The Most Effective Digitial Marketing Techniques for Small Businesses

Digital marketing is excellent for small businesses because they can achieve significant results with a relatively modest financial investment. While some digital marketing techniques, such as content creation, can be time-consuming, the typical ROI makes it all worthwhile.

Сontent marketing costs almost two-thirds less than traditional marketing, but at the same time it produces nearly three times as many leads. This is why the most successful B2B firms spend nearly 40% of their marketing budgets on content marketing.

If you need help running a cohesive digital marketing strategy, you’ll find the professionals you need via Leadar. Before you contact them, however, take a look at these digital marketing techniques to prioritize.

Measure ROI

Whatever marketing technique you use, remember to measure your success. HubSpot found that measuring ROI made content marketers 12 times more likely to achieve an increased return year over year.

ROI helps businesses make sound financial decisions. This is especially useful in a small business, where resources and cash flow can be restricted. Doing some research to prioritize the best investments makes a lot of sense.

Small businesses will find measuring the following metrics useful:

• Traffic and views
• Channels
• Engagement
• Social engagement
• Conversions

And note that the simple formula for measuring ROI is:

(sales growth – the cost of marketing) / the cost of marketing.

Marketers tend to value an ROI of 5:1, with $5 earned for every $1 spent on marketing. A small business should aim for at least 3:1.

Make Shorts

Video was the most popular content strategy in 2021, with 88% of respondents to a HubSpot survey reporting that videos provided them with positive ROI. In 2022, B2B marketers saw an 87% increase in web traffic and an 80% increase in sales thanks to video content.

HubSpot reminds us that the first video published on YouTube was 18 seconds long. So while short-form content isn’t new, it’s having a resurgence. YouTube Shorts and other ways of publishing short-form video content, such as Reels and TikTok, can be excellent for a small business.

Small businesses can dispense with high-production values and oscar-winning scripts and performances. Short-form videos filmed on smartphones can engage current and potential customers with bite-sized news segments or information that simplify something complex in under 30 seconds. Marketers can also repurpose long-form content by re-cutting it for the short-form format.

Take Advantage of Content Marketing

Content marketing is a key marketing technique that tends to provide excellent ROI for small businesses. Here are some powerful content marketing techniques that can help small businesses generate leads and engage their existing audiences.

Pillar Posts

The strategy of using “pillar posts” involves creating several items of long-form, in-depth content that aligns with your business. They should cover the primary things visitors expect to read and are typically full of the primary keywords for the brand or industry.

Marketers can then link multiple shorter cluster articles to the pillar posts to increase their visibility.

Backlinks

Backlinking is an often-neglected digital marketing strategy, but it’s effective at increasing the pull of pull marketing.

A backlink is a link from an external website. A link from a high-authority external site can boost a small business’s Google ratings. On the other hand, beware that low-quality backlinks, such as links from disreputable websites, can damage a small business’s ratings.

Ahrefs and Semrush are examples of backlink checker tools that small business marketers can use to tidy up unwanted backlinks and focus on getting more high-quality backlinks with activities such as linking to and requesting links from websites in complementary fields and offering high-quality guest posts.

Signature Content

Creating signature content is an excellent way for a small business to make a big impression. By spending some time and money on a superior quality infographic, for example, a small business can create immensely shareable content that travels all over the internet and makes it a perceived authority on the topic.

Blog Title Optimization

However much time marketers spend creating blog posts, they should not feel that spending the same amount of time again on the blog title is wasted.

The blog title is a gateway to the rest of the content. Fewer people will click on it and read the article if the title is unappealing. Optimizing your blog titles with tools like Semrush can boost click-through rates dramatically.

Create Email Lists

Email marketing remains an excellent way for businesses to interact with their fans, customers, and leads. With automation, a small business can invest in creating one or more email campaigns that drip-feed content to users over time, introducing them to the company and its services and moving them along the sales funnel.

Segment an Audience

With this powerful digital marketing technique, small businesses can use customer personas to identify different customer types and create marketing content designed for each.

By segmenting audiences for email lists and marketing campaigns, businesses can produce more targeted emails and campaigns, leading to more engagement.

Use Social Media

Customers expect brands to have some kind of presence online, but that doesn’t mean that small businesses have to stretch to be everywhere at once.

A small business would be wise to focus on the primary social platforms that its ideal customers use. Creating quality content there, rather than using a scattergun approach across all popular social media platforms, should yield better engagement.

Social media is excellent for the following reasons:

• Developing a conversation
• Responding to customer queries
• Learning about your customers
• A/B testing marketing materials
• Bringing potential customers back to a business’s website

To use social media effectively, remember that each platform has its own primary demographics and way of doing things. Regularly copying and pasting the same post into Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook demonstrates a misunderstanding of the differences between social media platforms or a perceived laziness that might reflect poorly on your business.

By all means, post the same topic to multiple social media platforms – repurposing content is an effective marketing technique – but repackage the content for each platform to show you understand your customers.

Conclusion

Small businesses tend to be able to react quickly to market changes, which gives them an advantage over large organizations with multiple departments and miles of red tape. Use whatever flavor of marketing techniques suits your business style, and don’t hesitate to seek a professional content marketing manager to help develop and coordinate your strategy.