In recent years, competition is much higher. More businesses are trying to get bigger portions of the pie by turning their efforts to updating their online presence. Small local businesses are finding it much harder to compete with bigger businesses, simply due to their endless budget. Whether your budget is large or small, you should be making the most out of what you have and making it work. The worrying part is that many of these businesses don’t even know the basics of digital marketing which will then cause them to make drastic mistakes that will cost them dearly. In this article, we will go through some top tips for marketing a small business in 2022.
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Set Up Analytics As Early As You Can
When you have a website that you use to draw your clients in, then you should have Google Analytics set up already, but if you don’t go and do that now. Having a data-driven marketing strategy can seriously help you make fewer mistakes. Due to a small business relying on everything to go smoothly the first time, you need to get it right, if not, you could face drastic issues with customer retention.
This will give you all of the data you need, the best thing is, once you have passed your first year in business, you will have enough data to be able to use in your strategy. The same goes with your social media, have some sort of tracker on there so you know what type of content is working, and what isn’t.
Audit Your Existing Pages
If you already have a website, this is a great start to building more business. The new year brings positivity and provides a great opportunity to give your site a good clean up and update if needed. For this, you will of course need analytics setting up for you to have some data to work off. You will want to discover if there are any pages that are low performing or are no longer needed.
You can do this by running a content audit as this will help you map out all of your web pages to streamline which will in turn help to make the site more user friendly. You can also identify if there is anything missing which you can provide further. When you are reviewing your web pages, ask yourself the following questions:
- What pages get the most visits and conversions?
- What pages have the highest bounce rate?
- What content hasn’t been updated in a while?
Once you have asked yourself these questions, you will have a good idea of what pages need re-optimising or removing. If you are struggling with doing this, there are many places out there that offer SEO courses where you can learn the basics. This will save you money later on as you won’t have to rely on an agency to do the basics that you could be doing yourself.
Focus On Backlinks
If you need to know anything about marketing it is that content is king, and backlinks follow a close second. Getting a website to link with your site is a huge ranking factor for search engines as it shows search engines that your website can be trusted and provides reliable information.
One thing to understand about links is that search engines prefer quality over quantity. A backlink from a reputable site will do your site a lot more favours than a site with lots of spammy links. If you do have spammy links, you will find that this does more harm than good so take your time and do your research on the sites you think will be relevant.
How do you get links you ask? Well, what you need to do is create valuable content that you feel people will want to share. Creating these relevant articles that answer peoples questions will give you a better chance of a site agreeing to have you link to their site.
Utilise Social Media
When you own a small business, you want to use all the resources that are going to give you the biggest bang for your money. Social media marketing is certainly one of those strategies you should be using. It is one of the cheapest and most effective ways to get the most out of your investment.
If you are willing to put the time and effort into getting this done, you will be able to do this for your business in-house which will save you money on admin fees. Once you start to build and the business grows, you can then opt for marketing tools that will help you further.
Here are some social media marketing tips:
- Select the correct platform for your industry (e.g. If a baker, use Instagram to show images.)
- Decide on a brand voice and stick with it throughout all platforms and channels.
- Be consistent with posts
- Use high-quality content to grasp your viewer’s attention
- Always add your website URL on the bios.
- Use traffic driven tactics
- Use relevant hashtags where necessary
- Create your own brand hashtag
There are many different methods by which you can start to bring more traffic to your site and actually improve the amount of traffic and conversions. If you follow these steps, you will be on your way to having a happier and busier 2022.
