February 15, 2025

How can small business use digital marketing?

You now have been successful in your digital marketing campaign by earning the reputation and confidence of your customers. The above customer journey is an effective practice in digital marketing where there are many marketing templates, content strategy planning, content marketing templates and campaign programs are worked out to bring out the best. On the same level to achieve the above sales funnel, there are many effective technical works that are put in place and these are explained briefly here. Digital Marketing Services for Small Business Search Engine Optimization Search engine optimization (SEO) has a key role in digital marketing. It is a process where your website or blog is enlisted on Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines with keywords, meta description and H1 tags. This is simply to say - that your website has been optimized to search engine requirements. This task is only performed by SEO specialists and digital marketers. It requires a lot of research in keyword competition, high, medium, and low volume of search, and region-wise keyword selection. On-Page SEO On-Page SEO is very important. It allows Google to understand about your website and how you deliver valuable services to customers. It allows your website to actively become visible to searches. It ranks your website and redirects traffic. The top essentials of on-page SEO High-quality page content comes as a priority Page titles Headers Meta descriptions Image-Alt Text Site Speed Mobile Responsiveness Structured Markup Page URLs Internal Linking Off-Page SEO When we say, off-page SEO, that is outside of your website. With on-page SEO happening all over your website, off-page SEO is completely external. Some of the important elements of off-page SEO: Content marketing Social media Reviews Podcasts Evaluate your backlink profile Improving internal links Fix 404 errors Getting your content found Update your business in the local directory Promote content with paid ads Perform guest blogging Post content on social media These activities not only keep your business active and voiced, but they expand the scope to bring much more traffic from various parts of the Internet space. Landing page Landing pages are independent web pages. This is the page your customers land through email, ad, or any other digital channel. Landing pages are different from website pages. They serve a purpose one at a time. This page is exclusively for the target audience who actually plan to draw the benefit of your service. Web pages often provide information about businesses. But if you have a well-defined short-term goal, a landing page is a valuable online marketing channel that can help you reach that goal in the buyer's journey. Mostly the goal is to generate leads or click-to-action (CTA) to buy a product. Because landing pages are designed for a specific audience, they give you the perfect opportunity to convert visitors into paying customers. Landing pages are great for digital marketing campaigns. It is a stand-alone page wherein when a person lands and clicks to conversion. Email Marketing is a great way to stay connected with your audience. It’s like two-way communication. You help your visitors to subscribe to your emails and newsletters and you sent emails periodically. Creating the most interesting and compelling content is the secret to your success. This is something the audience would find it very exciting to read your email letters, and love what you send. It could include photos, images, video clips, content, graphics, and much more. But every email that you send must have a goal and a purpose. It must also have a strategy. You can also add a lead magnet such as a free pdf book or a template or any free trial coupon that recipients would love to download and use. Creating the most excitingly interesting content is definitely your super talent. Google my Business Page There are many local and global businesses that heavily trust and rely on Google my Business Page. Apart from enabling easy and quick local search results, GMB allows you to easily get enlisted on Google. Making it easy for the local residents to find your contact address to access your services easily is another big benefit. You are also benefited from a free website, posts, photos, and videos and create products and services with pricing and offers that allow your customers to benefit from your business page. You can also view the insights. This is a great way to market your business and is definitely part of the digital marketing process. Social Media Business Page The free social media business page allows you to create the most compelling and top-of-the-sales-funnel content that captures the interest of your audience. Social media experts lay a special emphasis on what you post on your business page. You need to spend quality time on working on each post to deliver value to the audience. Affiliate marketing trusts social media posts for driving attention to various products and clicks to the product page. Every social media post you publish on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, and elsewhere brings a big impact. There are many successful businesses that completely rely on social media marketing that drives customers. Checking the audience stats such as - millennials, mid-age men and women, Gen Z, and others, you need to segregate your social media campaigns. A lot of groundwork is required before you finally choose a social media channel for your business to advertise and promote. Posting valuable content Personalization and delivering high customer experiences through your content is very important. Audience consume content that is most relevant and important to them. So, creating content for audiences who are actually in need of such content is a magic wand and you can get the data by taking research on your audience in various digital channels and arriving at a decision to understand the need to frame content exclusively. Adding emotion to your content Creating emotionally intelligent content is a complex task. This requires that you analytically create your buyer personas and think as they do.

Be it a plumber or an electrician, you search on the Internet and there you have it in your local search. A  flower seller or a log home interior designer, the small business owner has gained heavy popularity with an online presence and the audience receives it with much appreciation on the Internet. 

This is such a good thing that happened in this technology era and it continues to grow. According to SBA (Small Business Administration), there are 33.2 million small businesses in the U.S., as of 2022.

Few important stats:

  • 20% of small businesses are owned by women
  • 19% of small businesses are owned by minorities
  • The majority of small business owners are aged between 55-65
  • 61 million people are employed by small businesses

Global Small Business Stats

There are 125 million micro, small and midsize businesses globally. They have many needs in digital marketing. As the pandemic period has halted the progress and growth of many small businesses, now, a majority of businesses are trusting the efforts and results of digital marketing strategies for fast-paced sales and turnover.

Some of the recent surveys found that:

  • Nearly 69% of small business owners would like to ensure the safety of their customers.
  • 78% of small business owners prefer to go by word-of-mouth marketing due to budget constraints.
  • 71% of small businesses have their own website
  • 81% of shoppers choose to research prior to making a purchase
  • 55% search for online reviews and 47% search for a business website.
  • 85% of consumers use the Internet to search for local businesses.
  • 44% of B2B buyers abandon a small business website if they do not find contact information.

These stats indicate that there is a need to bring awareness about the benefits of digital marketing to enable derive the benefits.

There’s a lot that digital marketers can do for business promotion on the Internet.

What exactly in Digital Marketing in 2022 and Beyond?

According to HubSpot

“Digital marketing also called online marketing, refers to all marketing efforts that occur on the Internet. Businesses leverage digital channels such as search engines, social media, email, and other websites to connect with current and prospective customers. They also include communication through text or multimedia messages.”

Advantages of Digital Marketing

One of the top advantages of digital marketing is – 

  • Your business becomes active and visible on the Internet. 
  • Most of the marketing tools are made available for free.
  • Simple techniques of search engine optimization (SEO). content strategy, content marketing, and social media, your business can steadily gain the recognition of the audience.
  • With or without a website, you can still go on with your business promotion on social media and Google My Business page.
  • Reach your customers easily to provide your services
  • Proven as an effective marketing program 
  • Cost-effective and affordable where the premium or paid services are accessed such as in PPC, ad campaigns, and other SEO activities.

Why digital marketing is helpful for small businesses

Finding customers on a daily basis is one of the biggest needs for your business and this is a regular requirement. 

While some choose to get referrals with the help of friends, family, and other associates, digital marketing is one of the best ways to promote your products.

How?

Promotion on Social Media 

You can share your product on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and elsewhere for free. That is to showcase your product with short and concise content.

When the audience views your post, they click and find your product useful.

They visit your website to make a purchase.

This is a whole concept of promoting your business through social media.

Many products have been found to be useful through paid advertising on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Google.

It works through search queries by displaying suitable products.

Among the search results, your product can also be found.

In this pattern of search engine searches as per the keywords typed in the Google search bar. 

As of 2022, the latest data shows that Google processes over 99,000 searches every single second and there are more than 8.5 billion searches per day. (Internet Live Stats, 2022)

That’s more than the global population of 7.98 billion.

Engage with your customers 

Through every phase of the customer journey – you can stay connected with your prospects.  The sales funnel of – awareness, interest, desire, and action, you are able to watch what your audience is doing and it allows you tp engage with them through best offers, deals, discounts, coupons, trial offers, and much more. 

Further, you’ll be able to create personalized experiences according to their likes and dislikes.

The four important stages of a buyer’s journey are explained as:

Awareness

The target audience views your post or content and checks whether it is useful for them.  Here, your content plays a pivotal role in holding the attention of your readers.

Here, by all means, you have to put your 100% effort to create content that makes a positive impact on your visitors.

Interest

When your content begins to attract an audience, they shift to the next stage of showing interest in your products or services.

In this stage, you may have to keep up their interest by connecting with them and by promoting more content on your page.

Desire

In this stage, prospects would prefer to stay on your source and check for your products and are now at the decision stage to make a purchase.

This is the most crucial stage for your business.

Sometimes, when the shopping cart is abandoned, you may have to consider email marketing to connect and engage your customers to come back and revisit your site again for buying decision.

Action

This is the most important and final stage of conversion where your product is purchased. You now have been successful in your digital marketing campaign by earning the reputation and confidence of your customers.

The above customer journey is an effective practice in digital marketing where there are many marketing templates, content strategy planning, content marketing templates and campaign programs are worked out to bring out the best.

On the same level to achieve the above sales funnel, there are many effective technical works that are put in place and these are explained briefly here.

Digital Marketing Services for Small Business

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) has a key role in digital marketing. It is a process where your website or blog is enlisted on Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other search engines with keywords, meta description and H1 tags. 

This is simply to say – that your website has been optimized to search engine requirements.

This task is only performed by SEO specialists and digital marketers.

It requires a lot of research in keyword competition, high, medium, and low volume of search, and region-wise keyword selection.

On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO is very important. It allows Google to understand about your website and how you deliver valuable services to customers.

It allows your website to actively become visible to searches.

It ranks your website and redirects traffic. 

The top essentials of on-page SEO 

  • High-quality page content comes as a priority
  • Page titles
  • Headers
  • Meta descriptions
  • Image-Alt Text
  • Site Speed
  • Mobile Responsiveness
  • Structured Markup
  • Page URLs
  • Internal Linking

Off-Page SEO

When we say, off-page SEO, that is outside of your website. With on-page SEO happening all over your website, off-page SEO is completely external.

Some of the important elements of off-page SEO:

  • Content marketing
  • Social media
  • Reviews
  • Podcasts
  • Evaluate your backlink profile
  • Improving internal links
  • Fix 404 errors
  • Getting your content found 
  • Update your business in the local directory
  • Promote content with paid ads
  • Perform guest blogging
  • Post content on social media

These activities not only keep your business active and voiced, but they expand the scope to bring much more traffic from various parts of the Internet space.

Landing page 

Landing pages are independent web pages. This is the page your customers land through email, ad, or any other digital channel.

Landing pages are different from website pages.

They serve a purpose one at a time.

This page is exclusively for the target audience who actually plan to draw the benefit of your service.

Web pages often provide information about businesses. But if you have a well-defined short-term goal, a landing page is a valuable online marketing channel that can help you reach that goal in the buyer’s journey. 

Mostly the goal is to generate leads or click-to-action (CTA) to buy a product.

Because landing pages are designed for a specific audience, they give you the perfect opportunity to convert visitors into paying customers.

Landing pages are great for digital marketing campaigns. It is a stand-alone page wherein when a  person lands and clicks to conversion.

Email Marketing

is a great way to stay connected with your audience. It’s like two-way communication. You help your visitors to subscribe to your emails and newsletters and you sent emails periodically.

Creating the most interesting and compelling content is the secret to your success.

This is something the audience would find it very exciting to read your email letters, and love what you send.

It could include photos, images, video clips, content, graphics, and much more.

But every email that you send must have a goal and a purpose.

It must also have a strategy.

You can also add a lead magnet such as a free pdf book or a template or any free trial coupon that recipients would love to download and use.

Creating the most excitingly interesting content is definitely your super talent.

Google my Business Page

There are many local and global businesses that heavily trust and rely on Google my Business Page.

Apart from enabling easy and quick local search results, GMB allows you to easily get enlisted on Google.

Making it easy for the local residents to find your contact address to access your services easily is another big benefit.

You are also benefited from a free website, posts, photos, and videos and create products and services with pricing and offers that allow your customers to benefit from your business page.

You can also view the insights.

This is a great way to market your business and is definitely part of the digital marketing process.

Social Media Business Page

The free social media business page allows you to create the most compelling and top-of-the-sales-funnel content that captures the interest of your audience.

Social media experts lay a special emphasis on what you post on your business page.

You need to spend quality time on working on each post to deliver value to the audience.

Affiliate marketing trusts social media posts for driving attention to various products and clicks to the product page.

Every social media post you publish on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, and elsewhere brings a big impact.

There are many successful businesses that completely rely on social media marketing that drives customers.

Checking the audience stats such as – millennials, mid-age men and women, Gen Z, and others, you need to segregate your social media campaigns. 

A lot of groundwork is required before you finally choose a  social media channel for your business to advertise and promote.

Posting valuable content 

Personalization and delivering high customer experiences through your content is very important. 

Audience consume content that is most relevant and important to them.

So, creating content for audiences who are actually in need of such content is a magic wand and you can get the data by taking research on your audience in various digital channels and arriving at a decision to understand the need to frame content exclusively.

Adding emotion to your content

Creating emotionally intelligent content is a complex task. This requires that you analytically create your buyer personas and think as they do. 

In a way, your content should move along with the audience’s thinking and feed them their needs. 

The audience would always like to know – why you do what you do. It is not what you do.

What best can you offer?

How different is what you do and deliver?

How profitable and competitive it is?

How unique it is?

Is it worth the time and money?

It may not be a serious conversation. But storytelling.

That’s what matters.

Story-telling in your content goes a long way with humor, fun, facts, reality, practice, and much more.

Learning how to write emotionally intelligent content goes a long way for your small business.

Using AI tools for content marketing

AI or Artificial Intelligence is a Big Bang Theory and it is everywhere now in your business. AI is part of your smartphone.

But how can you use it in content marketing for your small business?

AI tools for content marketing deliver not only fast-paced results but come with a lot of accuracy.

When it comes to content marketing there are basically five important stages to follow with the help of AI marketing tools.

1.Planning

This is the stage where you plan with content strategy and Search Engine Optimization.

For this purpose, you can use

MarketMuse

Vennli

2. Production

At this stage, you need tools that help in producing intelligent content. The following are the most popular AI tools in achieving content production.

Frase.io

Automated Insights

Phrasee

3. Personalization

is a stage where you need to connect with the audience as per their needs. You need the following AI tools that help you get there.

Pathfactory

Conversica

Meera.ai

Rasa.io

4. Promotion

After producing quality content, it is time to promote it in digital marketing. Validity and Returnpath give you a better scope to communicate with customers, gain their loyalty and engagement with customers at every stage.

5. Performance

How to target the right audience to generate leads consistently. Similarly, campaign results and insights of content are also necessary to review.

Google analytics does a great job in easily measuring all the results.

PR20/20 is another marketing analytics report tool that helps in tracking performance.

How soon you can see the results

How soon can you enjoy the best results of digital marketing? Sometimes, it begins to generate leads immediately.

Ezeewash was providing laundry services for the local residents.  The small business owner was in need of customers daily to contact on his phone and Whatsapp.

He chose the strategy to use Google ads.

With a small budget assigned periodically for every month, he chose the services of BitraNet, a web development, and digital marketing agency to promote his business.

After successful SEO Google ad campaigns, he was successful in generating leads as customers began to hire his laundry services.

Sometimes, the results are also depending on your niche and category of business. Highly demanding customer services are quickly searched for and your business gains momentum.

From an overall view, digital marketing is the best you choose for your advertising and marketing of your business.

Following the Target audience

Your audience really understands you when your digital marketing strategy is in their favor helping them solve their problems.

As a small business owner, you have access to the services of digital marketing that have been designed as cost-effective and very affordable in many ways that suit your budget.

Hiring an efficient digital marketer not only drives your business but most importantly, there’s a flow of customers regularly who identify and recognize your business. 

Conclusion

These 11 tips for your small business to choose digital marketing as your first and foremost preference to grow your business online is definitely valuable and worth the time.