Creative Digital Marketing Campaign Tips for Small Businesses

If you run a small a small business online and you do not have creative digital marketing as an integral part of your marketing strategy, your business will struggle. To run your small business successfully online, promoting the business in the right and appropriate manner is imperative. You can only do so by using the right tools, the right techniques/tactics and in an appropriate manner. Doing business in virtual world is hugely competitive and if you don’t know what you are doing, you may actually be hurting your business if you are unable to promote it well with the right techniques and online tools. Here are some tips that can help you out.

 
Tip 1. Be knowledgeable about online marketing tools and techniques. It takes a good knowledge of online tools and methods of successful digital marketing to create an effective digital marketing. It is not all about creativity and originality that seems to occupy the thinking of most digital marketers. There is not one perfect marketing technique either. Every business owner keeps trying to do things that help him to get desired results. This is because there is no one-size-fits-all thing in digital marketing. What works for your business is what you do in your marketing campaigns. Fact is, there are literally hundreds of different marketing techniques which successful marketers have used and are still using. You can also try out such methods to see if they’ll help you get the results you want.

Tip 2. Integrate social media into your content. Incidentally, since the advent of social media, consumers now prefer to see social media integration into their content. If you are a business owner, before spending any money to develop content for your customers, do not ignore social media integration into the content. This is because social media allows you to easily reach out to a much larger audience made up of followers/friends built up over time. Viral sharing can also make that content reach friends of friends which can be in the region of hundreds of thousands of prospects within a short while. That is great for marketing. Business owners who are unable to properly leverage their content through social media usually find it extremely difficult to achieve their marketing goals. Before creating content therefore, be sure it is the type of content that can be leveraged through social media to reach a very wide audience of prospects in quick time.
 
Tip 3. Don’t rely exclusively on SEO. Relying exclusively on search engine optimization, SEO as a form of creative digital marketing is a great marketing mistake. Granted SEO is the type of strategy that can improve your website rankings and bring more traffic to the site but it is also capable of getting your potential customers bored with your site. Combining SEO with other website marketing techniques is a better option. This is because prospects come to your website mostly to learn or know about things through your content, not just to merely click on your ads.

Tip 4. Don't focus all your marketing efforts on optimizing keywords only. This approach may prove effective for some businesses but for others it may prove to be a huge waste of time. This is because search engines through their sensitive algorithms have a great habit of penalizing or even yanking off or removing websites that flout their strict rules. No matter how great your keyword/phrase is, if you use it excessively on your content, search engines will see it as “keyword stuffing” and your website can be penalized for that or even banned altogether. That can become a huge disaster for your marketing campaigns.

Tip 5. Trying to overly attract visitors to your website with pop-ups is a marketing mistake. This tactic may easily draw attention, but it is actually an ineffective way to draw visitors. You know why? Pop-ups are annoyingly and irritatingly slow and they tend to bug browsers. Worse still, search engines appear to hate pop-ups and they often penalize websites for using pop-up ads. Well-designed and natural looking ads are thus preferable. 

Tip 6. Do not create too much content for the sake of it. For content creation, quality rather than quantity is always the best option. You may want to create too much content to promote your business, but be careful. Even if you actually craft copious information about your products, it should not be at the detriment of quality. In content marketing, quality not quantity is king. Technically, if you overload your web pages with content, it reduces their relevance with the search engines. Users may thus perceive it as spam. The best way around that is to balance the amount of content you have with cleverly created SEO. SEO may be a huge factor in any marketing campaign but without some creativity and originality in the way you write and distribute your content, it cannot be of much help to boost your SEO results.

Tip 7. Make your website design simple but attractive. Avoid creating a website that looks like the next big design trend. Functionality is more preferable in website designs. Even though some businesses take advantage of the latest graphics software to create websites that may appear over the top in style, these sites may be functionally poor. All you need is a simple but functional website since prospects that happen on your website are there for information not entertainment. They naturally expect to find a site that is easy for them to navigate and use.

Tip 8. Creative digital marketing requires that you test your ideas before launching them. The best way to test an idea is to launch a short version of it and gauge your response. If it doesn't convert well enough, then you know that it needs more work on it to make it better. If however it converts well, you can determine whether or not you were able to tweak it properly. If your ideas don’t get tested well enough, it is difficult to determine what will work and what won’t. Being creative and implementing digital media correctly can earn good results but it takes time for tests to be carried out and perfected.

Creative Digital Marketing Campaign Tips for Small Businesses

Digital marketers need creative digital marketing campaigns to survive in the huge and very competitive digital marketing world. No matter how much leverage they get from the use of digital marketing tools and gadgets, without creative thinking, good results are very difficult to get. In the kind of scenario where everyone does about the same things, it is marketers who do these same things differently that stand a chance to have some edge over others. It takes creative thinking to get this edge. The more creative you are, the easier it is for your customers to remember you and to do business with you.

Here are a few things you can do differently while applying creative thinking in your marketing campaigns.

Have a Creative Plan: Your marketing plan must be sufficiently creative to get good results. Right from the outset of your marketing campaign, that plan must be set up and diligently followed. Your business can only be as good as the digital marketing campaign you are working with. That is why you cannot afford to ignore a creative digital marketing plan for your business. You need it to get more traffic, more leads, more customers and better sales. A creative plan allows you to better track how your marketing campaigns are progressing and to make changes and adjustments where necessary as the campaigns progress. The lessons from these efforts allow you to creatively experiment with digital marketing campaigns that work best for you and to decide what to retain and what to discard.

Think Out of the Box: Yes indeed! Thinking out of the box on its own is creative thinking.  It is through this method you can get to find ways to do things differently from what others are doing even if you all are doing about the same things in your marketing activities. To stand out from the crowd and be different, you must think differently with a view to trying different strategies to determine what works best. If you think outside the box, you will no doubt discover that there are numerous ways to promote your business, get traffic and leads, attract new customers, entice repeat customers and do better business. Without creative thinking into your marketing strategies, getting some traction in a fiercely competitive environment is always an uphill task.

Create a Viral Marketing Campaign: The prayer of most marketers is to always have marketing campaigns that go viral. So, you can start using creative digital marketing tactics even before your business website starts to get good organic traffic from search engines. The way to go is social media where nearly everyone appears to be these days. If you create accounts in the popular social media sites such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and others, you can take advantage of their huge popularity and easy interaction with the audience to promote your business, get leads and even customers. This is because, as soon as you create accounts on most social media sites, you can leverage their immense popularity to create viral digital marketing campaigns.

Nurture Customers Creatively: What this means is that it is OK to do most of what others are doing in their customer relations, but yours must be creatively different. You know why?  Most customers are more prone to remember any business that they know to be sufficient creative in its digital marketing campaigns. The difference may be little but significant enough to be noticed by customers. This you can do not by trying to reinvent the wheel most times but by exploring creative ways to blend relatively new ideas with some old ideas to redirect your marketing campaigns. Innovative and creative customer relations can make that possible because how your customers feel about your business is directly proportional to how much business they do with you.

Creatively Build a Mailing List: Your email marketing efforts cannot yield good results if you do not have a credible mailing list. You can build your email list creatively. Smart marketers use creative digital marketing tactics to capture customer's contact/e-mail addresses. From the homepage of your website, you can offer items of value that are perfect for capturing visitor’s attention. Items like eBooks, research data, privileged info, how-to videos, entertainment infographics and suchlike items can be offered free in exchange for the contact addresses of your website visitors.  That is really creative no doubt.

Use Creative Digital Media: Creative digital media is quite essential to achieving your business goals. Every digital marketer must always explore every avenue to leverage the enormous powers and tools of the Internet to promote products/services. If you cannot creatively take advantage of the internet to push your products/services, your competitors will readily do so to your disadvantage.

Creatively Evaluate Your Marketing Strategies: Digital marketing is always a continuous 24/7 process because of the power of the Internet.  For this reason, you must stand ready to constantly and continuously evaluate your marketing strategies. That allows you to quickly detect which strategy works best and which isn’t. Based on that info, you can easily innovate and adapt as necessary if you want your business to survive. Creative Internet marketing strategies don't only build traffic; they build customer loyalty as well. So, as your customer base grows, your sales/profits grow in tandem.

Blog Creatively: Only creative content marketing by way of blogging that tends to get good results. Therefore, you can be deliberately creative by writing and posting only articles and blogs that focus more on your business niche or industry. Provide valuable, informative and educational info and offer good advice that significantly benefits other people coming over to your website. That is one very effective way to let others know about your business and to attract new leads and customers. Creative blogging provides info that attracts the interest of others in your business. If you do this consistently, your digital marketing campaign gets good results from such efforts.

Market with Creative Ads: Creative ads are usually not too difficult to create and they get good results. You only need a bit of innovation and good thinking to come up with fantastic ads. If however you aren't sure how to create effective ads yourself, you can depend on online tools and software to help you out. Alternatively, you can hire the services of freelance writers to help you.  One DIY approach that works is to create a commercial for your website and upload the video to YouTube. You then use your e-mail signature feature to encourage others to click through to your website. As you promote your website, you get more clicks on the video and consequently more leads and conversions.

Final Thoughts

Most digital marketers do about the same things to market their products/ services, but it is marketers who do these same things a bit differently that tend to get the best results. Those are the creative marketers. Customers must appreciate that creativity by their own responses for it to be judged effective. That means, your creative digital marketing is not about what you want but about what your customers and prospective customers want. For effectiveness, creative digital marketing should not overtly aim to sell things to customers. It must aim to help customers solve their pressing problems.

Effective Marketing Campaign Tips For Small Businesses

  

Digital marketing in an increasingly interconnected world is becoming a lot easier and with better results for small businesses if the right marketing strategies are in place. Even with small and very tight marketing budgets peculiar to small businesses, it is possible to create impactful and memorable marketing campaigns to get good results. Many marketing experts do agree on this point and they offer some tips to small business owners seeking to better the lots of their small businesses in digital space.

Here are some tips on what small businesses that want to build effective marketing campaigns should be doing.

1. Segment Your Audience

As many small business marketers very well know, the audience they are marketing to is always very sophisticated and diverse.  That is what makes it hugely imperative for small business owners to work with a comprehensive marketing strategy that includes segmentation. Doing so allows them to target specific ads at specific audiences for utmost impacts at very low cost effects.

2. Leverage Your Free Channels

Marketing online requires the use of multiple channels most of which are free to push messages around the internet. Many small business owners are already using these channels. If you know your way around the internet, you can leverage on these free channels to get your message across to your targeted audience. Free channels like your own social media accounts, blog and email marketing lists are available for you to leverage upon in a cost-effective way to reach your target audience. Many of these channels may be free to use but they are very effective for online marketing, the reason you can leverage them for good results.

3. Be Creative with Your Content

Online marketing requires a lot of creativity to be effective. This is more so with videos, graphics or photo content where quality is of utmost importance. With the use of apps like Prequel or TikTok, you can really get creative with videos, graphics and photo editing. By using these apps effectively, you can easily create highly watchable videos and visually interesting graphics/photos thereby sparing yourself the need to have to hire at considerable costs the services of a professional videographer/photographer.

4. Identify Your Business with a Cause

Be sure what your business stands for is very clear before posting messages about it online. You must identify a particular mission your business can truly claim as its own. With that, you can then identify your business with it as a cause then prepare very clear messaging that drives your objectives forward in tandem with that cause. If you present a haphazard approach to many initiatives instead of identifying with one cause, your results will be hugely limited.

5. Target Your Niche with Social Media Ads

It is a known fact among marketers that small businesses typically serve a niche market. The reason it is easy to target that market with appropriate ads. Using such target messages in the very popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, you get very good returns on your investment. For best results, your social media ads must be specific when defining a target because of their own in-house algorithms that enable them to target specific audiences as a matter of course.

6. Develop and Target a Buyer Persona with Ads

For your marketing ads to be more effective, you need to do some diligent research to develop a buyer persona. That done, it becomes easier to channel your messaging to that persona, using the marketing platforms that your buyers interact on the most. That is like taking your message to where your buyers are and can be found. You can deliver such messages with the use of emails, social media accounts and blogs. Doing so enables you to capture easily a small audience that is highly qualified as against dissipating your efforts on a large audience that is unqualified.

7. Use Ads with Multiple Touch Points

If you have listed your business on Google My Business, you can create campaign ads that have multiple touch points by leveraging on it. Google My Business is very popular on Google searches and most people easily turn to it in search of businesses in their localities. Free listing on the platform usually helps to get very good results. This is good for the ads budgets of very many small businesses.

8. Be Consistent To Amplify Your Ads Message

Ads messages when repeated consistently tend to increase remembrance and memorability. That increases their effectiveness. Online tools that help to automate your online messages across several channels are always useful to amplify ads messages online. For this reason, your content needs to be appropriately adapted to any channel or medium you are using to propagate your ads messages online.

9. Deploy Online Metrics to Measure your Efforts

Without accurate metrics, it is very difficult to gauge how well your campaigns are doing. Because measurement is central to the success of your ads campaigns, you must always put metrics in place to make sure what you spend on marketing is converting adequately to sales. That is your ROI which every smart marketer must be interested in. It is a marketing folly to assume your marketing is working. Only metrics measurements give accurate and informed data to help make that decision. If the results you are getting are not commensurate to the marketing efforts you are putting in, with data from your metrics measurements, you can quickly make adjustments for better results.

10. Optimize Your Business for Local Searches

Many small businesses tend to get a very high patronage from local customers. That is what makes optimizing your business for local searches a very smart thing to do if you are running a small business of your own. Doing so is a way of telling your local target market that you are there for them. Google search results do show that many customers are always looking for businesses near their current locations. For this reason, it is just not enough to simply optimize your business for search engines, the business must be optimized for local searches as well. That helps more people searching locally to be able to find you when they need what you are offering.

11. Leverage SMS Automation

For most small business owners, repeat business means good business. Staying in touch with customers is one great way to guarantee repeat business. How do you do this? One very effective way is to leverage SMS automation to keep a constant dialogue going with your customers. Building personal one-on-one relationships with customers helps many small businesses to grow very rapidly. Leveraging SMS automation to keep their businesses top of mind for customers is one great way to build these relationships.  

12. Optimize Your Content Marketing Strategy

For online marketing purposes, it is not just enough to have a good content. The content must be well-optimized for search purposes because consumers now spend more time online searching for their needs. Content optimization has thus become a good marketing strategy. Consumer behavior now tends towards seeking out more information while looking for ways to be educated, entertained and inspired. Redirecting more of your marketing efforts to content marketing helps your brand to connect better with consumers in places they spend most of their time online.

13. Deploy a Robust Customer Loyalty Program

Nearly everyone I know craves recognition and appreciation. Customers are no exceptions. The existing customer base of many small businesses is their most valuable asset. They can leverage on that asset to get repeat business if they have a robust customer loyalty program in place. This program can take the form of discounts for repeat business or even outright gifts. Marketing experience shows that it is by far easier and cheaper to service a returning customer than it is to source a new customer. With satisfied repeat customers, you can quickly build up brand loyalty. With it, you can easily reach a wider audience through referral programs capable of helping your business to grow exponentially.

14. Market Your Satisfied Customers

By the time your business builds up a good customer base, you can leverage on it to get more and more customers. Many people always want to know what customers are saying about your business. Explore ways to get your satisfied customers in front of your target audience. Get what your customers are saying about your business on social media and such other channels where your target audience is. Their testimonies can get you more and more customers when many consumers chance on such comments online.