Whether you’re a bricks-and-mortar store or an online retailer, knowing how to grow your business online is a must in today’s technology-driven world. Among the most important tools for digital marketing are websites, social media, email, online content, SEO and AI.
In this article, we explore all the facets of digital marketing. We know that as a small business, you’re unlikely to have the resources to max out every digital channel. However, to grow your business virtually you need to understand the tools on offer, then you can find the mix that’s right for you.
Key Takeaways
- Know your target audience to guide your online marketing strategy.
- Your website is the hub that almost all digital activity will link back to: getting it right is a massive step.
- Content, SEO, email, social media and AI all have a role in growing your business online, and can be managed on a budget.
- Prioritize the digital channels that work best for you—every business is different.
Your audience will shape your digital strategy
The digital marketing platforms and channels you should use depend on what you’re selling and who you’re selling to. Figuring out your target market, if you haven’t already, is crucial to setting your online strategy.
Knowing your audience is the first step in digital marketing. Source: InConcert via Depositphotos
Your vision and your own observations about your potential customers are a good place to start—you may have an idea of their age, geographical origin or interests. But data beats hunches, and digital channels are a great source of data:
- Census data and national statistics agencies offer demographic breakdowns.
- Internet searches for keywords associated with your business and location can help you assess the competition and how they target their audience.
- Browse different social media platforms to see who’s posting on relevant topics, and check out your rivals’ social game.
- Send online surveys such as SurveyMonkey to find out more about current or potential customers.
Building a digital marketing plan
The data you collect helps you answer vital questions on how to grow your business online. What social media channels should you focus on? Does your audience crave the type of expert advice that a blog can offer? Or is that old stalwart email, a more powerful tool to incentivize your target market that isn’t always online with discounts and newsletter content?
A digital marketing plan takes effort, but is essential to building a strategy. Source: kantver via DepositPhotos
The resulting marketing plan should break down different approaches in terms of budget and outreach frequency across the channels. But your branding should be consistent throughout, to ensure it sticks. Through it all, never forget what makes your business unique—whether you’re choosing an image for Instagram, keywords for SEO or the template for your landing page, your unique selling point should come shining through your design and content.
Just as importantly, any plan must evolve with your business. Digital marketing can bring in rich data in terms of engagements, sign-ups and click-throughs, allowing you to measure success, and pivot as needed.
Websites are the beating heart of online business
Some stores get by without a website, relying on their physical premises, a Google Maps profile and social channels. But a website is arguably the most powerful digital tool on offer to small business owners:
- If you’re reliant on a Facebook page, and Meta changes its terms, you’re in trouble.
- An official website makes your company more credible.
- A website massively lifts your search ranking – with one survey finding 98% of Americans used internet search to find information about local businesses.
- Websites are flexible, from simple placeholders to ecommerce platforms and content hubs.
A streamlined design with a clear CTA suits this consultancy’s homepage. Source: Grapismo via 99 Designs by Vista
Website builders can deliver on a budget
Any website needs a domain name, a web hosting account, a CMS and a designer or design template. Thankfully, modern website builders can typically offer all four services in one. Key operators include Wix, Squarespace, Shopify and WordPress. It’s worth considering:
- the monthly charge, and what it covers
- the templates on offer (Wix has over 500)
- what you need it for (Wix is a great all-rounder, Shopify makes setting up an online store easy, while WordPress is a the classic blog hoster)
- the assistance on offer from AI tools, chat support and registered (human!) designers
- how optimal your site will be for mobile (Lighthouse is a free tool to assess this and other metrics)
Website basics include a well designed homepage (you have around 10 seconds to impress the average visitor) plus About and Contact sections.
Your vision and values should be communicated clearly through visuals (colors and branding on your website should echo other channels) and clear, straightforward text that contains calls to action (CTAs) such as options to sign up for communications and links to view or purchase. Companies offering ecommerce will also need to focus on the shopping experience with detailed product information, metrics on topics such as conversion rates and a robust and a trustworthy payments and ordering set-up. Tools such as Google Analytics can measure your website’s success, helping you improve your customer journey.
A sleek classic car is the defining image for this automotive museum. Source: MediaSpace via 99 Designs by Vista
Digital marketing for business growth
Digital marketing isn’t rocket science, and many small businesses are increasingly confident that they’re getting their marketing mix right. If you’re looking to join them, these are among the most important tools for online growth:
Quality content can boost your brand
One of the cornerstones of any successful website is content. Blogs, images, videos, infographics, ebooks, podcasts and user-generated content (UGC) can:
- drive traffic to your website
- boost your search ranking
- build and develop your brand
- offer expertise and build customer confidence
So which tools are right for your business?
- Blogs are a great way to flex your knowledge of relevant topics and build your online presence
- UGC such as customer reviews can build trust for free
- Special reports and ebooks can be used as lead magnets to encourage sign-ups
- Images are crucial for showcasing products and make pages far more compelling
- Video is great for engagement, evoking emotions and educating users
You can prioritize these channels based on your audience and resources. If you’re a good writer or have sparkling visuals, lean into it! If your audience needs guidance through technical matters, blog or video guides may be the way to go. User reviews give ecommerce sites a massive boost, with 95% of users reading online reviews before a purchase. But remember: any content strategy should be sustainable. It’s worth considering whether you’ll have the patience or budget to blog or produce video frequently in six months or two years time.
SEO will make your business visible online
Your lovely new website and carefully planned content will be worthless unless people find it. That’s where search engine optimization (SEO) comes in. This is essentially how you make yourself attractive to the bots that crawl the internet, indexing content for Google and other search engines. Most corporations have dedicated SEO teams, but there’s still plenty small businesses can do on a budget.
- Do your research, via both the audience tips above and using tools such as Google Trends, Google Keyword Planner, Moz and Ubersuggest to suggest keywords.
- Use keywords across your digital content, including in metadata (such as alt-text captions), and especially in headers.
- Update your content frequently.
- Seek backlinks (links from other websites) by creating shareable content or seeking unlinked mentions of your business and asking for the link to be added.
SEO aims to boost your business on search engines. Source: MacTrunk via Depositphotos
There are different strategic approaches. You might decide whether to target short-tail keywords (popular), or long-tail keywords (more specific). So for a florist, ‘fresh flowers’ is a short-tail keyword that many people will search for, whereas ‘lilac rose and peony lux’ will appear in less searches—but you might appear higher up the rankings when people do search for it.
SEO is not an exact science. The algorithms that shape search are usually kept under wraps and change all time. The best approach is to focus on including keywords, but to also focus on quality: original, human-written content that answers real questions about your business offering and is written by an enthusiastic expert should perform consistently well, and can be adjusted to optimize the results.
Use email to connect with customers—and keep them
Email may not feel like the newest or shiniest of digital channels, but it’s a great way to reach a large number of people on a budget, offering measurable results and the ability to tailor your communication to different groups.
You’ll start by building an email list, from existing customers and sign-ups from promotions. Make it easy for users to sign up via a prominent form or link on your website, and offer discounts or other incentives for signing up.
Marketing emails are a simple but effective tool. Source: GaudiLab via Depositphotos
You may be able to manage basic mailouts yourself. Email marketing platforms facilitate more sophisticated campaigns, making it easier to include images and links, schedule different mailings and—perhaps most importantly—track the results. Metrics such as click-through rates and open rates are a great way to measure your success and improve your email marketing.
The best emails are short and to the point, with punchy subject lines and high-profile CTAs. That said, there’s no one model: options include newsletters, promotional emails, educational emails and drip emails (sent to customers who take an action, like leaving an unpurchased item in their shopping basket). As your company grows, segmenting your email lists becomes increasingly important, allowing you to target loyal customers, recent sign-ups or people with particular interests with different content.
How to grow your business online with social media
You probably use different social media networks for different things outside work, and your business should do the same. Facebook (the biggest globally), Instagram (great for visual content), TikTok (for a younger demographic) and X/Twitter (an important customer service tool) are likely to be first in your mind, but Pinterest, WhatsApp Business, YouTube, LinkedIn and Snapchat are also key.
According to Hootsuite, one of a number of platforms that can augment your social feeds, around one post a day is ideal for most channels. If you’re a busy small business owner on a budget, you’re unlikely to be able to post that often on many platforms. So prioritize, based on the nature of your business and where your audience hangs out—we told you that audience research was going to come in handy!
Bright and breezy posts can gain serious TikTok traction. Source: grinvalds via DepositPhotos
A few tips on how to grow your business online with social media:
- Be authentic and chatty: if you love your business, that will come through loud and clear.
- Use it to engage, not just post: replies and comments on others’ posts show you care about the topic and keep you in the conversation.
- Plan your posts: mapping out a calendar and scheduling in content can make your life much easier.
- Use hashtags—and be specific with them.
- Consider courting influencer relationships: micro-influencers (with followers in the thousands) are often seen as more trustworthy, and are definitely more affordable than celebrities.
- Consider ecommerce: most social channels allow integration with Shopify and the like.
- Don’t rule out ads: digital advertising can be more cost-effective than its print cousin, and can be tailored to specific groups on key channels
Use AI to automate tasks and produce drafts
AI is here to stay, and it impacts almost every topic we’ve covered. It can assist visitors to your website, schedule and write marketing emails and manage social media feeds and analysis.
AI doesn’t have to mean high-end robotics: instead, affordable tools can make your life easier. Source: Bianco Blue via Depositphotos
You might worry that AI can sound robotic, but this isn’t borne out by the evidence: in one recent study 58% of Americans preferred an online review response written by AI to its human equivalent. AI doesn’t have to be expensive, either—AI tools often come included in reasonably priced software packages you might already be considering. Graphic designers and writers can produce great work, but generative AI tools such as Chat GPT and Dall-E 2 can produce impressive writing and images. More specific prompts produce better results, and it’s always worth reading through text, as generative AI sometimes gets things wrong, but for idea generation and drafting it can be a massive help.
How to ace digital marketing on a budget
As we’ve seen, many digital marketing tools can be used by small businesses on a budget. Yet without a firm hand, spending can still spiral. To keep costs down:
- Come up with a clear plan based on information you can gather from sources such as existing customers, internet searches and social media feeds.
- Be specific about your aims, and make sure they are measurable, realistic and have a clear timeframe. If that means just focusing on Facebook, TikTok and email marketing, that’s fine.
- Make sure your brand’s unique selling point and tone are present in everything you do.
- Look for free services, and use the free tier of apps such as MailChimp.
- Encourage UGC via social media, competitions and freebies
- Consider a mix of digital and print marketing—the two can dovetail effectively on a budget.
- Circle back once your timeframe has elapsed and assess what channels have provided the best return on investment. Google Analytics can assess metrics across your website and other apps, and combine the results.
This webpage features social links and product pics. Source: Slaviana via 99 Designs by Vista
Use the digital tools that suit your business
In the last 20 years, digital marketing has grown from a niche concern to a position of dominance. But that doesn’t mean it’s too big for small businesses . From efficient, intuitive website builders to micro-influencers, blogs and mail-outs, digital marketing can transform your business fast.
You’ll get the most out of it by prioritizing certain areas—whether that’s building a content hub or pumping out bright and buzzy social posts—and measuring the results. That means knowing your audience and understanding the role different channels can play. With this guidance under your belt, you’re part way there. Time to start planning!
Getting ecommerce, SEO, a website and shipping rolling can all feel like a serious challenge. Take it step by step, and use expert advice: other small businesses have got there, and so can you.
