If you are a small business or a pure startup, you need to have a strong digital marketing strategy to grow your business. While material marketing has its place too, digital marketing is the new competitive edge for businesses. The best thing is that internet marketing completely does away with any boundaries that limit conventional marketing strategies. Whether you are in Lebanon, the US or some other part of the world, the entire world is your target audience with online marketing. Here is what you need to know about digital marketing if you are a small business.
Quality Will Always Have the Upper Hand on Quantity
When it comes to digital marketing, you have to focus on quality rather than quantity. Take the example of SEO where you have to use keywords in your content and link your landing pages to high authority websites through backlinks. In both cases, you have to focus on quality. Stuffing your content with keywords will attract penalties from search engines. Having too many backlinks coming from low authority websites will also result in penalties from search engines, especially Google. You have to be careful about quality even when embedding images on your web pages.
Personalization Is the New Focus
Whether you are doing paid or unpaid marketing, your focus has to be on personalizing your ads and marketing content according to your target audience. You can’t use cookie-cutter strategies anymore as they will result in lower ROIs. Take the example of email marketing where you first segment your customers based on their interests and then send the emails that are most relevant to their recent searches and interests. Website analytical softwares like Google Analytics are also used to collect visitor data to allow marketers to make the overall website experience more personalized.
If It’s Not Mobile It Is No Good
It does not matter how much money you spend on marketing, it will do you no good if your efforts are not optimized for mobile. It all starts from your website that has to be optimized for mobile devices. The website experience should be seamless for users when they move from a desktop to a smartphone or tablet. Mobile optimization is also important for search engine optimization. Keep in mind that your website is only visible in Google results to the mobile users if it is optimized for mobiles. To go the extra mile, you should also develop a mobile application if your business model allows for one.
It’s Incomplete without Local
The most important trend in online marketing has been “local”. If you are a brick and mortar business or your services are limited to a particular region, local SEO is more important for you than general SEO. Through local SEO you can target a more narrowed down audience and you get to compete with fewer businesses. A great way to appeal to the local audience is to offer them a local version of your website and application i.e. make them available in their language. So, if your business serves Lebanon, you would want to offer a translated version of your website in Lebanese Arabic.
For a long time small business owners have been under the impression that they don’t have to pay much attention to SEO, local SEO, social media marketing, personalized marketing, etc. but the time has made it clear that small businesses need the same level of digital marketing as large enterprises.