5 Free Digital Marketing tips for Small Businesses

As a small business digital marketing can seem daunting and very time consuming, especially with so many platforms and channels to focus on. Understanding where best to spend your time to get the biggest impact is key to making it work for you. With the average person now spending an incredible 6 hours and 42 minutes a day online, digital marketing isn’t something that can be ignored or done as an afterthought.

In this post, I have outlined a digital marketing plan for a small or new business that will provide the foundation for online growth. This is applicable for all sorts of businesses from online stores, physical stores, gyms, estate agents, or local tradesmen. The idea is to provide you with a strong foundation and get you moving in the right direction.

1. Online Local Business Listings

If you have a physical office or store local business listings are the perfect place to start. I recommend focusing on the below listings as these have the biggest reach and therefore will have the biggest impact on helping your business get found online.

• Google My Business

• Bing Places for Business

• Apple Maps Connect

• Yelp for Business

These listings will make sure your business shows up in Google, Bing, and Apple maps when people are searching for your service. They are also quick to set up and require minimal maintenance and cost nothing, so it's a no brainer! Click here for my local SEO guide.

2. Search Engine Optimisation

SEO is a huge area of digital marketing and you can quite easily spend hours optimising your site. However, some basics can put your site in a great position to generate organic traffic that doesn’t cost a penny. Below I have listed the basics to make sure Search Engines can find, crawl, and display your website to the most relevant users.

• Set up Google Search Console and submit a sitemap

• Optimise Meta Titles and Descriptions for all pages on your website

• Optimise all page headings

• Add relevant copy designed for the user but containing keywords

• Add internal cross-linking to priority pages

This is by no means a comprehensive list of SEO optimisations, but will put your website in a great place to start driving free organic traffic.

3. Organic Social Media

Building a loyal audience on social media for your business can seem difficult and very time consuming, however, if you have a good plan and don’t spread yourself too thin by trying to cover all platforms it can be very rewarding. The key is to post regularly and be consistent by sticking to your brand look and message.

• Create a weekly/monthly social media calendar for posts

• Post 2 or 3 times a day

• Put 15 minutes in the diary each day to respond to customer questions and comments and to interact with your audience or target audiences

4. Content Marketing

Content Marketing is often done as a tick box exercise and adds very little value to a lot of business marketing activity. If you don’t have the time to do it well don’t do it!! However, if you provide useful information or insights to your potential customers then the rewards can be great. Creating content can be useful for the following reasons:

• Driving organic traffic to your website

• Building brand awareness

• Building links back to your website strengthening SEO

• Increasing soft leads through new email signups and boosting your cookie pool

• Providing material for your social media

Content doesn’t have to be blog posts, it can involve videos, short insights for social media, or even games. The main thing is to think about the audience you want to reach and make sure the content you create will be useful for them or help get your brand in front of those people. Its always good to include a call to action on your content to maximise its value. This can be signing up to a newsletter or guiding people to a relevant product.

5. Email Marketing

This is the channel most widely used by small businesses and often provides the best results. Despite this, I frequently see email only being used to a fraction of its potential. Email is great for getting right in front of a highly engaged audience and you should be sending at least 2 or 3 emails every week. Importantly these don’t always need to be sales focused. A lot of the time you just want to remind people you're there for when they need you. So sharing your latest content or relevant industry news can be as effective in the long term as email offers.

• Send emails regularly and on consistent days i.e. every Sunday and Thursday

• Create an email calendar with content ideas

• Grow your email database

Don’t forget to keep growing your email database as this will make the channel more effective over time. This is where having an integrated strategy with social media, content, and email comes in. On your blog have a call to action getting people to sign up. Also, get people to sign up from the homepage with an incentive.

These digital marketing strategies are ones you can do with no additional costs, just your own time and creativity. To get the best results make sure you are integrating these channels into one clear strategy and leveraging each one to help the other. For example, if you create a new article for your blog make sure you take key points from the article and promote it on social media through a series of posts over a week or so. You can then add it to your weekly newsletter for email and finally make sure it's SEO friendly and it can drive traffic and leads to your website for years to come. I’ve seen a single blog post generate thousands of visits every month for a website for almost a decade. Not bad for half a day's work!

If you don’t have time to do all this yourself I provide a digital marketing set up package for just £250. Click here to find out more!