5 Tips To Get Started on Digital Marketing for Your Small Business

Digital marketing is crucial for the longevity of your small business in a digital-first world.

If you don't already have a digital marketing strategy or invest in any digital channel, such as email marketing, content marketing, or social media, you may be wondering how digital marketing can help your small business and if it's worth the investment.

"We live in a digital-first world, and Google has changed how they rank sites and businesses. You have to update things to stay relevant."

Joe Papa

CEO of Liquid X Energy

A strong digital marketing strategy helps your business remain visible on Google and connected with consumers through social media, email, as well as helpful content on your website's blog. 

But like with most things, getting started is the hardest part. With so many different digital elements to choose from, how do you know where to even begin? 

If you're a small-business owner or decision-maker looking to bring digital marketing to your small business, here are five things to do to get you started.

1. Identify your business goals

Whether you have an in-house team dedicated to digital marketing or work with a third-party digital marketing agency, the first thing you need to do is identify what you hope to achieve with your digital marketing strategy. 

Your overall goal may be to increase sales, but this alone is not specific enough. How do you want to achieve this? 

One goal could be to build relationships with consumers who might become customers in the future. Or perhaps you want to maintain relationships with existing customers so they'll keep coming back. Another goal could be to increase your company's online visibility to get more eyes on your products and services.

Each of these goals would require a different approach, but all get to the same overarching goal of increasing sales. By identifying your goals on how you want to get there, you can better understand which type of digital marketing will be the best fit for your business. 

2. Define your audience

If you don't know who your audience is, it will be impossible to reach them (whoever they are). When you start to build your digital marketing strategy, it's critical to define your target audience in terms of demographics such as age group, gender, interests, and location (i.e., your town or state). This will make it easier to figure out where and how to connect with them. 

If you want to focus your small business digital marketing strategy on developing your social media presence, for example, it's important to know the demographics of certain platforms. Older generations tend to prefer Facebook, while younger generations tend to prefer Instagram and TikTok. If your target audience are people born between 1946 and 1964, you'd be wasting time, money, and energy investing in a robust TikTok marketing strategy. 

Conversely, if your target audience are people born between the ages of 1996 and 2015, you won't see a high conversion rate through Facebook.^[2]

The moral of the story is to know where your audience hangs out online so you can meet them where they already are. 

3. Build a social media presence

Once you define your goal and your audience, you'll know where to find them. Start building a social media presence on platforms your audience prefers by creating a schedule and posting consistently. 

Posting frequency should be adjusted for each platform. According to Sprout Social^[3], businesses should post on TikTok one to four times a day, Instagram one to two times a day, Facebook four to five times a day, LinkedIn once a day, Twitter three to four times a day, and Pinterest once a day. 

If you post too often, certain platforms' algorithms can penalize you, decreasing the overall visibility of your posts.

You'll also want to make sure your content makes sense for each platform. For example, create short videos for TikTok, post highly visual content on Instagram, and keep Tweets at around 280 characters. 

When you're just beginning to engage with consumers on social media, it might feel really overwhelming in the beginning. If your marketing team is handling this in-house, consider investing in a social media marketing tool that can automatically post scheduled content and collect performance metrics such as likes, shares, and comments. 

If you're working with an agency, make sure to get regular updates about how your content is performing on each social media platform.

4. Hire out responsibilities as needed

Creating content for and managing multiple digital marketing channels at once can get really overwhelming, especially when you’re also collecting and analyzing metrics to understand how each channel is performing. 

If you choose to manage digital channels in-house, be sure to have one or two people dedicated solely to digital marketing, creating content, outlining strategies for individual channels (i.e., Facebook and Instagram should have separate strategies), managing these channels, and collecting metrics to inform future strategies. This requires a lot of bandwidth and is a full-time job, not a side responsibility. 

As a small business, however, you may not have the manpower to build a robust strategy for each of your digital channels. If that's the case, keep your strategy simple by focusing on only one or two digital channels), or hire out some or all of your digital marketing responsibilities to a third-party agency. If you choose to hire a digital marketing agency, be sure to communicate your goals and get regular reports about how the channels are performing. 

By outlining your strategies for each of your online marketing channels and platforms, such as Facebook, email, and Instagram, and keeping track of performance metrics, you can inform future campaigns by knowing what type of content works and what falls short.

5. Know your competitors

Your customers have options, so it's always a good idea to keep an eye on your competitors.  

When conducting a competitor audit, you want to find out how your competitors are approaching their digital marketing strategy. Ask yourself:

• How are my competitors using social media?

• Are people liking, sharing, or commenting on their content?

• What types of products or services do they offer? 

• What makes them unique? What makes you unique? 

• What types of content are they producing (e.g., blogs, eBooks, checklists, whitepapers, videos, etc.)?

After the initial audit, keep a pulse on their digital content and note any changes to their approach. Perhaps they start using more video content or change the layout of their website or start a social media campaign.

Or, perhaps they start to capitalize on a trend that resonates with consumers. If your competitors start to create content about a new topic, you’ll want to find out why and if it's a topic you should also post about. 

It's important to stay in the know so you can ensure your own strategy remains relevant to consumers and your competitors' digital marketing strategy doesn't outcompete yours.

You don't have to approach digital marketing alone 

To develop and maintain digital marketing strategies, you can choose to do so in-house using digital marketing software or by hiring a digital marketing agency. Whatever you choose will depend on budget, goals, location, and employee bandwidth. 

If managing a digital marketing strategy in-house doesn’t work with your business needs, you have options. You could hire a freelance marketer or a digital marketing agency that offers specialized focus such as social media or a full-service marketing agency. 

To help you easily remember these tips to get started with digital marketing, we’re including this checklist below for you to reference in the future.