7 Steps for Creating a Small Business Digital Marketing Strategy that Generates a Solid Income

Looking to take your small business online or start an online business altogether? Just because you've set up a website doesn't necessarily mean you're going to generate customers. In order to succeed online, you need an effective digital marketing strategy. While there's a lot of hearsay about what you should do to market online effectively, the most important thing is that you have a digital marketing strategy that is comprehensive.

To set up a comprehensive digital marketing strategy, here are seven steps you'll need to follow:

Step 1: Create a Winning Website Design

Everything starts with your web design. Consumers trust the credibility of your business by your web design. If your design looks like it was done by an amateur, they'll lose trust in your business. If your design looks professional, then your business will be taken seriously. While the visual presentation of your site is important, there are other essential elements of web design that you need to integrate into your site.

First, you need to have a mobile-friendly site. Over half of the Internet's traffic comes from mobile devices. If you do not optimize for mobile users, then you're potentially missing out on as much as half of your visitors. You will need to build a responsive site that adapts to the device the user is on whether it's a desktop, smartphone, or tablet.

Next, you have to make sure your site delivers a great user experience. This means that your navigation menu is clean, your site structure is organized, the font has high readability, and there's an easy-to-understand navigation path. Basically, you want to make it easy for users to interact with your site. Finally, you must design so that your web traffic converts. It doesn't matter if your site is visually appealing. Your design still needs to be optimized to convert visitors into leads and sales. This is something we'll get into later.

Step 2: Take SEO Seriously

A large bulk of the web's traffic comes from the search engines, specifically Google. If you want to be found online, you will need to take search engine optimization seriously. SEO is the process of optimizing your site for the search engines. You want to find keyword searches related to your business. Once you build a list of these keywords, you can start optimizing for these keyword searches so that your site comes up in the top listings when these searches are made.

To build a successful search campaign, you have to design your site properly, optimize each page properly for the target keyword, create quality content, and build links going to your site's pages. This can be difficult for the average business owner that doesn't have the knowledge, experience, or time to work on a search campaign. This is why most business owners turn to digital marketing agencies to help them build and manage their campaigns.

Local businesses can also benefit greatly with local optimization. Many consumers go to the search engines to find businesses in their area, so it's becoming critical for local companies to invest in local optimization. The problem is that many business owners don't take search seriously enough. They think that paying a professional a few hundred dollars a month will result in the top rankings. Search can get quite competitive, so you need to be prepared to invest a good amount of your marketing budget to build a winning campaign.

Step 3: Optimize for High Conversion Rates

There's no point in trying to get visitors to your site if you can't convert them into leads and sales. To successfully convert your web visitors into leads and sales, you need to work on your sales letter. This is basically content that persuades your visitor to take the action you want, whether it's to sign up to your email list or make a purchase. A sales letter typically consists of multiple parts like the headline, introduction, selling points, offer, and guarantee.

Even after you create a great sales letter, you will still want to optimize it so that it converts at the highest rate possible. Testing different headlines, offers, angles, and selling points can lead to big improvements in how well your site converts. Taking web copy that converts at an average of one percent for a $100 sale to copy that converts at one and a half percent boost sales by 50 percent. This starts to become significant as you get higher volumes of people coming to your site.

As briefly mentioned earlier, design is also a big part of the optimization process. Even the smallest details like the color scheme of your site, size of the call to action button, and the font you're using has an impact on your site's performance. Whether you plan on optimizing for conversions yourself or plan on going with a copywriting (writing sales letters) and conversion expert, you need to make sure that working on the design is a big part of the process.

Step 4: Craft Winning Email Marketing Campaigns

Did you know that very few people make a purchase on the first interaction? It's been said that you need to reach prospects at least seven times before the prospects take some kind of action. That's why you need to utilize email marketing in your digital marketing strategy. By using email, you can continue following up with your prospects and customers, giving you multiple opportunities to generate a sale.

Of course, this doesn't mean that you should inundate your prospects and customers with promotions and offers. Email is a very effective channel for building relationships with your prospects and customers. By providing a good mix of value and offers, you can make email marketing one of your most profitable digital marketing channels. The challenge is in learning to craft effective email marketing campaigns, producing great email content, dealing with delivery issues, and creating a solid schedule.

Email is also used by many businesses to create what's called marketing funnels and lead nurturing campaigns. Marketing funnels are basically follow-up campaigns that are designed to steadily lead the prospect towards making a purchase through educational content. Lead nurturing campaigns are similar to marketing funnels. However, they are different in that the goal of lead nurturing is to build a relationship until various metrics indicate that the prospect is ready to become a customer.

Step 5: Invest in Paid Advertising Campaigns

One of the weaknesses of search engine optimization is the fact that it can take some time before you start to see results. Search campaigns can take several months to develop, so it doesn't make sense for business owners to wait that long to bring in web visitors. That's where paid ads come in. There are many paid ad platforms that help you bring in web visitors to your site at affordable rates. The list includes Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Bing Ads, and more.

Most of the ad platforms use the pay per click (PPC) model. This is a model where you bid a certain amount per click. You are only charged at this bid rate whenever a user clicks on your ad. Google Ads and Bing Ads allow you to bid on keyword searches. Your ad shows up when the keyword you bid for is searched by the user. This means that web visitors are very targeted. Other platforms like Facebook Ads work by helping you target audiences.

Whether you're working on a search campaign or not, using paid ads are an essential part of a digital marketing strategy. It's one of the most effective ways to reach your best prospects. These ad platforms also allow you to control your budget, making it accessible to just about any business owner.

Step 6: Consistently Create High-Quality Content

Content creation is something that many businesses do not take seriously enough. High quality content is what will help you connect with your prospects and customers. It allows you to demonstrate your authority, establish credibility, and build trust with your audience. Content should not be limited to the web page that's being optimized for the search engines. You need many different types of content in your digital marketing strategy.

You'll need high-quality content for your blog, content for distribution, content for your email marketing, and content for your social accounts. The content on your site, blog, and emails will provide value to your audience, which will build and strengthen your relationships with them. The content on your social accounts will keep your followers engaged and help you grow your brand. The content you distribute will help you generate links for your search campaign.

Content creation is not as easy as it seems. There needs to be a lot of research done to figure out what ideas, topics, and angles resonate with your customers and general audience. To maximize exposure and engagement, you need to publish different types of content formats like articles, images, infographics, podcasts, presentations, live streams, and videos. On top of that, you need to publish content regularly to keep your audience engaged.

Step 7: Build a Following and a Brand with Social Media

Social media marketing is another vital step in creating a winning digital marketing strategy. It is a very unique marketing channel in that it's best used to build a following, create/maintain engagement with your audience, and build a brand online. Like email marketing, it can be used to develop and strengthen relationships with your prospects and customers.

The big difference is that it is interactive. Your followers can respond to your comments, so you need to focus on engaging in conversations. And because everybody on these social platforms is connected, your content can really take off and reach people outside of your initial network. This is what makes it an effective tool to build your brand online.

And of course, social media is a great marketing channel for promoting your products and services. It may not be as effective as email, but the idea is to combine it with all your other channels (website, blog, email, etc.) to maximize reach.

Do You Have What It Takes to Build and Execute Such a Comprehensive Digital Marketing Strategy?

As you can see, there's a lot that goes into creating a comprehensive digital marketing strategy for your business. It's very difficult to work on digital marketing with everything else you're responsible for in your business. You need to know your core competency and focus on what you excel at. Thankfully, that's where outsourcing comes in. You can focus on what your best at while also working with a company that specializes in digital marketing.

Finding the right digital marketing company to partner with is the key to making this happen. You need a company that knows every aspect of digital marketing and focuses primarily on ROI. You have the option to do everything in-house, but the importance of outsourcing cannot be stressed enough. Doing things in-house consumes a lot of time and money. You'll need to overlook your entire camp, hire employees, train them properly, and manage them. Very few businesses have the resources to pull this off.

We at Rubberneck Society have helped many of our clients find success with their digital marketing and can do the same for you. Our focus is on combining serious data analytics with creativity to come up with winning strategies and campaigns.

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