Have you felt your small business is stuck and wondered what you could do differently to boost your brand visibility, increase sales and make your business profitable long-term?
If you answered yes, you’re not alone. Many entrepreneurs end up in their small business’s daily operations and fail to employ the right marketing strategies to fuel growth.
Unfortunately, without the right marketing strategies, it’s almost impossible for any business to stay afloat, let alone make profits.
Here are six low-cost digital marketing strategies to grow your small business and take it to the next level.
1. Create a Google My Business Account for Free
Creating and setting up a Google My Business (GMB) account for your small business is one of the most powerful and influential steps you can take. Having a GMB set up correctly is a must-have in any digital marketing strategy, especially as it’s a free service and will help your business to target local customers.
Creating a Google My Business account allows your business to appear on Google Maps and local search results whenever potential customers in your local area search for a product/service you provide.
Having your business appear among the top GMB listings consistently will significantly increase your brand visibility, exposure, and credibility. This consistency, in turn, will enable you to generate a steady stream of qualified leads daily without spending additional money on advertisements.
So, ensure your Google Business Profile is properly optimized for search to rank higher on GMB listings.
2. Get a Website for Your Business
Having a website for your small business is an absolute must-have for all the low-cost digital marketing strategies listed. Nowadays, consumers use Google, Bing, and other popular search engines to search for virtually everything online.
A website gives your business an online presence, making it easier for your ideal customers to find and engage with you while having the opportunity to research and compare your services and products in advance.
Here are a few things you should do on your website to increase your ROI:
- Ensure your website is well-designed from an aesthetic perspective and, most importantly, a user experience perspective.
- Ensure your website loads quickly (in 3 seconds or less) to reduce your bounce rate and provide a better experience.
- Make sure the mobile experience is optimized, as smartphones are commonplace.
- Educate your website visitors on your products, services, and policies.
- Make navigation easy so visitors can find whatever they’re looking for quickly.
- Make it easy for people to get in touch with your business by displaying your contact information prominently on your site.
- Use your site’s CTAs (calls-to-action) and contact forms to generate leads.
- Take the time to gather feedback from visitors and customers to iterate and improve the experience.
3. Optimize Your Website and Content for Search Engines
Once you’ve created your business website, you need to ensure that it shows up among the top organic search results when potential customers perform web searches related to your product, service, or industry.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is not something you can easily avoid in digital marketing. SEO involves incorporating keywords relevant to your products and service in strategic places within your content and web pages to make it easier for Google to identify, index, and rank your site.
If you run a local business, you’ll need to perform local SEO to rank higher in local search results to compete against your competitors.
One way to boost your local SEO is by listing your business on online directories and ensuring that the information you provide is the same across all platforms. Also, consider creating content that is location specific and includes location-based keywords in your titles, headings, hyperlinks, images, and content.
Optimizing your website and content for search engines will take time, effort, and some expertise, but the long-term benefits your business will enjoy will all be worth it in the end.
4. Leverage the Power of Social Media
Modern consumers increasingly use social media to search for, connect with, and engage their favorite brands on various issues. This behavior means that if your target audience can’t find your small business on their preferred platforms, you will lose them to your competitors for good.
Your business needs to have a solid social media presence. When used correctly, social media can help you engage with your fans and followers directly, drive traffic back to your website, build stronger relationships and ultimately win their trust in your brand, products, and services.
One of the things you can do to increase your social media engagement is to consistently post helpful content, industry-specific resources, company updates, and news to your fans and followers. It also pays to engage them in a polite tone and respond to the questions they ask quickly and accurately.
5. Consistently Publish Well-Crafted and High-Quality Content
Another highly effective marketing tactic that doesn’t need a big budget to get started is content marketing.
You will need to research, plan, create and post different types of content on your website, social media pages, and other places where you can find your audience.
Once you’ve developed valuable resources, you’ll be able to control part of the flow of your audience and direct them where you want them to be.
Content marketing is one of the most potent ways to help you to increase your brand awareness, online visibility, and website traffic. Some examples of the content you can create include articles, blogs, infographics, podcasts, videos, social media posts, etc.
Google prioritizes high-quality content that provides the best answers, backed by expertise, to the queries online users are asking. So, ensure that the content you produce is not only of high quality but also relevant, well-researched, original, and optimized for readers and search engines.
You can get the most out of your content creation efforts by repurposing your published content. This process means taking your old content, updating outdated information, and turning it into something new and fresh.
For instance, if you have a series of informative blog posts that performed well but are now long forgotten, you can update them and turn them into an e-book or a series of video tutorials that your current audience will find useful.
6. Don’t Forget About Email Marketing
The last low-cost digital marketing strategy you can use to promote your small business is email marketing.
Just about every person has an email address that they check regularly. Therefore, email marketing is a great way to communicate with your target consumers directly and periodically and keep your brand name on top of their minds.
Email marketing is effective for small businesses because the people you’re emailing are already familiar with your business, products, and services. They willingly opted to give you their email addresses to receive more of your great content.
Because of this, you need to ensure that every piece of content you send them is high-quality, relevant, engaging, and provides real value. Also, avoid sending emails too frequently, as this can overwhelm your subscribers, forcing them to either delete or mark your emails as spam, which can have lasting adverse effects.
It’s important to use email marketing platforms so that you can manage, track, and report your email campaigns.
Final Thoughts on Low-Cost Digital Marketing Strategies
Marketing your small business effectively to potential customers can be very challenging if you work with a small marketing budget. But the good news is that you can use many low-cost digital marketing strategies to promote your business without spending any (or much) money.
These include creating a Google My Business account and optimizing it for search engines, having a business website, publishing high-quality content regularly, and email marketing, among others.
Try them out for a period of time to find out which strategies will work best for your business and bring you the highest returns on your marketing investment.
