Effective Digital Marketing Tips & Tactics for Small Businesses

Are you a small business looking to grow your online presence to ultimately boost your
bottom line? Then digital marketing tactics are what’s required. While at first glance
digital marketing tactics are intended to generate leads and grow traffic, the end result,
if executed correctly, is always sales (i.e. ROI).
In what follows, we’ll be discussing what the most effective digital marketing tips &
tactics are for small businesses. More specifically, however, we’ll dive into what a BVP
is, why it’s important, and how it can act as a roadmap towards identifying what
marketing tactics to implement.
So, if you’re eager to take your digital marketing strategy to the next level, this article is
for you! Let’s get into it…

What is a Business Value Proposition?

Before proceeding to implement a comprehensive digital marketing strategy, it’s
important to first know and understand who your target market is. That’s where having a
business value proposition comes into play…
Simply put, a business value proposition is a statement inferring what you offer to your
audience and why they would and should choose your offering over a competitor’s.
The reason it’s advantageous to both understand and have a BVP is that it inherently
improves your understanding of your target market, thus providing you with a clearer
roadmap to increase engagement and conversion.
Similarly, it gives your target market a clearer picture of the benefits of investing in your
business, thus providing them with a roadmap of sorts to conversion as well…

The Importance of Digital Marketing

The value of digital marketing for both small businesses and large corporations alike is
much the same, just on a different scale. Not only does an effectively implemented
digital marketing strategy aid in communication, but it provides businesses with an
untapped opportunity for growth.
However, you choose to define growth via marketing metrics (i.e. conversion, CTAs,
ROI, engagement, etc.), it’s undeniable the importance of having a strategy in place to
achieve it; not to mention, when done properly, digital marketing is the most cost-
effective strategy available.

The question, however, remains; how do you use digital marketing to grow and promote
your business. While digital marketing and its accompanying tactics are often deemed
inevitable to elicit some level of a successful result, it can actually become quite
ineffective and costly if you don’t know what to implement and how to implement it.
Whether it’s social media management, content strategy, metric analysis, market
research, email marketing, SEO, or otherwise, it’s imperative that you first understand
what you’re doing; while we won’t be going into detail regarding specific marketing
strategies, we will provide some relevant tips to ensure success…

Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

As mentioned in the preface, the importance of digital marketing is much the same for
both small businesses and large corporations. The primary difference between the two,
however, seems to typically be the knowledge or lack thereof of marketing basics…
In other words, while small businesses are often great at filling the gap of local problems
and solutions via products and services, they typically lack awareness of basic
marketing principles that would otherwise help take their business to new heights.
Below are some tips regarding these marketing basics…

Know Your Audience

Knowing your audience is invaluable for small businesses seeking to grow their
customer base. The act of knowing your audience, however, isn’t as simple as defining
your target market.
Instead, it requires you to perform a competitive analysis, create ideal buyer personas,
conduct surveys, monitor feedback, experiment with relevant content, and adjust
accordingly.
Though a tedious tactic upfront, knowing your audience will set you on a clear path to
success in the long run… In short, knowing your audience is step one of creating an
effective marketing strategy.

Perform Market Research

While knowing your audience certainly requires a level of research and analysis, market
research is a much more comprehensive task, however, a necessary task at that.
Unfortunately, many small businesses fail to do any such research, instead, proceeding
without any level of clarity or understanding of the market that they’re after.
In short, market research is the act of identifying whether or not what you’re offering is
both viable and in demand. Failing to effectively execute market research is often the
downfall of most small businesses.

Appropriate Choice of Platforms

In today’s digital ecosystem, your marketing strategy is all but complete without the
implementation of social media. In other words, without an online presence, your small
business is all but irrelevant, even non-existent to most.
Most small businesses, however, make the crucial mistake of opting out of social media,
assuming falsely that because they’re a tangible brick-and-mortar business, they don’t
need access to what social media has to offer.
With that said, the first step here is to unequivocally build an online presence, largely
through social media, if only to build awareness… Next, you must choose the
appropriate social media platform(s) to share your content on.
For example, if your target audience is the male demographic ages 45-65, Instagram
and TikTok are likely unsuitable choices. Instead, you might opt for Facebook and
LinkedIn as the appropriate choice of platforms; a basic premise but a necessary one at
that…

Final Thoughts

Unlike large corporations that often have a plethora of red tape and hierarchical
roadblocks, small businesses typically have the autonomy to make the changes and
implementations necessary, ultimately taking success into your own hands.
Because of this autonomy, however, you also have a responsibility and obligation to
become informed of effective marketing tactics and how to implement them. As
mentioned, it all starts with the basics…
Good luck!