all kinds of products. Many rely hugely on YouTube product reviews to make their buy decisions.

Blogging: This is readily the most common content marketing tool among digital marketers. A good blog content spiced with relevant keywords for SEO helps to generate organic search traffic to business websites. If you blog regularly by writing articles in your business niche with informative content, it helps to demonstrate and firmly establish your industry expertise in the eyes of your readers. Blogs are very useful content marketing tools that have proved successful for creating some impact for increasing sales revenues. This is more so for products where customers can read reviews and write comments about personal experiences through blog feedback.  

Infographics: Infographics are a form of visual content designed to educate people. They often use charts, images, numbers, and minimal text, to communicate information quickly and clearly and give an easy-to-understand overview of a topic. The reason they tend to attract readers attention better and faster at giving out very important marketing info quickly. They get good results too just like videos.

eBooks: These are a long-form content type designed to inform and educate readers. They are similar to blogs in many respects except that they give more details in espousing a subject matter as well as the expertise on the subject. On business websites, eBooks find use as token gifts to get sign ups. That way, they serve as efficient lead magnets to collect the contact details of people who sign up to download the eBooks. That helps the marketer to build up a credible and reliable prequalified email list quickly. Every sign up thus represents a potential customer if followed up with appropriate emails from the marketer.

5 Wasteful Small Business Marketing Strategies to Avoid

 For any small business, time and money are way too valuable for any wastage to be tolerated. Granted everyone in business always wants to do what most others are doing to promote their products/services in the market place. It gets real difficult most times. That is because marketing is no easy task. It is where some business owners at times get to overdo certain things thereby occasioning some avoidable wastage. When developing your own marketing strategy, you must take care to avoid wasting your time and money unnecessarily. Here is what to look out for and try to avoid.



01. Casting your marketing net too wide. Almost always, you get better returns on your investments and your marketing efforts work better if you target your audience effectively. Experience has shown that if you cast your marketing nets too wide, you end up wasting valuable time and money marketing to the wrong people in the wrong places. That clearly is a waste which is avoidable.

02. Untargeted video marketing. If you rightly assume that your customers are watching videos online, you must find out where. First you must try to know on what platforms your videos would be viewed on before you even create one. That is because creating videos for social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram for instance requires different approaches and strategies for the simple reason that videos are consumed differently on both platforms. Doing otherwise leads to avoidable wastage creating videos which are not well targeted.

03. Using too many social media channels. The more the merrier is hardly relevant when it comes to marketing on social media. If you are one of those marketers who still believe you need to be everywhere on social media, you are simply wasting your very valuable time, effort and money. When you decide to market on social media platforms, what is most important is to target your customers exactly where they are already spending their time. Just take your business to them in the social media where they already are. That saves you time and money.

04. Creating irrelevant content. We hear marketing experts say “content is king” when it comes to blogging for business. And that you need regular and fresh content all the time. Great! But that’s not all. What is important is that your content must be relevant to be useful. That is what helps your customers who want to build a relationship with your business. They appreciate your business more when you regularly give them valuable, relevant and fresh content which helps them. Irrelevant content is clearly a waste of time and money in that wise.



05. Wrong use of influencer marketing. Influencer marketing is good for your business if the influencer is in the right industry. To get good value from the advice of influencers, they must be right for your business and they must also have some visible and identifiable reputation. If however you’re in an obscure industry or you create products for a small niche market, influencers are probably not going to be of much help to you. Using influencers for such business will clearly be a waste of time, effort and money. Therefore, you can do well to avoid wasting your time and money on some low impact influencer or one in the wrong industry.