Social media is here to stay so if your small business still hasn’t taken a step into the world of online marketing, it’s time you swallow the pill. Your target audience is probably too absorbed in their phone screens to pay attention to the banners and posters you are putting up – it’s time to enter the space your audience is paying attention to.
The bigger your online presence, the more exposure your brand gets, and the greater your brand awareness will be. This will lead to people having more confidence in your brand and that will make all your online efforts worth it.
While venturing into the online space may seem daunting to you, your digital strategy can be broken down into a few simple chunks that make it easier for you to maximize your online presence. Let’s walk you through simple yet effective strategies.
Social Media Marketing
We tracked global phone activity to see how we spend our time on the phone and found that the results were embarrassingly tilted towards social media. And I’m sure many people can relate to this; an average person spends 2 hours and 22 minutes on social media every day! Our new social media obsession, though, is something you can capitalize on as a small business. After all, social media is a platform that lets you share content with a few clicks for free and enables you to reach your target audience. Not only is it a great way of reminding existing customers about your brand, it also lets you reach new people that can potentially turn into loyal customers down the line. Clearly, social media does wonders for brand awareness!
Now that we’ve convinced you why your small business needs social media, let’s address your concerns about it. It is free to use, yes, but your words alone won’t carry as much weight as relevant and engaging visuals would. But to create such visuals, you will no doubt have to pump in some money to hire a professional graphic designer, right? Wrong. You can, instead, use affordable options like PosterMyWall to create social media graphics yourself without even needing any design expertise. PosterMyWall offers ready-made professionally-designed social media templates that you can customize to your needs by changing text, imagery and other design elements and then download for free!
When posting online, it’s important to ensure you are covering all social media platforms your target audience is likely to be active on. Maintaining an active presence on all these social media platforms might seem like a lot of hassle. As a small business owner, you don’t have the time to create content for every individual platform. If you started doing this, you’d most likely drain all your resources. No need to worry! Posting the same visual on all your selected platforms does not mean having to recreate the same design in 5 different sizes every time. Simply use the free Resize feature in the PosterMyWall editor to resize the design to any of the 60+ design sizes available, or create a custom size.
Once all your designs and design sizes are ready, you can publish your posts directly to your Facebook pages and Twitter accounts through PosterMyWall’s extensive sharing options. Their Premium plan even allows you to schedule the posts for later – just add your caption and schedule the post for a specific time and simply move on to your next task without worrying about the hassle of posting at different times.
Content Writing
After social media, the content you produce for your blog, newsletters or website will reach the most number of people in your target audience. Content marketing allows you to put a laser focus on all the great information and expertise your business has to offer and makes it available for buyers. If your content is useful and well-written, it will establish your business as an expert in the industry and your customer base will grow as people learn to turn to you for information the next time they find themselves in need.
A blog or website is quite simple to create nowadays with sites like WordPress and HubSpot that walk you through the process of creating and managing the site. What is more complicated is getting the right content out in the right packaging. The attention span of digital natives is relatively short so your content should be sharp and focused as you spread the vision for your business, and the range of topics you cover should be diverse and comprehensive. Some basic knowledge of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can also help lead to higher search engine rankings for your content as people search the Internet and find their way to you. (Don’t worry, we will discuss this in more detail later.)
You have to remember, however, that never-ending blocks of text on your blog will get you nowhere, even if the information you are providing is solid. Your audience needs to have the text broken up into chunks for them to consume it more easily and the easiest way to do that is to add captivating visuals to your content. Customizing your blog by using eye-catching graphics and enticing blog headers can be a game-changer for bounce-rate and make the reader want to read on. Adding a nice-looking and useful visual after every 400 words can help to break up the text and make the content more easy to consume.
Such graphics are easy to create using PosterMyWall which offers hundreds of blog header templates to add a personalized and captivating preview to your blog post, quote templates to highlight certain sentences in the blog post or add credibility to the post by citing known authorities on the topic, and many other options, depending on the nature of the blog post.
Email Marketing
Email is one of the best ways to share news, updates and helpful tips about your product, as well as any new content you have been creating, with your audience. But people receive a lot of emails in a day and it is easy for your email to go unnoticed or ignored in a full inbox so it is important to craft your email well in order to cover more ground in terms of audience.
The subject line of such an email is critical. An engaging subject increases the chances of the reader opening the email. Personalizing your email content and subject lines for different segments of your target audience can increase your chances of being read but making intriguing content to get everyone curious is also an effective strategy.
It is also important to track the success of the emails you are sending out to check if they are as effective as you would like them to be. Testing different subject lines for the same email, known as A/B testing, can help you determine what kind of subject is more likely to be opened by people in your target audience. Many email campaign softwares, like MailChimp and Active Campaign, have built-in A/B testing tools.
Making your emails visually appealing and engaging is important to make people pause and read the email before they decide to close it. As a banner maker, PosterMyWall’s hundreds of stunning email header templates are sure to do wonders for your email bounce rates.
Repurposing
Your best performing content should be leveraged to get more attention by repurposing them into fresh material for other platforms. This is one of the oldest tricks in the book to increase your online presence with minimal extra input. Recycling an engaging blog post you wrote into other types of content saves you a lot of time and effort – it can be turned into a YouTube video tutorial, for example. Some people find it easier to watch videos than read blog posts to get the information they require so you should have all your content spread across all channels. Some people also prefer to receive information in small bites instead of long-form blog posts. In that case, a blog post can also be taken apart and used as a series of informational posts on social media. Keep in mind that all channels are not suitable for all types of content so be careful when deciding how to repurpose your content.
But that doesn’t mean you have to create the same imagery again and again in different sizes to suit different platforms. Simply hit the free Resize button in the PosterMyWall editor and choose from over 60 different sizes or create your own custom size.
Optimizing for SEO
You hear the term Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, and how important it is in digital marketing spaces but what is SEO really? When most people run a search on the Internet, they click on one of the top 5 search results on the page and that’s where you want your business to appear. SEO is done to improve the chances that your business will pop up in one of these top spots when someone searches for a term or keyword that is relevant to the product that you offer. This makes SEO one of the primary ways to increase your reach and maximize your digital footprint.
To get an edge over your competitors, you need to optimize all your content for SEO, including your web pages, blog posts and articles. It might sound complicated to a layman or someone not very tech savvy but it is actually quite simple, especially with the help of tools like SEMrush that help you identify important keywords that Internet users commonly search for. It allows you to strategically target keywords keeping in mind keyword volume, keyword difficulty, and other metrics. It also lets you track and update saved keywords and offers a site audit as well as an on-page SEO checker and keyword gap analysis.
Conclusion
Keeping up with new digital marketing trends is essential to keep your audience engaged and convince them to become loyal customers. Start with defining a clear digital marketing objective for your business and then put the strategies we have outlined here into action to make a splash in the online space.
While venturing into digital marketing can seem overwhelming at first to people new to this domain, by using tools like PosterMyWall, WordPress and SEMrush, and breaking it down into smaller tasks and milestones, any business owner can become a digital marketing pro.
