15 September 2021
5 Ways a Small Business Marketing Agency Can Help
Today, it’s not enough to just wait for people to find you. Everyone is looking online and if you’re going to grow your company, you have to be there. The reality is that if your company doesn’t have an active online presence, it doesn’t exist.
Whether your company is large or small, you need a digital marketing plan. You know this. But as you’ve probably discovered, planning, executing, and managing your marketing plan are all vastly different tasks. All of which can be time-consuming if you’re intent on doing them well and overwhelming if digital marketing isn’t already in your wheelhouse.
As a startup, perhaps you got away with creating a basic website and posting on social media from time to time. As you’ve grown, and, because the digital landscape is constantly changing and becoming more saturated and competitive, staying ahead of the curve requires a broader digital strategy and more expertise in how to run effective results-driven marketing.
When small business owners decide to tackle their digital marketing needs themselves, they are quickly surprised by how much time needs to be spent in the research stage before anything can be implemented. Beyond research, there is the experimenting phase where strategies are evaluated and fine-tuned based on campaign performance. Realistically, truly effective marketing strategies never leave the experimentation stage. There is no “set it and forget it” in digital marketing. You always need to have your finger on the pulse of your messaging, your graphic design, your pay per click marketing… all of it.
Among the elements of a comprehensive marketing strategy is an optimized website that utilizes proper SEO keywords to attract targeted traffic. Strong SEO strategy takes time to build but increases trust with search engines over time and moves you up in organic search rankings. You’ll have a hard time getting noticed by the potential clients you’re looking for if you show up on anything other than the first page of Google (or Bing… do people still use Bing?!). Digitally speaking, you won’t exist. Other components in your strategy can include PPC campaigns, email marketing, a social media marketing strategy, and content marketing. Annndd don’t forget about monitoring the analytics for each of your marketing initiatives to help guide any changes and tweaks you need to make.
With the “I’ll do it myself” mindset, so much time is spent away from growing the company. To be honest, your time is too valuable to be wasted. You’ll find relief working with a digital marketing agency to establish measurable goals, increase awareness, drive sales, and increase conversion rates, so you can work on the other aspects of your business! Plus, you need results now.
If the magnitude of the time and experience needed for a powerful digital marketing solution seems outside of your current bandwidth, don’t worry. This is where a skilled marketing agency can come alongside and help your company gain the online visibility you need to attract those new clients you want.
Here are five key services that a small business marketing company will be able to provide to jumpstart your company’s growth.
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What if instead of spending your time on research and teaching yourself the various digital marketing components, you consulted a specialist? Partnering with a digital marketing expert will provide you with a clear view of your current marketing efforts along with a specific marketing plan for better results. Ask any questions you have! Ask about the research process, the marketing tools they use, and the ROI you can expect to see. Get a better understanding of how marketing can increase your customer base and therefore increase your revenue.
Receiving counsel and guidance from an expert will speed up your growth and help you avoid common marketing pitfalls. Investing in a marketing consultant will quickly prove to be a much more productive and certainly less frustrating use of your time.
Search engine optimization. It’s becoming a more common term, but is still one shrouded in a lot of mystery. Everything you do and post online can potentially boost SEO. Or it will do nothing for you, which ultimately means you’ll be invisible to your audience. Your website content strategy needs to be SEO driven: speaking to the questions, topics, and keywords people are searching for in your industry.
Your Google My Business account, social media presence, and online ads also feed into your SEO and are important for building trust with the Google bots. The more accurate, consistent, and congruent your information is online, the more the robots will trust your company and move your company higher in search engine results.
High performing SEO is technical and time consuming but is WELL worth investing in.
When done right with intention and consistency, SEO will turn into an inbound marketing machine. Learn more about SEO and how it can increase sales opportunities here.
Another technical digital marketing solution but one that makes a big difference is paid ads. Paid ads bump your company to the top of search pages, helping create awareness as well as getting more leads to your website.
Highly effective ad campaigns include important keywords and only show to the most qualified audience. Setting appropriate ad campaign parameters ensures your ads target your intended customer base and generate relevant traffic. This way those who click on your ad are those who are more ready to buy and you’re not wasting your advertising budget.
The ads dashboard allows you to pull reports on every aspect of your ads performance. Reports indicate what's working and not working. Experts know how to interpret the reports, diagnose the issues causing slow growth, and get creative when implementing solutions, generating more sales and edging out the competition.
The number one tip for social (like all digital marketing) is CONSISTENCY. Consistency is the gas to your social marketing efforts. Without it, your endeavors don’t gain traction or produce good results.
Remember: social’s primary purpose is to build brand awareness and stay connected with your customers. Whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, or another social media platform, recognize that it’s about connecting with your current (and future!) clients. Post relevant, engaging material that is important to your target audience, and stay on top of those comments and messages.
Even small business social media management takes time, intention, and requires the monitoring of metrics.
Here again, a marketing agency servicing small businesses will be able to monitor all your campaigns, including copywriting, content creation, and platform management. There are a lot of pieces to the social media puzzle. Take some time to demystify social as you learn about this valuable tool and how it can benefit your business.
You can add a lead generating aspect to your social media marketing by running a seasonal contest or giveaway. With these, you’re exchanging the chance to win a prize for someone’s information and the ability to market to them in the future. Of course it’s imperative to offer something of value that will entice them to stop what they’re doing and enter their info for a chance to win. A lame giveaway gets lame results. Be sure to highlight your winners (with their permission) congratulating and tagging them in your posts.
Analytics is a valuable tool that will indicate what’s working and what you need to tweak. Utilizing analytics is like taking advantage of the complimentary breakfast buffet at your hotel. It’s free and available, you just have to wake up and go downstairs to enjoy the spread.
Likewise, analytics already exists. You just have to pull the reports, learn to interpret the data, and use the information to fuel future goal-driven results.
Analytics is available on all marketing platforms; social media, email, Google, etc. For some platforms you’ll need to create an account to access your data, ie Google Analytics, but the setup is generally user friendly.
Your digital marketing agency can set this up for you as a part of your onboarding and/or teach you how to pull your own reports.
If you find yourself out of your depth while trying to spearhead your marketing efforts on your own, let’s connect today. We’ll discuss a full search engine blueprint so you’ll have a clear view of your current online presence, how you stack up to the competition, and what you need to do to dominate them.
