Online Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

I shared a bunch of creative content marketing ideas here, and Elisa recently rewrote the rules of content marketing for small businesses. Wistia offers a great video tutorial showing you how to shoot expert-looking footage on your regular old iPhone! If video sounds like too much of a challenge, try making slide decks and sharing them on SlideShare.

Get Ad Promo Credits. While massive ad campaigns may be out of your budget , there are often discounts and coupons floating around for paid Facebook ads or Google ads. Some web hosting services offer advertising discount codes as part of their membership offerings. Check and see if yours does. Reddit is composed of a very tech-savvy audience that bristles at any obvious marketing tactics.

Tip #1: Your Website - Keep it simple

To win at Reddit, share only truly awesome content, and post only to extreme niches. In Reddit, there are subcategories known as subreddits that deal with some of the narrowest, most specific interests in existence. Find your niche and dominate. Be a Savvy Social Networker. Add Instagram in there too if your business is image-oriented. Also check out this list of easy Facebook marketing ideas for any type of business. Paid Discovery delivers users straight to your site, ready to engage. What works best on Stumble Upon? Photography, visual assets, and humorous content. Stumble Upon is pretty cheap compared to other paid ad structures.

You can see the whole price list for detailed info. Infographics are insanely powerful marketing tools. If you have some understanding of Adobe Illustrator, try out these free vector kits that provide all the elements needed to make a stunning infographic. Not sure where to start? They have beginner and advanced examples for you to browse through. Give New Life to Old Data.

If your marketing budget it tight, you might not be able to always afford content writers to whip up content for your blog. There are a ton of data studies and stats available on the internet. While some of these studies may get initial traction, many often go unnoticed. Find a study that relates to your industry and polish it up. Highlight the most important or interesting parts of the study , add images, crank out some charts, and make your own thoughts and predictions based on the data. For government data, check out data.

Lounge About on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a major social media site that is often under-utilized. Just as you can repurpose existing data studies, you can rehash your old content into new creations as well! Turn a webinar into a video tutorial. Transform a collection of blog posts into an ebook. Develop a Customer Referral Program. Offer existing customers a free product, free month of service, or some other reward for referring new customers. Remember, word-of-mouth is powerful stuff, so friends telling friends about your business is incredibly valuable. Really tight on budget? They want a fast loading website as a minimum requirement.

As a local business, you may not have the budget of the bigger, national or international firms, but you can at the very least get the basics right. From the above stats, you can see how much of an effect a slow website can have on your chances of converting new users into customers.

Page speed or page load time is becoming ever more important as we shift to a more mobile-first world with slower 3G internet connections. Google PageSpeed Insights shows you how you can reduce the loading time of your website.

Luckily, with Google My Business, you have a level of control when it comes to managing how people perceive your business. Secondly, ranking for a broad term may not eventually lead to more customers. This is where your blog content plays an important role. Write the perfect blog post with this blogging guide from Rebecca Bull. The below screenshot is an example of how we increased organic traffic for a local business in Nottingham through researching blog content that they could produce in-house.

However, the principles remain the same and the fundamentals are covered in this helpful small business PPC guide from Google. One of the key stages when creating your Google Ads Search campaigns is selecting appropriate keywords. Google Keyword Planner has been updated on the new interface to help with this. Example showing the first stages of keyword research for a local plumber campaign.

Content is still king and content marketing is an industry in its own right. Your content will form an important part of your digital strategy. Video is an area that is growing at an incredible rate, and these statistics from HubSpot show why:. Also, an important stat which shows how important video is today is the fact that over 1. Local SEO is important if you are primarily a local business.

There is a really comprehensive email marketing guide from Simply Business which ensures you cover all the essential email marketing questions. Some of which are:. If you are struggling with this area or need to solidify your knowledge, you can also complete a free email marketing certification course from HubSpot. Social media marketing strategies are continuously changing along with constant platform updates.

Focus on the social media platform most relevant to your business and where your customers are most active. My colleague Elle works with local influencers to create share-worthy content for our clients.

This is definitely an area of digital marketing that is growing, and perhaps your business should consider it too. For example, you could be within the food industry and have an influencer outreach strategy to help raise awareness of your brand by approaching local food bloggers.

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In conclusion, these tips should help your small business if you use the above digital strategies effectively. If you have any questions about any of these, contact the Hallam team. Kevin Kapezi has specialist experience in Digital Marketing Strategy. As well I think that the most powerful way to differentiate yourself and to get ahead, is by… Also… 1.

When often people have every piece of the puzzle, but refuse to put the pieces together. People miss out on one, and often both. When you create some great blogs posts, as the one above, people LOVE that and follow you for it. Quality content and being consistent is important, especially with how much content is out there on the web, you can immediately stand out if your content is better researched. Twitter is an ideal platform for social listening and we have tips detailed in the above post on how you can use this as part of your digital strategy.

As a small business you would need to write about content that your target audience would appreciate, adds value and is likely to be shared. As part of a wider link building strategy, you are able to gain some natural links which will boost your SEO efforts.

I think there is not enough content online explaining how to effectively improve Google business profile, and some of the points you made are really spot on and helpful in practice. Hopefully this can help you or others improve on one of the fundamental building blocks of SEO — Google My Business profiles.

Concerning page load time, is it only pictures on the page that can take the majority of the page size and cause slow loading? And how can I compress pictures without affecting its quality?

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In terms of improving page load time, large image files are usually the easiest to spot. However, there could be other issues.

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We have a blog post that explains how to optimise your images for the web and maintain qulaity. GTmetrix is a great tool to see what else could be slowing down your site. You can spot if any plugins, files etc might be slowing down your site. Thanks Kevin for sharing this wonderful article.