Digital Marketing Strategy

Looking for a Marketing Digital Strategy for your Small Business?

If you are a small business owner and serious about growing your business, then you should be serious about getting a digital marketing strategy. Ask anyone where they go when they need something, and 9 times out of 10 they will say the internet. We all carry around mini-computers in our pockets, and it’s second nature to pull it out and do a Google search when we need something.

Looking for a restaurant, pull out the phone. Need a new hot water system, do some research on the home computer. Want to know the opening hours of a business, ask the smart speaker. So if you don’t have your business on the internet and optimised for digital marketing, you’ll never successfully grow your business.

What is a Digital Marketing Strategy?

A digital marketing strategy is simply developing a plan to get leads and sales and/or build a presence on the internet and other forms of digital communication. It’s deciding what your business objectives are, who your target market is, and which digital marketing channels you will use to reach this market and achieve your goals.

Developing Digital Marketing Strategies

When developing your digital marketing strategies, there are several elements you need to consider:

• What are your business objectives or digital marketing goals?
• Who is your target audience or ideal customer?
• What is your budget?
• Do you have the skills and resources to do this yourself?
• Who are your main competitors?
• Which digital marketing channels will you use?

Let’s go through these in more detail.

Digital Marketing Strategy: Goals

The first step in building a digital marketing strategy is often overlooked. Over the years we’ve had lots of clients come to us unhappy with their previous digital marketing agency and not really knowing what they were achieving. Often these agencies sent them reports showing where specific keywords ranked, how much traffic their website was getting and how many likes and shares they were getting on social media. The problem was, their phone wasn’t ringing, and they weren’t getting leads and sales.

At Probity Web Marketing, we specialise in digital marketing for small business. Small business is very different to big business in how much they have to spend on digital marketing and therefore, how important their brand awareness is. A large business not only wants to generate leads and sales from digital marketing, but they also want to build their brand awareness to assist all the other marketing strategies/channels they may be running (eg. Radio, TV, Billboards etc). Small businesses don’t have that sort of budget and in most cases are only running a digital marketing strategy and maybe a local paper campaign etc. So whilst it would be nice to spend money building brand awareness, they don’t have that luxury, so need to focus on sales and leads.

If the main goal for your digital marketing strategy is to grow sales and leads, then you need to track them. You can’t improve something if you don’t know when it’s improving.

Digital Marketing Strategy: Target Audience

When developing a digital marketing strategy, it’s important to understand who your target market is. There is no point developing a strategy for a digital marketing channel if it doesn’t reach your target audience. For example, you may be advertising on LinkedIn when your target audience uses Facebook; or maybe you’re trying to rank for a keyword search that not many people use or use differently to what you think.

When developing a digital marketing strategy for your small business, we always start with thorough keyword research to give us a good understanding of what people are looking for. This then guides us on how to structure your website, which digital marketing channels will work best and how best to frame your sales message.

Digital Marketing Strategy: Budget

If money was not an issue, you would run multiple digital marketing campaigns as well as some traditional marketing campaigns. Unfortunately, with small business, this is not generally the case. So it is important that you work out what your budget is and then target the digital marketing channels that will give you the best results or return on your investment. You can always expand your budget and campaigns as your business grows.

Digital Marketing Strategy: Skills and Resources

Most big businesses have their own marketing departments, which include a team of digital marketers. However, the majority of small businesses don’t have this luxury and marketing is often handled by the business owner. Why would you try and manage your digital marketing strategy when your skills and experience are elsewhere? Why wouldn’t you use a digital marketing agency, leaving you free to focus on providing the products or services and/or building your business operations? The only issue is finding a digital marketing company, like Probity Web Marketing, you can rely on.

Digital Marketing Strategy: Competitors

Whilst it’s important that you focus on what you are doing as a business, it is always good to keep an eye on competitors to see what they are doing and if there is anything you can use to improve your business. From a digital marketing perspective, we often look at competitor websites to see what keywords they may be targeting or how they structure their sales message.

Digital Marketing Strategy: Digital Marketing Channels

The last part of developing a digital marketing strategy is deciding what channels to use and how best to use them. The main channels to choose from are:

• Website Design
• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
• Social Media Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Marketing Automation

How important is a website for an effective digital marketing strategy?

At Probity Web Marketing, we believe that a professional and functional website should be the starting point of any digital marketing strategy. Sure their are other digital assets that you can use to convert prospects to customers, such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Online Directories, Display Ads etc, but these all have something in common; you don't have complete control over them. You own your website, which means you have complete control over how it looks and works. There have been many examples over the years where other digital assets have changed the way they work to the detriment of the business. Some have even closed down.

So before you get too far into developing your digital marketing strategy, make sure you've got a professional and functional website design that you have control over.

Digital Marketing Strategy Examples

Whilst there are many different digital marketing strategy ideas out there and every agency may have different thoughts on which one is best, at Probity Web Marketing we believe that the best strategy for most small businesses is SEO. In a nutshell, this is where you work out what people are searching for and build your website content to target and rank well for it. The reason we believe SEO is a must have, is when done correctly is conversion focussed and continues to grow over time. Whereas many other strategy examples are about maintaining your conversions (unless you want to increase your budget), SEO will grow your website traffic, and more importantly, sales and leads, year on year.

Want to grow your small business?

Don't waste any more time overthinking it and sign up on one of our proven digital marketing plans today. We aim for long-term client relationships and are 100% committed to growing your leads and sales. You'll wish you started with us sooner.