Before you put on your reading costume and dive into this article, I would kindly direct you to first read my first piece on this topic titled ‘Really, what is Digital Marketing’ which will do you a whole lot of good in understanding and appreciating contents of the following paragraphs.
Read article here; Really, what is Digital Marketing
While the first article was a general introductory discussion for small businesses to digital marketing, this one is a more pragmatic guide on how and where to begin your digital marketing strategy, the little things that count, and what your major focus should be at beginner’s level.
If you are a small business seriously considering or even somewhat curious about venturing into digital marketing and didn’t know where to begin, here is your guide;
- First, Get a website
I’ve already tackled this mega issue in a separate detailed article and I can’t emphasize it enough.
Read article here; Does our small business need a website?
A website is the backbone to your online presence and must be at the center of your digital marketing strategy right from the very start. Most small businesses are still dragging their feet on this but the few forward thinking ones have super websites for their small businesses and are set to remain relevant and smoke out any competitors still in the stone age out of the market.
It is on your business website where you display your products or services, describe them in detail, outline different packages or customizations and a tone of other information social media platforms may not be able to provide you. Your website is always available online 24/7 all year around which means a prospective client can visit it at anytime, anywhere on any device and easily learn about your products and services.
Even if your online marketing is majorly aimed at getting people to pick up the phone and ring you, it is important to lead them to your website for more information, variety and for brand strengthening. In any case, a person willing enough to give you a call to find out about your products will most probably not hesitate to click on your website link to read more for themselves before eventually reaching out. This is an absolutely logical argument, think about it.
Regardless of your business, a website is a compulsory for successful digital marketing. If you don’t have one, let our team at Clinet Online get you started with a wonderful design.
2 .Social Media
Now that you have a brilliant website designed to be simple, with color scheme that is consistent with your branding, SEO ready, and most importantly easy on the eyes of your target audience – it’s time to get down to the real digital marketing.
Social Media is the best beginner’s starting point playground. It’s free/cheap, easy to use and pretty straightforward to an everyday person who is not a techy, right? … wrong!! Building your brand and selling on social media (Facebook and twitter) is very difficult than it sounds and looks. It in fact requires super experienced digital marketers like our team here at Clinet Online to get your products flying off the shelves and making a meaningful return for your business. How then can it be that I’m advocating a difficult channel for your business?
While it is a tough channel with all the jokers and spammers, social media is a wonderful place for you to begin experimenting with your products and pointing people to your website. It will help you to easily study your target audience and considerably shorten your learning curve. Social media marketing doesn’t have shortcuts; you must do the heavy lifting in the first months before you turn that ‘like button’ into an attractive magnetic field.
The key to success is consistency and learning something new every day about your target audience. Be alert for timely response to comments and messages as social media is all about conversations relevant to people. If you don’t respond to comments and ‘likes’ then your post will eventually fade away and be replaced with other threads and posts.
The many challenges on social media combined with the friendly user experience make a perfect balance for a beginner’s playground.
- Analytics
One of the most important lessons every beginner needs to learn about digital marketing is that actual sales are not always the only measure for a particular digital marketing strategy success. Now don’t get me wrong, sales should be the ultimate success pointer and in fact this is true. However, when it comes to digital marketing, a certain technique say social media can take a considerable stretch of time before it can begin manifesting itself in form of sales. This is perfectly normal even for digital marketing strategies run by veteran skilled marketers.
As already mentioned, consistency and patience are vital in the pursuit of your destination which is selling, selling and more selling. But even so, blind consistency and patience are the perfect recipe for failure. In digital marketing there is interestingly a yardstick for hope and it’s called Analytics!!
Analytics help you to know and understand how your marketing techniques are working, what’s not working and what might be working. It gives you the finer details of how people online are reacting to your posts and by extension your products. This boosts your confidence as a beginner and allows you to formulate fresh strategies on how to improve your digital marketing techniques.
There are a tone of Analytics techniques/websites available on the internet to choose from but few work satisfactorily. At Clinet Online we recommend Google Analytics. It is detailed and a little intimidating at the beginning but once you know your way around it gets much easier.
After you have mastered your social media marketing skills and stabilized your website, you are now ready to move into more advanced digital marketing techniques that will help you scale and reach more people. You will now be ready to translate clicks, comments and like into sales.
At Clinet Online, we take great joy in educating you about great online techniques which can help grow your small business or product line. Remaining faithful to this, we shall follow up this article with another on advanced digital marketing techniques you can use for your business. Stick around.
Thank you for taking time to go through our website. If you love our great content or our services here at Clinet Online, feel free to kindly leave us a comment.