Small business owners often find it intimidating to move to digital sales. Maybe, you already have a website and use social media, but if it hasn't brought you a few leads in the last month, you need to rethink your strategy.
In this post, we breakdown how you can approach digital transformation in a stepwise manner. Do you really need a website? SEO vs paid ads - what should you pick? What digital marketing strategies are a must for your business? Find out in this post.
Do you really need a website re-design?
50% of small businesses in the U.S. still don't have a website.
Almost every purchase these days begins with an internet search. Imagine the business you're losing because you're nowhere on the internet!
A website is the face of your brand, and undoubtedly you need one. But what if you already have one?
- It's crucial to determine if your website is sales-ready.
- Open your website on your phone. Is it easy to navigate? In 2019, a website needs to be responsive and mobile-first.
- Is your website design inline with your branding?
- Is your website properly structured with pages to capture leads?
- Is it scalable? Hint: If it's still running on HTML, you need to take action & contact us for website development now.
SEO vs PPC ads
The biggest dilemma business owners face is whether to go for SEO or PPC ads.
SEO: is the process of increasing the organic visibility of your website in a search engine. Remember, in 2019, it's not just Google. YouTube is also a search engine and so, is Amazon.
PPC (pay per click) ads: is the process of running ads online, with Google ads being the top choice. Facebook & Instagram ads are the second most used option for PPC ads. There are also specific platforms like LinkedIn, which is expensive but a great option if you're a B2B business and you can afford a higher cost per lead. Quora and Pinterest ads are emerging as another winning ad platforms for small businesses.
What should you pick?
Personally, if we had to make a choice for our own brand, we'll always go with a combination of both. SEO is a time-consuming process, but if done right, it's highly sustainable.
Of course, you have to keep working on maintaining your keyword positions, but if your strategies are right, you can maintain a steady flow of traffic and leads using this online marketing strategy.
PPC ads is a 'pay to play' option. You'll encash benefits of this strategy only until you put money into the system. The day you stop, the leads stop.
However, considering how these ads cost significantly lower than the traditional ads like billboards, newspaper, radio & television ads; and are measurable unlike their traditional counterparts, these can be significant in quickly getting your business the revenues you need for day-to-day operations.
Remarketing - Email & PPC ads
Let's say, you managed to attract a potential customer to your business with SEO or any other digital sales tactics. Current buyer needs to be pitched at least 7 times to close a sale. How do you capture that visitor and put him into your marketing & sales funnel?
You can't just let a visitor come and leave your website just like that, if you want to make money.
Email Marketing lets you build effective campaigns to capture emails of your website visitors & potential customers and setup campaigns to nurture them into ready-to-purchase leads. The entire process can be automated to improve the results per effort.
Ever searched for something on Google and then got stalked by the ad of the same product - everywhere on the internet? That's remarketing. It's a highly effective way to capture leads and drive sales.
Whether you go for SEO or PPC ads, remarketing campaigns are a must-use to stop losing out on leads you could easily capture with a little more convincing.
7 times - you need to be there 7 times before you get the actual business come to you.
Content Marketing & Social Media Marketing
Both are popular ways to generate leads, and more importantly, they're important for branding. With the cut-throat competition, it's important for your business to brand itself.
In the next few years, people aren't going to look for buying shoes online. They're going to look for buying Nike Shoes online. Wait! Aren't they already doing it?
That's it. It's already happening.
About a decade back, SEO meant going for generic one-word searches like 'shoes', 'seo', 'web development' but in 2019, it's no longer possible to rank for these generic keywords, unless you have a huge budget and you're looking to burn money.
For a small business, a highly optimized digital marketing campaign is needed and it involves going for specific keywords with 2-3 word long phrases & purchase intent like 'buy shoes online', 'SEO in NJ', 'Web development agency.'
Similarly, even if your website ranks on top for a search result, the user may still go for the second or third result that maybe a brand they've already heard about before.
Branding.
That's what you need for that unconscious choice users will make every time they search on Google or see a Facebook ad.
How do you do it? By establishing yourself as the industry leader. With content, that can educate and entertain your audience.
What's next?
If you're entirely new to digital sales, we recommend you to get these processes setup to bring an influx of leads and revenue. But what if you don't have money for all of it at once?
Introducing A Subscription Model
We understand the flow of money could be tight and even though, you do need web development, SEO, PPC, Email Marketing, Remarketing, Content Marketing, and Social Media Marketing now, you can gradually move into it throughout the year or two.
To make it easy and affordable, we've introduced a subscription model. Find the details here.
Chatbots & Machine Learning
You may see billion dollar businesses investing in AI technologies, but even if you're a local diner, you can afford chatbots. Chatbots are a new way to personalize and market to your clients.
They have several applications - find out why you need a chatbot in this post.
Overall, every business needs to utilize the opportunities offered by the digital era. Your users are now online and they may choose somebody else if they can't find you there.
A website is the face of your brand and must be designed properly for easy navigation. It will also need content and structure that could capture leads for you.
To begin digital sales, you need a combination of SEO (your long-term strategy) and PPC ads (your short-term strategy) and invest resources in both of them.
To ensure the potential clients you attract with SEO and PPC ads are converted into leads & sales, you need email marketing & remarketing campaigns.
For top-of-mind brand recall and leadership in your industry, branding through content marketing and social media marketing is crucial.
If you don't have resources to dip your feet into all of it at once, you must consider going for the subscription model we conceived to help small business owners exactly like you. A gradual shift is 100 times better than no shift. Right?
To keep up with the emerging trends, you may also want to invest in chatbots.
To find out more about the digital marketing strategies that could fit your business model, schedule a free consultation with us now!
