For a small business owner like yourself, digital marketing is indeed a blessing.
For one, brands can now better connect with the target audience, even if they aren’t a big multinational conglomerate with huge stacks of the marketing budget. Humble online stores or neighborhood mom-and-pop establishments can now compete with the big dogs with a cleverly designed digital marketing campaign.
Digital marketing covers a good number of practices which you can find in the infographic below by Serpwatch. However, part of the appeal for small businesses is that there are aspects that they can have direct control over. For example, they can maintain a Facebook page, put out a series of product-centric articles, or run an email marketing campaign.
Knowing the latest digital marketing trends and how they best apply to your brand is crucial for you as a small business owner. So here’s a little refresher on what you should know about digital marketing to better grow your business in 2019.
We’re focusing on three practices this time — SEO, the use of video, and lead generation/nurturing.
Search Engine Optimization
There are a few interesting trends regarding search engine optimization (SEO) in 2019.
First of all, as more people use mobile devices to conduct an online search, you need to do your best to optimize your website for those devices. Failing to do so will result in losing a lot of customers and being penalized by Google.
However, the story with mobile devices doesn’t end here. As more people are getting comfortable with personal digital assistants built into their smartphones, voice search is steadily on the rise and thus impacts Google ranks.
When doing a voice search, people tend to use a more conversational approach to keywords. For example, their query would look something like — “new Japanese restaurants with great sushi near me,” instead of — “Japanese restaurants sushi 91135.”
Adjust your content to match voice search. You could rewrite it to include question-answer forms, or you could create a FAQ page.
Video Marketing
Here’s an interesting tidbit — online video viewership has already surpassed TV for the first time, and there doesn’t seem to be any signs of slowing down.
Creating own videos for your brand has never been easier. Modern smartphones make it possible to shoot high-quality video clips, and you have all sorts of companies offering a variety of apps and software to simplify the video editing process.
The advantages of video sprinkled into your marketing mix cannot be ignored. When used wisely, video not only boosts SEO rankings and online traffic but it also greatly improves conversion rates and sales.
Lead Generation and Nurturing
A good mix of online advertising and organic SEO can drive high-quality traffic to your site. Dedicated landing pages are good for capturing valuable leads. Furthermore, a series of thoughtfully-crafted marketing emails help sift through these leads.
Today, we have a wide variety of marketing automation providers that tie together landing pages and email marketing with other integrated functions, such as a CRM (customer relationship management) software, leads database, analytics, and mobile optimization.
The good news is that you have a wealth of such tools at your disposal, such as HubSpot, MailChimp, Zoho Campaigns, Drip, and DailyStory, to name a few.
And when you grow significantly, services like Customer.io, Pardot, Marketo, Bizible, and Act-On will handle your increased lead generation and nurturing requirements.
Conclusion
There’s clearly a lot to take in when it comes to digital marketing for small businesses. But as the business environment and market evolve, so should your techniques and practices for attracting and retaining customers.
