The Right Mix of Digital Marketing Channels for Startups and Small Businesses
Digital Marketing is pretty comprehensive. It can be overwhelming for startups and small businesses to find the right channels to start with. This article is going to explain the right and ideal mix of channels you should be starting with.
Big businesses start small. - Richard Branson.
Know this well, but don’t compare your business with the giants in your industry. Don’t even be overwhelmed or demotivated looking at their growth stories. Rather, focus on your craft and do better than your best.
What you see as success today is the result of consistent smart efforts put into the right place for a period longer than most would expect.
Success needs strategic efforts put into the right direction with an unflinching persistence.
This statement was true yesterday, is all rock-solid today, and would remain true tomorrow. But the kind of efforts that you need to put in changes with time. As we move ahead with technological advancements, there comes a behavioural shift in the way we do things.
It impacts marketing as well.
Here are some of the proven strategies by Digital Marketing Strategist Ratan Jha on how to accelerate your business growth starting today:
Understand your business and the audience
Do you know your business well?
Isn’t that a dumb question? I know my business that’s why I do it, don’t I?
I don’t sell pizzas because I don’t know how to make one. I don’t know that business. I bake cookies and I know how to bake the best tasting ones.
Wait, you just answered my question!
And, the answer is – you don’t know your business well.
Knowing how to bake the perfect cookies is only half the business.
Making a product or offering a service that creates value is not the complete business. It can make you a good baker, but not a good businessman or woman.
Undoubtedly, you create value baking cookies that taste delicious. But do you know how to take that value to the end consumers who would value it?
In simple terms, do you know how to sell your cookies like hotcakes? Do you know how to bring customers to your store?
If the answer does not come with the same confidence as when you talked about your cookies, you don’t know your business well.
The sooner you make it out, the faster you would grow.
Even if it is yes, I will suggest you dive deep into your business and know it really well.
Knowing your business can be segmented into the following categories:
- Understanding your niche
- Identifying who your potential customers are
- Demography, interests, specific behaviours of your potential customers
- Track their activities and behaviours when they interact with your brand
- Analyzing the collected data regularly and aligning them with your marketing goals.
Don’t just say you know it all.
Hold on!
Don’t let your prejudice ignore what I just said. I have been there, so I definitely know it well.
Take a pen a piece of paper, write down everything you know about the categories of understanding I talked about. Once done, read it out loud. You will see what clarity you get for your business now.
Congrats, you just built a strong foundation for your business which will drive your marketing efforts forward more rapidly.
Google My Business
Whether you are a small business offering local services or a business not limited by a physical boundary, as long as you have a physical address, you should list your business with Google My Business (GMB).
GMB is not just a tool to list your business, it’s an opportunity to reach an extended number of people every day, and that too without a cost.
There are two reasons for me saying that:
First - Google’s search results are impacted by the physical location you are searching something from. Yes, Google knows your location (how? it’s a different story. May talk about it in a specific post later).
Second - There’s a consistent increase in Google’s search queries suffixed with – near me. If your business is listed with GMB, your business gets more visibility in searches if people from your physical location or with interests in your physical location search for what you offer.
Once you are on GMB, make regular updates with offers, events, blog posts, or anything new about your business. A GMB listing that does not have any updates, is a dead listing. If you make regular updates, it does impact your listing’s visibility over a period.
Next, ask your customers for reviews.
Don’t be afraid of the poor reviews from any unhappy customer. That’s the part of the game. Make sure to respond to every review that you get. If you happen to miss replying to a positive review, it’s fine, but make a point not to miss addressing the concerns of unhappy customers.
A few poorly rated reviews are okay. It makes you more genuine. When you respond to them, your new potential customers visiting your GMB page will only be impressed that you care for the experience and have the courage to face it and do the corrective measures if it was not as expected.
Trust me, it makes a huge difference.
Not responding is like trying to neglect, and that’s a bad sign.
Content marketing
Marketers usually put this after paid advertising or social media marketing, but I believe content marketing works great in the long term if started from an early stage.
There are reasons for it...
- It makes your brand sound less promotional to the potential customers
- It gives you valid and relevant reasons to talk about on social, email and other channels
- It helps you build organic traffic and a pool of loyal subscribers in the long run
- It helps you pull potential customers towards your brand which you can nurture over a period to pull them further towards the bottom of the funnel. Remember, pulling works better in marketing than pushing.
Now, when I say content marketing, it does not mean text contents only. You can connect with your existing and potential customers through contents in multiple formats- blog posts, images, infographics, video, ebooks, podcasts etc.. The more, the merrier.
The most important thing about promoting your brand via content marketing is not promoting it.
Yes, none of your contents should sound promotional.
To make it easier for you to understand, shift your focus from I and We to You and Them. It has to be about your audience, not you.
Create genuine value for your audience and they will value your brand. Make a list of things what your audience should be looking for.
They can have questions they need answers to. Answer them without promoting your brand. They can have pain points they want to relieve, go address them with your contents.
Identify the problems that you can eliminate and draw attention to your brand by actually helping them with tips and suggestions.
For example, an e-commerce site selling skin products could write blogs on common skin problems and draw the attention of potential customers to their brand.
The right approach is to avoid being promotional in the main content but add a call-to-action block at the end of it about your brand, related products or services.
Social media marketing
Social Media is colourful. It’s one platform that hosts different types of contents viz. images, videos, animations, gifs etc..
This very fact gives rise to the myth that Social Media Marketing works for glamorous industries only. For me, it’s not true.
Suppose, you are into the plumbing business. Is social media right for your brand?
Yes, it is.
What do you think? Somebody on Instagram might not need a plumber’s service? Don’t they have taps in their houses? They do.
Remember, they are the same people searching about things on Google, watching videos on YouTube, connecting with professional groups on LinkedIn and engaging on Instagram. What’s different is the mindset.
When you are on LinkedIn, you have a different state of mind. Your expectation about the types of contents you would like to consume can be different, but as an individual you are the same. The same person who is engaging with the recent photoshoots of his favourite celebrity.
So yes, the same messaging won’t work on both the platforms. You have to fit into the mindset and when you succeed at doing that, it will work.
One more thing, there are many social media platforms today, as a brand looking to start with Social Media Marketing, do not try to be everywhere. If you have the budget or team limitations, you will end up being nowhere. Take two platforms for the first year and then extend your reach to others.
Paid Advertising Campaigns
Investing in paid advertising campaigns can be a challenge for small businesses to start with. But it becomes necessary today.
Your organic, content and social media marketing efforts are going to take some time in building the traction. You can’t be sitting and waiting for other channels to work. You would need some immediate sales or leads to sustain and keep your morals up.
Paid advertising campaigns will help you exactly with that.
Key paid advertising channels you should be on:
- Google Ads
- Facebook Ads (Combines Instagram as well)
- Linkedin Ads
- Bing Ads
Google Ads is a robust and comprehensive platform. It will allow you to reach your target audience group very precisely. However, with its comprehensiveness of the system and the extensive set of targeting options and features comes complexity as well.
If you do not know it well, it’s better to find an agency or an expert to do it for you. If used in the right way, it can drive immediate sales and leads for the business.
Facebook & Instagram ads are not specifically for cosmetics, clothing, or anything that relates to glamour. As already said, you need a different strategy and messaging to make the most of these two platforms.
Why did I include Bing Ads?
Well, Bing does seem small given the search engine market share of Google, yet it has the got the potential to bring conversions. The number of users is small, but the conversion rate is better. And best of all, it does not cost very much to have your ads on Bing search for the entire day.
One more thing, advertising with Bing, extends your reach to Yahoo and AOL as well. So, practically, advertising with Bing is a wise choice as it helps you address three additional touchpoints on the path to conversions.
E-mail marketing
Email outperforms any online marketing channel in terms of engagement, conversions, and ROI. One of the primary reasons is that it allows you the highest level of personalization.
But there’s a myth associated with email marketing that needs to be busted. The myth is that – it works only when you have a big list of subscribers.
No, it’s not right.
The size of your mailing list does have an impact on your overall numbers, the total revenue that you generate, but the conversion rate is not impacted by the size.
Even when your email list size is small, have emailers in place. Make segments based on users’ actions and behaviours and send emails accordingly.
You can automate some trigger-based emails.
For instance, if you are eCommerce business, sending automated emails to people who have products in the cart, but they did not complete the checkout, will improve your conversion rate.
Sending a welcome email on registrations or free trials is always appreciated. Asking feedback of the free-trials, requesting replenishments for products that last a certain period, sending how-to-use videos etc. are good examples of a better email marketing.
Here are some of the key things that impact the performance of your emails:
The quality of list - Do not buy the emails from spam businesses selling data. That’s not your list. The people on the list are not aware of your brand. Sending emails to people who have not deliberately subscribed is an example of push marketing. You should rather work on pulling people, not pushing them.
The content of your emails - What do you send in the email is one of the most significant factors deciding the success of your email marketing efforts.
The frequency of your email - Do not annoy your subscribers, rather try being helpful. Obey the frequency they have chosen to receive updates from you.
Free Consultation
To stand out from the crowd and to establish authority, free consultation works wonders. It is something that gives benefits real fast.
Now don’t think that it can be helpful only to service businesses only. The majority of the businesses today can use the free consultation to help and connect with potential as well as existing customers.
A skincare brand can offer free consultation choosing the right product or home remedy tips for the specific skin type, a website design company can answer questions related to common issues and maintenance of the website, and so on.
If you are service business, I am not saying that offer everything free that you charge people for. You have to spend some time defining the limit what you can do free and what you cannot. In this process, you have to pull the reign at the right time to ride the situation in the right direction.
Take any industry, if there are questions, pain points, concerns, fears, etc., a consultation can be possible. A brand that utilizes it properly and creates actual value free of cost for the users, is sure to grow faster.
Conclusion
I don’t actually know what business you are in but if you analyze the possibility of any strategy mentioned above with your brand, you will find the relevance.
I emphasize it again, spend some time identifying and defining the relevant target audience for your business before getting to start marketing it. A small business is usually constrained by budgetary limits, so cost-effectiveness always plays in mind, for that reason, I would advise avoiding investing in random channels or platforms. Understand the potential before getting to embrace it.
All the best!
If you have any question or feedback, I am curiously all ears and you are more than welcome.