updated 6/20/2022 ⎮ 39 min read ⎮ Digital Marketing
You’re not alone. Every business owner faces different challenges. Marketing is fast-paced, so it can be difficult to keep up and identify what to improve to turn your small business marketing into an even more effective revenue generator.
In this digital marketing blog article, you’ll learn how to overcome the top 14 marketing challenges and grow your small business.
The top 14 marketing challenges for small businesses and how to overcome them:
- Not Knowing Where To Begin With Marketing Your Small Business
- Not Being Sure About What The Right Ways Are To Market Your Small Business
- Not Enough Resources To Carry Out A Digital Marketing Plan For Your Small Business
- How To Master Lead Generation And Traffic Generation For A Small Business
- How To Compete With Big Businesses As A Small Business
- 6 Tips To Choose The Right Social Media Platforms For Your Small Business
- How To Build A Visible Brand For Your Small Business
- How To Consistently Execute My Small Business Marketing Tasks
- How To Create Content For Your Small Business & Distribute and Promote It Successfully
- How To Expand To More Marketing Channels And Increase Your Small Business' Online Presence
- How To Keep Up With Trends And Technology As A Small Business Owner
- How To Come Up With The Effort And Patience Organic SEO Marketing Requires
- Who To Trust When Outsourcing Your Small Business Marketing
- How To Overcome Budgetary Constraints To Hire A Marketing Team
1. Not Knowing Where To Begin With Marketing Your Small Business
For many small business owners, it can be difficult to determine the right ways to market a small business or where to even begin.
Marketing contains the word market. Your market is your target audience, your ideal customers. These are the people you want to make yourself known, trusted and liked amongst with your marketing. This means getting to know them and studying and researching them in depth is where you must begin.
The first step is to create a buyer persona. You can use our free buyer persona template to create a detailed profile of your ideal customers.
Buyer personas help you focus on the type of customer you want to appeal to and align with their values, motivations and interests. Since your business revolves around your customers, you want to try and cater to them as much as possible.
Once you’ve established who you want to market to, you can craft your marketing strategy – a plan of action to reach your marketing goals.
One of the best ways to create a digital marketing strategy, is by using the OKR method. This ensures that for every objective (O), you have tangible, measurable key results (KR) you can track your performance with. Defining key results for each objective also helps you to determine which concrete actions you need to take to get there and figure out the marketing tactics required.
Learn more about how to use the OKR method to set your digital marketing goals in this video:
Your marketing strategy can make or break your business. Without the right amount of reach and exposure, your small business can’t make a real impact on your customers.
The right digital marketing strategy with the appropriate objectives, key results, tactics, and channels makes all the difference between a successful business and one that struggles to keep up.
Make sure you set a time frame for each goal to hold yourself and your team accountable and update your strategy periodically to keep it up to date and to reflect the most successful marketing channels.
For example, if your social media marketing is not contributing as much to reaching a key result and objectives as your email marketing does in the same amount of time, you should update your strategy and focus more on email marketing and also dedicate more resources to it.
As to the different possibilities that you have to marketing your small business online and offline, there is content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, affiliate marketing, influencer marketing, paid advertising, community building, and many more…
Check out this blog post to learn more about all that digital marketing includes.
Read this article for more small business marketing tips and resources.
2. Not Being Sure About What The Right Ways Are To Market Your Small Business
You need to make your presence known.
This means that you need to be where your target customers are at. Your customers should have in-depth knowledge of your brand and this can be achieved by establishing a reliable online presence.
When building an online presence, it is important not to put all your eggs in one basket and focus on only one marketing channel, and it is equally important not to dilute your marketing power across too many channels you don’t have enough resources to give the attention they require.
On top of that, you want a healthy mix of marketing channels that you own and channels that you don’t own.
You own your website and you own your email list.
In contrast, you do not own your audience on social media and are dependent on the people who own and run the platform and its algorithm.
Here’s what to do:
Setting up a user-friendly website that is optimized for the purpose you want it to serve to and that has a form which allows you to collect the contact information of your customers, so you can build your database and email list, is the first step every small business needs to do to market itself.
In addition to this, it is important to stand for something unique and valuable, build a brand that embodies that, and have consistency in your branding to build trust and get recognition. This way you increase your business value and can grow and scale strategically.
3. Not Enough Resources To Carry Out A Digital Marketing Plan For Your Small Business
Struggling to reach your audience with high marketing costs and a very small budget? If you don’t have the help from a number of people on your team, lack the spare time, or don’t have a high budget for your marketing strategy – don’t worry. There are a number of ways to market your small business effectively with limited resources.
You still need marketing. The worst thing you can do is to stop marketing and allow your audience to completely forget about you with all the other stuff that's going on in their minds.
On a tight budget, it's more important that you do whatever you can to stay on top of your audience's mind.
So, you need your marketing strategy to have two main characteristics:
- It has to be marketing budget friendly, and
- It has to be highly effective
This is what to do:
Step 1. Get online.
Digital marketing is more affordable and worthwhile than traditional marketing. You need to bring your business online.
Get a website, be present on social media, start selling online, get started with email marketing, etc. Get online, go digital, and build an online presence for yourself and your small business.
Step 2. Social media marketing.
You can post consistently on social media, which is completely free.
Organic social media marketing helps you to stay in touch and grow your audience.
Don’t know what to post everyday? Here are a few ideas:
- You can share helpful articles and blog posts.
- You can post insightful infographics.
- You can be inspiring and motivating by sharing quotes.
- You can create relevant content that solves problems your audience has and handles objections.
- You can show that your small business is human and customer-centered and share a glimpse of what’s happening behind the scenes of your business.
- You can put yourself out there and show your personality and qualifications.
- You can post about your products and services, and share customer reviews and testimonials.
- You can also consider holding social media contests or hosting events.
- You can go live and provide value by answering frequently asked questions.
- And of course, you can also sell through social media and take advantage of social commerce and set up shop on the social media platforms.
You can do all of that the inbound marketing way, all organically, without having to spend money to buy ads.
Step 3. Content marketing.
If you can’t spend dollars, you have to spend time. You can easily create helpful and beautiful pieces of content that support your customers.
Consider the 4 main types of content: text, images, audio, and video content. And create content pieces in all of these formats to allow each member of your aidice to consume your content and hear your message and story in the favorite and preferred way.
Written content:
You can create your own written content. You just need to open your laptop and start typing and writing. Everybody is a writer. As a matter of fact, if you write in a conversational tone, skip the jargon and fanciness, and put it in simple terms, it resonates even better with people. Keep your blog posts and articles on the writing and reading level of an 8th grader. You can do that.
Visual content:
You can create professionally-designed images, posters, flyers, thumbnails, social media posts, presentations, etc. using Canva. Canva is a graphic design tool with an easy to use, drag and drop interface and a lot of design templates that you can modify. With Canva you can be your own graphic designer and add your branding to the customizable templates. Of course, you can also create designs from scratch if you feel confident enough, but you absolutely don’t have to.
Audio content:
You can create audio content by just taking out your smartphone and recording a voice memo, which you can then turn into a podcast episode, or just a sound bite with helpful information. Pro equipment is optional.
Make sure to be in a quiet space with lots of fabric things in the room to absorb any echoing when you’re recording. Your closet is the perfect studio.
Recording this week’s show (well, I closed the closet doors while I read my narration). @ThisAmerLife pic.twitter.com/SrTO0hsgyz
— Ira Glass (@iraglass) March 22, 2020
Corona can’t stop the podcasting! (Recording from my new home studio in our closet.) pic.twitter.com/knGXjXOUKC
— Steven Johnson (@stevenbjohnson) March 19, 2020
Why don’t you give our digital marketing podcast a listen? Explore it here.
Video content:
You got a high-quality camera right in your pocket. You can just use your phone to make videos.
Make it a habit to record yourself every time you got an epiphany or want to share something. You can start off by reading from one of your written content pieces, or make a script to reference until you’re confident enough to improvise.
It’s the 21st century and videos are the hottest things right now. YouTube, Snapchat, TikTok, social media stories. You need to overcome camera shyness.
You’re a subject matter expert in what you do and people want to hear your knowledge. It does not have to be perfect and you don’t have to feel ashamed of anything.
Video marketing is so easy to get into right now because the entry barriers are so low. The times will eventually come back where it is seen as unprofessional to record yourself with a phone or publish a shaky video. You may be forced to spend money on high luster productions again in the future. So take advantage of this time right now. It's full of chances and you'll miss them if you procrastinate.
Step 4. Email marketing.
You can build an email list and send out emails regularly to your leads and customers.
We have a guide to small business email marketing that teaches you everything you need to know about getting started with email marketing for small businesses.
And if you don't know what to send, you can download our free email marketing campaign planning calendar template. It gives you ideas for email themes and topics, so you can plan your content and promotions in advance, and you'll never run out of ideas or miss an opportunity for a great email marketing campaign.
Email is used by literally half of the world population. It is used by 4.3 billion people and for 58% of people, their emails are the first thing that they check every day.
Email marketing also has the highest return on investment. For every dollar that you invest in email marketing, you can expect an average ROI of $42. That's amazing!
Step 5. Follow up.
Following up is vastly underestimated and underleveraged. You can make it a part of your strategy to follow up with prospects who've ghosted you and you haven't heard back from in a while.
You can also touch base again with customers you haven't heard from in a while and make them a compelling sales offer to win them back.
Just go through your CRM and make yourself aware of all the opportunities you have at your fingertips, and simply forgot about with everything that’s going on. Sometimes we're so focused on reaching more people, getting more leads, and acquiring new customers that we forget about nurturing and delighting our existing ones, and we forget about all the opportunities and open deals that we already have.
If you don't have a CRM and don't know what it is, here's what it is and how it helps you: A CRM (or customer relationship management system) helps you to manage your customer data. It supports your sales management, delivers actionable insights, integrates with social media, and makes your team communication easier.
It will show you when the last time was that a contact has been engaged with your business and can also automatically remind you to follow up.
Ultimately, a CRM helps you to keep track of leads in a system and not in your head.
Step 6. Optimize your website.
Your website is one of your business's most important ambassadors and a crucial component of your digital marketing strategy and branding strategy. If you don't already have a beautifully designed, mobile-friendly and SEO-friendly website, you need one.
Improve your website with special regard to site load speed, accessibility, SEO, the web development and web design best practices, usability, and user experience (UX).
Also, make it easier for your visitors to opt-in by placing more contact forms on your pages. You can also think about adding a live chat feature.
As you can see, you can work with what you already have and find ways to make it better and get the most of it.
If you think you do not have enough resources to carry out a marketing plan – think again and be resourceful.
4. How To Master Lead Generation And Traffic Generation For A Small Business
A steady stream of leads is vital for any small business.
It allows you to grow your email list, customer base, and increase revenue year over year.
But without a lead generation strategy, you'll lose valuable market share to those that have refined this process.
This is a 5-step lead generation process for small businesses that you can implement, and then tweak and optimize to tailor it and make it go smoothly.
Step 1. Identify your target audience.
Know who you want to target and know your ideal customer. Having a buyer persona is incredibly helpful for that. Grab this free buyer persona template to create your today.
Step 2. Create a lead magnet.
Create amazing pieces of educational content that address your leads' pain points, solve their problems with actionable tips, and give them all they want and need.
Ask for something in return for it, like a name, phone number, and email address. This way you can contact your leads later.
Step 3. Promote your lead magnet to your target audience.
You need a promotional plan that will get your content in front of your target audience. Promoting and sharing it is just as important as creating it.
Step 4. Create your marketing funnel.
You need to have a plan for collecting the contact information and what you want to do with it once you got it. Your plan lays out how you want to guide (or funnel) your new leads through the stages towards becoming your customers.
How are you going to collect and store the leads’ contact information? How will you deliver your lead magnet to them? What content do you plan to nurture them with in the future? How and when will you present your sales offer to them once they are in your funnel? How and when will you follow up?
The needs of a person in the different stages of the funnel are different. And you want to be recognized as the solution your new leads need where they are at.
Step 5. Nurture your leads and engage them.
After the conversion is before the conversion. You want to rinse and repeat this process to get repeat customers.
Engage your audience and engage with your audience too. Nurture the customer relationship with the people who care about you and show them that you also care about them.
Lead generation is a continuous process.
You need to get an efficient system in place to reach potential customers and get heard through the noise.
Your leads are only as good as the website that produces them. Explore this digital marketing blog post to learn how to turn a website into a lead generation website.
5. How To Compete With Big Businesses As A Small Business
One of the first steps that every small business owner should take when establishing their business is to study the competition.
Knowing how your prosperous competitors operate will shed light on industry trends and standards, which in turn makes it easier for you to find a small but deep niche you can dominate, know how to price your products and services, what digital marketing tactics work best, and so on.
With all this knowledge, you can then go ahead and craft a digital marketing strategy for your small business.
Consider to include as many of the following points in your small business digital marketing strategy as you see fit for.
- Build personal relationships with customers.
- Go out of your way to help your customers find the right product or service.
- Pleasantries go a long way. Remember to smile, say ‘thank you’, ask how they’re doing.
- You may even start to remember your customer’s names or something else they’d highly appreciate.
- Reach out to other small businesses and form partnerships.
- Position yourself in a unique market niche that is narrow but deep, so you have room to grow and dominate it. Serve a very specific audience. Leave targeting a broad audience to the big businesses until you get there.
- Segment and refine your target audience, and update your buyer personas regularly to keep them updated and make them more detailed as you go.
- Show your personality. Your small business has a ral face to it – yours. Get it out there and flaunt it. People want to know who is behind a company and who they're doing business with.
- Take risks to stay competitive. Adapt fast. Stay competitive. Test out marketing trends and keep up with new technologies.
- Establish a solid online presence with a professional design and build your business’s reputation.
- Constantly make improvements based on customer feedback and always ask for customer feedback.
- Start a customer loyalty program.
- Get involved in the community. Focus on local. Run local promotions and contests.
If you follow these digital marketing tips, you set yourself up for success not to allow big brands to swallow your business.
6. 6 Tips To Choose The Right Social Media Platforms For Your Small Business
With over 200 social media platforms to choose from, how do you know which ones are right for your business? Where do you even begin?
The answer: Be where your audience is at and where they are receptive for your content.
You want to choose the social media platform where you know from research that your target audience hangs out on. And you have verified the intent and sentiment on the platform is aligned with you being able to reach your marketing goals and people being receptive to your content on the platform.
The important thing to remember - when you've selected the channels you want to pursue - is to pick one platform to focus on first and build it up successfully before you work on another one.
Don't try to be active on multiple social media platforms at once when you're just getting started with limited resources. If you try to launch multiple channels at once, your chances of success diminish because you dilute your marketing power as a small business. What you need to do is to concentrate your marketing power and get the most out of it and not spread it out, since you're competing with bigger companies with more resources.
Step 1: Start with your audience.
Create buyer personas for your audience. Your audience is absolutely the most important factor when choosing a social media platform. It's about being social.
Step 2: Consider your business, products and services, and your brand.
Your brand personality and how you want to be seen in the world should fit into the social media platform.
Is your brand highly visual, artsy, creative, casual and cool? Or more professional and sophisticated? Will you make jokes, be political, or use colloquial language at all? This is something important to decide on and stick to.
Step 3: Research successful businesses in your industry.
Next, research what your competition and others in your industry are doing. Identify the most successful players and analyze their strategy. Then decide whether it strategically makes sense to engage and create content like them in your style, or to take a different approach.
Step 4: Study the different platforms and their uses.
You want to look at the way people use the different platforms. How is the vibe on a platform? How do conversations go? What are trending topics that are talked about?
If people want to be entertained, make entertaining content to stay front of mind, and post less educational and informational things. If people are looking to learn more about businesses and professionally network, don't just joke around, be funny, and post quotes. These platforms allow you to promote yourself more directly.
This determines how you can build relationships, brand loyalty, do PR, generate leads and brand awareness, develop your small business, nurture, educate and entertain your community.
You also need to align your activities with your overall digital marketing goals. Some platforms are better suitable for search and discovery, and not really great to make sales. Some are optimized to get purchases from and have integrated sales solutions where you can even set up shop right on the platform.
Also, pay attention to a platform's organic reach. If you need to 'pay to play' and cannot reach your audience without paying for it, don't pick that platform unless you have to have the required marketing budget. If you have more time than dollars to invest in social media marketing for your small business, choose a platform with a good organic reach to see results.
Step 5: Keep your resources in mind.
People, budget, tools, software, content, time, etc. How do you deploy things? Make a plan! Here's a free social media content calendar template for Google Sheets and Excel.
Bonus tip:
Regardless of which social media platform you decide to go with, it may be a good idea to reserve your business name or brand name on social media platforms. That way, no one can take it from you and if you ever decide to expand your social media presence later, you can do so and start to promote and become active on those accounts.
7. How To Build A Visible Brand For Your Small Business
We would never confuse Nordstrom for Walmart or Apple for Microsoft, for instance. That’s because smart brands build a reputation, certain attributes, and visual components, which help them become and stay visible and make us more aware of them.
Brand visibility is critically important to small businesses. You need to let people know that you even exist.
If you’re looking to boost your brand recognition and visibility, keep reading.
You might offer the best product or service on the market these days. However, when your brand isn’t visible to potential customers, it cannot thrive. Recognize your starting position and make a plan to get you where you want to be step-by-step to improve your brand visibility.
With the right marketing campaign, you can help your business receive maximum exposure.
Think about the brands that have great brand visibility and you see all the time.
The reason you see them all the time is because they are present where you are, which means you’re probably in their target audience. And they are doing a great job of putting themselves in front of you and getting your eyeballs attention.
How can you achieve a similar thing for your small business brand? Where can you afford to be seen using paid ads and sponsorships, and where can you get your brand some visibility organically by sharing content?
Then go ahead and do just that. And don't forget to measure the performance of your marketing efforts and invest and distribute your time and marketing budget accordingly, focusing more on the things that work best.
Here are a few ideas, examples and suggestions for building your brand visibility:
Successful brands showcase their products and service experience every chance they get and have a professionally designed logo that people can associate with them.
They also leverage social proof.
When making purchasing decisions, customers trust peer recommendations. That’s actually the major reason why referral marketing plays a key role in brand development. People will be happy to share their positive customer experiences with your product or service, and you can use it to attract and persuade new customers.
Also consider giving them something in return and incentivizing customer reviews and referrals.
Dropbox is a great example for this. They grew so huge because they gave their users 500 MB of additional storage space for each person they refer.
In an increasingly impersonal world, humanizing your brand is an essential process. Take advantage of social listening and find out the biggest issues your customers face when using your product or service or a competitor’s solution and learn from it.
Post employee testimonials and share stories of your staff members along with behind-the-scenes pictures and videos to humanize your brand and also make it more visible.
You can also create online communities on platforms like Slack or social media platforms like Facebook or Clubhouse to allow people to communicate and share their valuable experiences about your service or product in those communities. This makes you more visible as a brand as well because you’re the one making this exchange possible and can brand the content.
SEO gives you the opportunity to appear in the search results in Google and gain more visibility that way.
Nowadays, the majority of people use Google or other search engines when looking for a new service or product or a solution to their problems, or simply more information on a topic.
That’s why online search is imperative for brand visibility. Small company owners know about the importance of using the right keywords but often fail to do it correctly.
SEO is more than just keywords. There is a lot of research, tracking, optimization, technical things in the backend, outreach, and link building involved as well.
When done correctly, SEO will get you lots of free website traffic and visibility in the long run and it snowballs over time.
Customers should know what to expect from your company. That’s why it is key to have consistency in every interaction that is part of the customer experience (CX). Be sure you stay consistent across sales, accounts receivable calls, customer support, on social media platforms, and in your advertising and marketing messages. The consistency also extends to the brand voice and brand tone your employees use when interacting with potential and existing customers.
A clearly defined content strategy can also help you enhance your brand visibility – especially if you write blog posts, post regularly on social media and leverage audio and video.
A content strategy is all about covering the right topics in the correct format, and then using the correct channel for distribution to reach the right audience.
A strong brand visibility lets you stand out even in highly competitive markets and draws in new customers and builds trust. Experiment with various branding and marketing tactics and test them on a regular basis to see what works best for your company.
8. How To Consistently Execute My Small Business Marketing Tasks
We’ve all heard the phrase. You know the one: ‘Consistency is key’.
Key to what? Consistency is the magic key to success, especially in marketing and branding. Consistency is defined as acting or behaving in the same way, or the same quality. As a result, you stand for something and build trust.
January is a month when everyone is in a dynamic mood to welcome the new year. For most businesses, January means making a marketing plan and strategy for the new year ahead and everyone is enthusiastic about it. However, as time goes by, the enthusiasm fades, and the plan is no longer followed consistently.
So how do you avoid slacking?
Your digital marketing cannot be an on/off deal like the last diet you tried out. You need to break down your objectives and define measurable key results for them, and then put tasks on your to-do list you execute on every week. This way you don’t have this big, vague goal in front of you, but you have clear, small tasks in front of you, you can execute consistently.
Don’t allow things to pile up because you feel paralyzed by your big goals. Break it down and execute one step at a time.
Be consistent in the quality, quantity, and message of your marketing. This will add value to your small business. Also, be consistent with your lead generation, and customers, and collection of customer reviews. This will give you engagement and keep the flywheel turning, so you always have a running system that consistently produces results for your small business.
- Quality: Produce amazing quality every time and don’t allow the quality of your content and work to waver. If it does, you run the risk of your readers dropping like flies and you not generating the leads you want.
- Quantity: You also need to produce enough content and get enough work done to stay relevant and front of mind. Consistently post content to your blog and social media profiles, so that you are present and reachable to those you want to connect with. If you aren’t consistent in this area, then you don’t seem present to your potential customers, but absent, unimportant, and not a valuable use of their time.
- Message: Your message should be presented to your audience in the same fashion to get the same point across each time. Tell the same story and the same message in many different ways to make it stick and get it across. Consistently convey the value you set out to give. You can be creative in how you portray your message, but the idea needs to stay the same not to confuse the audience.
- Leads: Consistently creating and publishing entertaining, educational, convincing, and inspiring content will help you capture the audience’s attention. As a result, you will generate more leads for your business.
- Customers: As you consistently provide quality content for your leads they will find you trustworthy and begin converting into customers. Stay consistent in being educational and delight them, use the language they use, and meet them where they are. This is when you have to put in a consistent effort not to lose them to the competition.
- Engagement and customer reviews: Aim to get consistent engagement with your content to stay relevant and build momentum. Social proof is key to winning more customers over. Make it a part of your digital marketing strategy for your small business to collect and strategically use and showcase customer reviews. Reviews are content you can post, too. It helps the brand and image of your business.
Inconsistency can potentially destroy any of the efforts you have already made. Without consistency you will stagnate and become a mere speck in the ever expanding sea of content.
Consistency will give you the leads you want, convert your leads to customers, and increase customer engagement and reviews.
Whether you publish blogs every day or once per week, it’s crucial for your small business to choose and adhere to a schedule. You need a content calendar or content marketing plan. Execute on it every week and have enough pieces of content ready to schedule them out in advance.
Project management tools like Trello, Slack, etc. help you to stay on top on everything and send you and your team reminders. They also help you to make sure you track how all of your content performs and check the engagement, so you know what to create more or less of.
Creating content doesn’t have to be a difficult or complicated process, but it does need to be consistent and valuable to your audience.
Start by creating a shared document that holds all of your content ideas and a specific publishing schedule. Assign due dates and important tasks to each team member, and elect one member to oversee the project.
According to Techipedia, consistent brands are worth 20% more than those with inconsistencies in their messaging.
So remember: Even if the consistent execution of your marketing activities is a marketing challenge, it is certainly a marketing challenge worth taking.
Once you got your workflows down, consistently executing your brand and content strategy will feel like a natural routine, and you can introduce marketing automation to save even more time and eliminate human error to it as well as you progress.
9. How To Create Content For Your Small Business & Distribute and Promote It Successfully
Content builds trust, brand recognition, helps your SEO, creates leads, and establishes your expertise.
By creating new content consistently, you're building a library of amazing resources that define your brand. Every time someone clicks on your article or image, you're instilling name recognition. It allows you to consciously get on their mind with something relevant and helpful.
Today, if you're not online, you don't matter. You want to show up in the newsfeed, stay top of mind, and get people's attention.
Creating content is also a great way to compete with larger companies with big budgets because you can get started by simply investing some of your time.
Providing answers to questions and explaining solutions that help the people in your audience out also has a ripple effect that gets stronger over time. You are working on becoming the recognized authority in your field and people will seek you out. People will start to prefer you over other providers.
For example, have a look at our collection of digital marketing questions and answers for small business owners.
The content you’ve created years ago, will continue to generate you leads and customers today. People buy from people.
But:
That doesn’t happen overnight. So how can you consistently produce and deliver content?
The answer:
You need a content marketing strategy for your small business. You need to follow a plan, research topics, take the time to create the content pieces, edit them, deliver and publish them, analyze their performance, etc.
The most important thing is just taking the first step and getting started.
Practice makes perfect and your 10th, 30th, and 40th article, video, etc. will be better than your 1st attempts. You tweak it as you go.
You also don’t have to come up with completely new content all the time. You can repurpose your existing content and distribute it across a variety of marketing channels and platforms.
You can take a 30 minute video interview of you networking, and chop it up into three dozen pieces of micro content. This could be everything from memes, quotes, short video clips, long video clips, an article based on the transcript, and an audio podcast.
Get inspiration for all the different types of content you can create in our podcast episode about content marketing examples.
Also, make sure your content is social, shareable and digestible.
Take advantage of UGC (user generated content), support and incentivize when people talk about you, share posts that mention you and engage with them, and make it easy for your users to help you promote your content by e.g. including social sharing buttons.
You make your content more user-friendly if you break it up in smaller sections with subheadings, use bulleted lists, etc. so people can easily consume it on the fly, skim through it, and get what they need in an easily digestible format.
You also don’t have to do everything alone. There is affordable help out there. Look for capable freelanders, virtual assistants, digital marketing agencies, etc. that you can outsource some work to.
In addition to that, there are content marketing tools that make it easier for you to create content and can even do it automatically. Check out Canva and Descript.
Check out our 101 video guide about digital content creation.
The glue that holds everything together is your content strategy. You definitely need a plan of action to follow, that’s been designed to bring you closer to your business goals, and defines the purpose of each piece of content.
This is how to get started with content marketing and how to create a content marketing strategy for your small business:
Step 1:
Firstly, it is key to have a content calendar, also called an editorial calendar. A Google calendar or a spreadsheet will be just fine for this when you're just starting out.
Your content calendar defines:
- which content you will create and publish
- when you will do so
- on which channels
- which topics you'll create content around
- which keywords to use
- what the title and headline will be
- which hashtags to use when posting it on social media
- how you will be repurposing your content
Step 2:
Categorize your content in different buckets.
Here's a beginner-friendly approach with 3 content buckets you can take to get started right now:
- Hero content - inspiring content that supports your brand mission
- Hub content - regularly scheduled entertaining content for engagement, awareness, and impressions to convince people of your EAT (expertise, trustworthiness, and authority)
- Help content - educational content that answers questions, solves problems, and is helpful
As you go, you can come up with more or different content buckets.
Step 3:
You need to have a goal in mind for each piece of content that you create and it needs to be based on audience research.
You don't want to waste your time and energy on creating content that nobody needs or wants and only you thought they would need or want it out of a gut feeling.
That is a major mistake a lot of people make. You’re smarter than that. Make data driven decisions and look at your marketing analytics.
How to make data-driven content marketing decisions:
- Look at what your best-performing social media posts are
- Write down all the questions you get asked, and answer the most frequently asked questions in your content
- Research what the most visited and shared pages on your competitor's websites are and create better versions on your own
- Find out what top ranking articles are and write better versions for you own blog
- Find out what the most shared content pieces on social media are and post your own branded versions
- Find out what the most linked to resources of your niche on the internet are and create better ones
- Set priorities based on the actual demand, and work data-driven and results-oriented
- Create content that can be repurposed for as many different purposes as possible
Examples of content marketing goals:
- Generate brand awareness
- Generate leads and customers
- Collect email addresses for your email list
- Get you press and PR
- Get lots of engagement
- Grow your number of followers and subscribers
- Increase word-of-mouth referrals
- Encourage getting customer reviews and testimonials
- Increases your brand visibility on marketing channel X
Step 4:
Measure your performance with meaningful metrics and look at the marketing analytics regularly.
There are a variety of tools and metrics you can measure your performance with.
For instance, it’s advantageous to use a social media management tool to post on all your social platforms for you and detailed analytics from it. For content on your website, you can use Google Analytics and Google Search Console to analyze the performance.
You can also see how your different pieces of content stack up against each other. Determine the best performers and see what they have in common to replicate successes. In the same manner, avoid and minimize wasted content marketing efforts and see what to improve in underperforming pieces of content before you promote them again.
See how your content contributes to your conversion rate and how it impacts your bottom line.
In this podcast episode, you will learn more about how to create a content marketing strategy for your small business.
Here are 14 digital content creation tips:
- Collect topic ideas that serve your small business and are valuable to your target audience and buyer personas.
- Do your research on topic ideas and prioritize accordingly.
- Think about the headline and title first before you think about the body content and include SEO keywords.
- Determine the direction, purpose, and message of your piece of content. How it is supposed to help your business and get people in your funnel?
- Make sure your content is original and unique. Plagiarism can get you in trouble and duplicate content doesn’t do well and is penalized by many algorithms.
- Make sure your content provides answers. When people consume it, it should be a good use of their time and result in a positive sentiment.
- Make sure your content is actionable. People want to be able to take action and solve their problems. The answer to their problems shouldn’t just be implied, but explicit steps should be mentioned.
- Make sure your content is thought-provoking and shareworthy. Who knows… it might go viral.
- Make some notes, collect information and data, structure and organize it, before you begin to create your piece of content. You cannot always add things you’ve forgotten to mention later, so the planning phase is crucial.
- Add credible and accurate sources of information, like statistics and numbers, and give credit where deserved in the form of mentions and links.
- Proofread and double check. There are free tools that do this for you.
- Publish, distribute, and promote your content. The content promotion is just as important as the content creation, because your content is only valuable when people see it.
- Check your content performance and track and measure the effectiveness. How many leads and customers are you getting from a particular content piece?
- Regularly revisit your pieces of content, and keep them updated and relevant. Also, promote them continuously. This way your older pieces of content will continue to generate you business.
I have one challenge for you:
Post something today!
You've been waiting for the perfect camera, the perfect microphone, the perfect lighting, or a sudden blessing with world-class writing skills without practice.
The smartphone you hold in your hand everyday is an amazing content creation tool and all it takes to get started.
Your first piece of content can be sharing this blog post on social media today. Just start today.
10. How To Expand To More Marketing Channels And Increase Your Small Business' Online Presence
The modern digital world allows us to be everywhere, at all times. And brands have the ability to be everywhere at the same time, too.
So, we want to aim to achieve omnipresence with our brands and small businesses and keep up with and take advantage of this to stay front of mind.
You want to know your customers and their needs and find new channels to reach them to become omnipresent.
The perfect business example for omnipresence in marketing is Coca-Cola. They are everywhere at the same time, whether it’s a shop, bar, restaurant, vending machine, canteen, café, hotel, in TV commercials, on billboards, on every major social media platform, etc.
As a small business, it is important not to try to do everything all at once when you’re just starting out, not really know what you’re doing, and have limited resources. Expanding too quickly has put many companies out of business, so it’s important to do it carefully when the time is right.
First, you need to make sure what you’re doing is working for you. When you have the right systems and processes in place, you can think about growing your business by scaling it to a larger scale, and using more marketing channels to be present, and to attract leads and customers.
This is not something you can do overnight, however there are a variety of things you can do as a small business and a small brand to expand your online presence step-by-step.
To learn more about it, I recommend watching this video podcast about omnipresence marketing.
A cost-effective way to expand marketing channels is to include more social media platforms into your digital marketing strategy. Basic social media marketing tasks can draw in new customer groups. Master the basics of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube & Co and share valuable content that’s tailored to the platform on a consistent basis.
Wait until you have established a sizable and engaged audience on one channel, before you expand to the next. You do not want to dilute your marketing power and not be successful anywhere because you spread your eggs across too many baskets at once.
When done right, spreading the word about your brand on social media platforms is an excellent way to help it become and stay visible.
If you’re really feeling innovative, try InAppStory to push your numbers even higher.
11. How To Keep Up With Trends And Technology As A Small Business Owner
If we look at the snapshot of the previous five years, you will see a shift in the way brands promote their products or services.
Technology is constantly evolving. It's high time for us small business owners to keep up with the latest digital marketing news and trends.
How can you adapt to the latest digital marketing trends?
It will be an understatement to say there has been a shift in the way brands and businesses use the internet in general. Over the years, email, blogging, social media, etc. have evolved into great tools for marketing. And, brands have realized they need a future-proof strategy to move ahead and make a mark for themselves in the online world.
Here’s what to do:
Multiply your ROI by doubling down on the channels that you know are working for you, and do not keep on adding more channels hoping it will help your ROI.
It is better to bundle and focus your time and resources on the channels you know work for your audience. Get more out of the channels you already have a presence on and leverage them more efficiently, rather than looking to expand. This way you go deeper into the marketing channels and not cast a wider net.
Following this digital marketing strategy does require you to only stay up top date with the news and trends happening about your core channels, and you do not have to worry about anything else.
It’s a cost-efficient way to grow your brand and small business and stay front of mind with state-of-the-art content and channels you know it resonates on.
If you constantly look to expand and cast a wider net instead of going deeper first, you will end up diluting your marketing power as a small business.
The thing is that only in theory for every marketing channel you add, you can improve your ROI and effectiveness. That’s because each channels has to be managed, planned, strategized for, reported on, analyzed, tracked, created content for, and more. Otherwise it’s not worthwhile for you to use that channel because it’s a competitive shark tank you likely won’t stand a chance to make an impact on and be seen and heard through the noise.
As for keeping up with the trends, tools, and technology on the few channels you now put all of your focus on, you can follow trusted resources and subject matter experts in the space that break it all down into easy-to-digest nuggets of content you can consume during your day as a sideline.
To keep up with trends, tools, and technology in the small business marketing space, Dragon Digital Marketing is a great resource to follow.
12. How To Come Up With The Effort And Patience Organic SEO Marketing Requires
You know what? It’s true. Organic search traffic does require quite a lot of effort and patience. But… here’s why it’s more important than paid traffic and so worth investing in:
Why is organic traffic important? Organic traffic is important because it is targeted and free.
Users visiting your website from a search engine's organic results have a very specific intent and if you can provide them with a solution or answer to their question, they are more likely to convert.
It makes sense to invest in getting free targeted traffic in the long term, and not keep on paying for and relying on paid traffic forever, without putting any money against an ‘insurance policy’ against raising advertising costs and the potential to eventually get it for free. Relying on paid forever likely isn’t sustainable.
As long as you keep on optimizing your website for SEO, the ranking of your website will continue to improve. When you keep your content updated, relevant, and evergreen, you’ll remain relevant to the search engines like Google and your rankings can be pretty permanent and give you cost-effective, long-term results.
Organic search traffic can give you a competitive edge, become a great marketing asset of your small business, is an excellent method of brand building, and results in more engaged, highly-qualified prospects.
That’s exactly what your small business needs to grow and scale.
Read this article to learn more about organic search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search engine marketing (SEM).
13. Who To Trust When Outsourcing Your Small Business Marketing
You feel overwhelmed with marketing your small business and need help with it, but don’t know who to trust. How can you be sure to make the right choice when you can’t afford making the wrong choice and starting over with a new person?
Keep on reading to learn how.
Here are 18 tips to choose the right solution for outsourcing your small business marketing:
1. They are legitimate and credible.
Don't fall for big words and a beautiful website and do your own homework about them. Make sure it's a legit company and they actually know what they're talking about.
Look for content they have and search for their name on Google and YouTube. You can also directly ask them for case studies and similar projects they've done before.
2. They offer the services you need and have the required expertise.
Ask yourself 'why' do you need help with digital marketing? What are your needs and what services do you require?
Is it content marketing, SEO, social media marketing, website optimisation? Or do you want someone to handle your email marketing, marketing automation, and marketing analytics?
It's best to outsource your small business marketing to someone that is equipped with the right skillset and can fulfill all your requirements.
3. They can help you with your digital marketing strategy and Its execution.
It's important that you pick somebody that's hands on and not just hypes you up with a lot of creative ideas that they can't plan and execute properly. Look for somebody that puts the same level of emphasis on the execution and implementation of your digital marketing as they put on creativity.
4. Their values and company culture are similar to yours.
Take a moment to revisit your personal and your small business' core values and culture. It's good to work with a person that values the same things and operates accordingly.
Ultimately, they should act as an extension of your own business.
Looking into values and culture is just as important as considering the quality of their work.
5. They ask lots of questions and encourage you to ask questions too.
It’s a good indicator when the person makes an effort to understand you and your small business and asks a lot of questions. Ideally, they also encourage you to ask questions.
6. They don’t make outlandish promises.
The type of claims they make and results they promise are a strong indicator of how well they understand digital marketing.
For example, anyone claiming to fast track your way to the number one spot on the Google Search results, doesn't know that SEO is a long-term digital marketing strategy and requires continuous work. So, that's probably not someone you should hire to help optimize your website for SEO.
If something sounds too good to be true, that's because it probably is. Outlandish or seemingly impossible promises are a red flag. Stick to someone that offers transparency and realistic promises.
7. They are easy to get in touch with when you need them.
You should be able to contact them quickly and easily and know how to schedule a meeting.
8. They are prepared to do their homework about your small business.
It's essential to have everyone on the same page, so it is a good sign when the person makes the effort to learn the ins and outs of your business. Knowing your business, its offering, and target customers, is a huge factor for the success of your marketing campaigns.
9. They understand the scope, process, and timeline of the work.
Before the project starts, they should create a project plan and make sure every person with a stake in it agrees on the scope and timeline before moving forward, and each step is clear before the project begins.
10. They don’t promise you a completely hands-off experience and encourage collaboration.
When the success and growth of your business is on the line, you want to work with someone who checks in with you and gets your ‘ok’ at times. The best digital marketing projects are highly collaborative and your input, thoughts, ideas and feedback help to move the project forward in the right direction to match your digital marketing goals.
11. They have social proof like testimonials, customer reviews, and case studies.
Before you hire anybody, ask for proof of their work experience and expertise. Ideally, you'll see some customer testimonials, positive customer reviews, and get access to case studies.
12. They document and track important metrics and can report to you.
Metrics and marketing analytics are the best way you'll be able to tell if your marketing investments have a positive return investment (ROI) and are effective.
Make sure your helper measures the right metrics, not the vanity metrics, and keeps track of your marketing campaign performance properly.
13. They have technical expertise.
Digital marketing can get technical quickly. It’s advantageous to work with someone who has technical expertise and you don't have to consult another third party person.
14. They practice what they preach.
What does their own marketing look like? Do they follow their own advice? You want to work with people who practice what they preach and live what they teach.
15. Their own digital marketing is exemplary.
Their own digital marketing oftentimes is a reflection of what they are capable of doing. Check out their content and how high-quality it is. Inspect their website and social media activity. Have a look at their email campaigns and landing pages. It's a good sign if their own digital marketing is exemplary and acts as a showpiece.
16. They have a well-designed website.
A website is a digital storefront and shows you the level of professionalism.
17. They use state-of-the-art technology.
Sometimes you don’t know about the tools and softwares that are the best to get a certain thing done. But if you do have the knowledge, ask them about it. If they're working with state-of-the-art technology and tools for digital marketing, that's a good sign they are on top of their game.
18. You get what you pay for.
Fast, cheap, good. You can only pick two. If it's fast and cheap, it won't be good. If it's cheap and good, it won't be fast. If it's fast and good, it won't be cheap.
It's not advisable to go for a cheap option, because people tend to charge what they’re worth. A person who is great at their craft will typically not charge low prices. If you're hunting for a discount, chances are you'll end up with someone that cuts corners and hurts your performance.
Every project or ongoing work, big or small, deserves the attention of a true digital marketing expert. With so many options to choose from, choosing the right solution to outsource your digital marketing or hire someone in-house can feel overwhelming.
Now you know what to look for and feel more confident.
Use the tips mentioned in this article when you're on the hunt for a digital marketer that's ready to bring your ideas to life.
If you are not sure whether to hire a digital marketing agency, a freelancer, a virtual assistant (VA), or an in-house digital marketer, read this comparison article with pros and cons to make the right choice.
14. How To Overcome Budgetary Constraints To Hire A Marketing Team
Who says that you need to hire your own in-house marketing person or team as a small business? When you’re just starting out, you can learn how to do a few simple things yourself using the digital marketing resources of our digital marketing resource center.
When you feel confident enough to be able to judge the quality of marketing work and direct helpers, you can look into finding a virtual assistant (VA), freelancer, or digital marketing agency to lend you a helping hand. This oftentimes is cheaper in the short and medium-term, and you have no long-term commitment and can work with them on a project-to-project basis.
We have put together an honest comparison of the pros and cons of digital marketing agency vs freelancer vs in-house marketing team to help you make the right choice for your small business.
Conclusion
Every business faces marketing challenges.
You just have to learn how to overcome them and continuously aim to improve to grow and scale your business. Marketing challenges are not a bad thing. They are necessary for growth.
To overcome any challenge, developing a plan is key. Now you have the information you need to create a digital marketing strategy for your small business.
This blog article gave you digital marketing tips, inspiration, and solutions to overcome some of the most common marketing challenges for small businesses.
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