How to get started in digital marketing as a new business owner
If you're a brand new business owner or entrepreneur turning to web marketing for small businesses for the first time, getting started might feel like an intimidating leap. That’s understandable since it’s an industry that is always changing.
It’s also a large, competitive sector that generates a lot of media conversation, both negative and positive. Any reasonable person would hold some trepidation over wading into these fierce waters. That’s why we’ve built this full-stack guide to help you get started on the crucial small business owner’s journey into the world of digital marketing. We’re taking a closer look at all the details business owners and entrepreneurs need to know about digital marketing as well as offering up tools you can use to put your newly built strategy into action.
First, let’s nail down some basics:
What Is Marketing?
Before you call us Captain Obvious, take a closer look: the actual definition of marketing in a digital context might not be as clear as it appears. It’s easy to conflate “marketing” and “advertising” when in fact, they’re not interchangeable terms. The difference? Advertising is just one element of a thorough marketing strategy. Comprehensive marketing strategies include media and PR engagement opportunities, product planning and advertising, sales, customer support, target audience research and community engagement.
Many of these elements may be translated into online strategy. We'll go through that in further detail below.
The Building Blocks of a Small Business Digital Marketing Strategy:
When building a small business digital marketing strategy from scratch, there are many things to consider. This roadmap we’ve outlined will help anyone getting started know where to begin and discover the most efficient way to build a marketing strategy.
Don't just aimlessly try things out without any tracking or measurement—the only way to see whether your plan is working is to follow up on your results and make changes as necessary.
So, once you've gone through this tutorial and decided what you want to accomplish, create a game plan for your organization to follow, and get going!
1. Clarify Your Goals
A digital marketing strategy needs clear, focused goals and defined outcomes in order to be successful. To succeed, you need highly focused goals. Creating a list of clear business goals and how your marketing outreach is intended to support them will put you ahead of the competition from the very start.
Your goals should include notes on both your desired outcomes and WHY those outcomes are critical to the success of your business.
What are some common business goals you could consider addressing with your digital marketing strategy?
Brand Awareness: having a brand awareness goal means you want to market and advertise your business just so people have an understanding of what it is. If someone asks you “Have you ever heard of Coca-Cola? Pepsi? Nike?” and you say “Yes, of course! What, do I live under a rock?” that's an example of strong brand awareness. Whether or not you are a regular customer, you sure do know what those brands are. Of course, people have to know that you exist and understand what you offer before making a purchase or becoming a user, so brand awareness can be an important goal.
Sales: a sales goal drives initiatives that directly convert to purchases or adoption of your services. This is obviously the goal at the heart of most other goals, but different levels of directness may be more or less effective, depending on your circumstances.
Expansion: if you’re looking to grow your customer base, and reach large new audiences, you’re probably looking for an expansion goal.
Customer Retention: at the opposite end of the spectrum from expansion is retention, which is a goal about keeping your current customers engaged, happy, and on board.
Of course, you may have other business goals in mind, but these are often a good place to start!
2. Define Your Target Audience
Your audience, AKA your customers, users, or clients, are another essential building block of your business and marketing strategy. Before you can create effective marketing outreach, you need to know WHO exactly you are targeting with that advertising.
You’re likely to discover that customers have many individual characteristics and desires, and that there’s no benefit to you in trying to reach a broad audience. The market is crowded, so targeting a highly specific customer profile is essential to the success of your operation.
Start by getting to know your existing users/customers.
Before you launch your marketing game plan, you should speak with your current consumers. Understanding what your clients want is an important aspect of excellent marketing, which may be difficult to determine.
How did they become aware of your business? What was the conversion pathway they followed from discovering you to becoming a user/customer? What do these consumers primarily care about or value in your business? You should also note demographics (gender, location, profession, age, etc.)
Take a few moments to jot down the broad characteristics of your ideal user. Who are they? What are they interested in? What do most of your current users have in common? This becomes your target customer profile, and will be the backbone of your targeted digital marketing outreach.
Types Of Digital Marketing For Small Businesses
Now, let’s dive into HOW you accomplish your digital marketing business goals: each of the marketing channels we’re going to explore has different benefits and requires a unique skill set and setup.
Understanding what all of these marketing pathways are and how they work will help you decide which ones are the best places for you to focus your marketing strategy as you kick things off.
Defining “Distribution” vs. “Destination”
Distribution is marketing that reaches out to consumers: this includes things like email newsletters, paid search results, social media ads, and influencer marketing.
Destination marketing drives user traffic towards a central landing page like a blog or a website, whether that’s on a mobile smartphone device or a laptop browser.
A good marketing strategy includes both of these approaches.
Media Types: The Differences in Owned, Paid, and Earned Media
Traditionally, digital marketing is categorized in three broad verticals: owned media, paid media, and earned media. What is meant by each of these and how are they useful to a business owner just getting started?
Owned media is clearly defined as your specific channels that you own: most likely your website, and maybe your social pages. Owned media ties into destination marketing because these are the best destinations to drive your customers into.
Paid media is what most people think of as traditional advertising. You buy a placement ad for your product on a social media app or landing page. The most common services for paid media today are Facebook (Meta) and Google Ads. Using their services you can spend a small, medium, or large amount to reach wide populations targeted specifically to be good users for your business.
Earned media is when other people feature your content without you paying them, like if your company is featured in a news article or if a user tags you in a social media post.
Pathways: What Does Digital Marketing Look Like in 2022?
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is the use of platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, Snapchat, and many others to promote your business, carry out content marketing techniques, create campaigns that target specific users, and engage with a community that cares about your brand. It’s what many business owners choose to start with, because making accounts on social platforms is easy and free, and it’s an essential part of a modern marketing strategy.
There are countless methods to leverage social media marketing for your company, from hashtag campaigns to sharing offers with your followers. However, it’s a lot more complex than just making some posts and “going viral.”
The most effective social media marketing techniques encourage clients to follow your company, building brand recognition and patronage.
Giveaways
Digital media is a fantastic platform for running contests and posting special offers for clients. This particular form of content marketing frequently succeeds in turning followers into paying consumers.
Influencer Marketing
Finding an influencer to collaborate with your brand on promotional posts can be a great strategy to increase your brand awareness and encourage purchases. Choose content creators that have sizable internet followings to market your company, but make sure they are authentically aligned with your brand and actually like and use your product. This ensures that a sponsored media strategy feels a lot more natural, which makes it easier for consumers to connect, and more likely that they’ll become customers.
Email Marketing
Email marketing involves sending out email messages to large groups of people–these may be customers whose email you have already, people who sign up for your website to get a discount, or digital leads found through some kind of funnel.Ultimately, all your email communications with customers or potential customers fall into the email marketing category.
Email marketing can be a great way to drive traffic to other places, like your blog, website, podcast, YouTube, or other social media accounts. It’s also one of the best ways to generate sales and engage customers to retain them. Most people use some sort of email client like MailChimp, Hubspot, Customer.io or others to manage the mass sending of emails.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The process of using specific keywords throughout written content to hopefully affect a page's appearance within search results such as Google or Bing (AKA bringing it to the top of the organic results) is called search engine optimization, or SEO.
If you create content about your industry, product, or service without optimizing it for search engines, you will miss out on high-quality traffic.
Search engine optimization may be accomplished in two ways: by understanding the questions that customers are asking and by using those terms, or keywords, in your content. Researching keywords may be done using the tools described above.
But SEO includes more than just keywords. It needs both science and imagination to get your content to appear in the search engines.
Paid Digital Advertising
Another common technique is just paying for online ad space. This is similar in digital marketing to buying a commercial slot or a billboard. Mostly, this is done through programs like Google Ads or Facebook Ads because they have a lot of customer data to help your ads reach the right people.
Typically, you can decide what you’re willing to spend per day or per campaign, and target a “cost per click” meaning the amount you spend on ads to get someone to click through to your site.
Content Marketing
By producing and disseminating pertinent blog posts, articles, YouTube videos, podcasts, links, and other media, content marketing is a tactic used to draw in, hold onto, and grow an audience. When it's time to buy what you sell, people will think of your company first thanks to this strategy's promotion of brand recognition and establishment of competence.
Referral Incentives
Customers that recommend your company to their friends, family, or followers can get rewards if you offer a referral program to bring in new customers. You may decide to set up a system that generates special referral codes for your clients so you can monitor their progress, or you can utilize one of the many B2B services available to you for a tailored answer.
Choose a Few & Measure Success
As a small business, you likely won’t have the power of a 25-person marketing team to go after ALL of these strategies the way a major company does. So, you should start by choosing a few that are the most relevant to your business and set up some initiatives. Track their success, identify what works, and iterate from there. Try new pathways if the old ones aren’t working or if you have the bandwidth to expand.
Now that you have this clear outline for starting a digital marketing plan in your small business, take the leap and watch your success grow!
