For many small business owners, cautious decisions have to be made on how best to spend your marketing budget. In the world today, it has become increasingly important to stay ahead of the game and this can prove to very difficult on a digital landscape. Each day more and more new brands are entering the market and potential customers can only be reached via social media and the internet. So if you don’t come from a digital marketing background, it can quickly become overwhelming to move forward.
It is always a good idea to hire an SEO company in Melbourne or an SEO company in Sydney, but if your budget doesn’t allow it, you can to figure out other ways to do it. It is true that digital marketing can be extremely time consuming and expensive, but there are also cost effective digital marketing options that you can attempt to use on your own. When done correctly, this can even become more lucrative than traditional marketing options.
When you embark on developing your digital marketing strategy, it is important to first build a website that is not only fresh and appealing, but it also needs to be a site that is easy to update and measure. Without a website, your potential customers will not be able to find you and engage with your business. So it is crucial to build a great website that is optimised to achieve your targets.
For small business owners, WordPress is a great option to start off with. It will not bleed your budget as it is an open source web building tool and it is a powerful content management system. WordPress will allow you to customise your website any way you like with thousands of widgets, plug-ins, and themes to create the best website to successfully engage your audience. Further, you can use free tools like Google Analytics to measure your website’s traffic and learn where your users come from and where they are headed. By using this information to develop a profile for your audience, you will be able to figure out how to provide a great user experience.
Once your website is up and running, you have to work on making sure that your company listings are correct and easy to understand. To make sure that your business is listed accurately across websites, directories, and apps, you can upload your data to Moz Local to create consistently accurate listings across various platforms.
Once you have that out of the way, small business owners will need to focus on social media platforms to interact with their audience. As consumers increasingly use social media to engage with brands that they are interested in, it is necessary to have the right tools to observe conversations across multiple social media platforms. To do this easily, you need to sign up for a social media management system like Hootsuit. Whether you have Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other social media accounts, Hootsuit will allow you to manage the accounts while reducing your response time. Further, Hootsuit will also allow you to view weekly reports to help you ascertain what is working well and what’s not when it comes to social media.
Finally, your digital marketing strategy should include email marketing because it works. As email software that’s normally used isn’t built for email marketing campaigns, it is best not to risk your budget and end up in the spam folder. Email marketing services like Mail Chimp will help you easily design newsletters and share them with your customers. Further, Mail Chimp will allow you to track individual activity and figure out the rate of success for each email marketing campaign. You can also see if your customers are actually reading it. Mail Chimp will also guide you every step of the way so that you can be confident with your email marketing.
So you don’t have to give on digital marketing if you’re a small business on a shoestring budget. Although hiring an SEO company in Melbourne would make things a lot easier, there are still options to try out. Like anything else it will be a learning experience and for whatever that you don’t understand, there will be a YouTube video to help you.
Author : Michael is the founder and director of shout agency, a Melbourne-based boutique digital strategy agency. Michael is a highly regarded thought leader and digital innovator in the fields of online strategy, corporate SEO, Google re-targeting, email and affiliate marketing, and online reputation management.
