17 Digital Marketing Hacks For Small Businesses + Infographic
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Josh Wardini, Community Manager at Webmastersjury |
Introduction
Not surprisingly, a business owner can’t be expected to get into every single aspect of digital marketing even if he or she wanted to. After all, it covers a wide variety of practices, which we’ll be discussing today.
Digital marketing is great for small businesses. It’s cost-efficient, surprisingly effective, and best of all, results are measurable.
And to help you figure out which specific online marketing hacks can give you the most bang for your buck, we’ve compiled a list of 17 actionable items every business owner should consider looking into to boost their digital marketing efforts.
Content Marketing
1. Have a business blog. Blogs are great because they not only help showcase your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, but they also generate solid organic traffic for you, especially if you have a good bunch of well-written articles. It is the best marketing for small business.
2. Keep your post titles short yet creative. Posts with titles 6 to 13 words long attract the highest and most consistent traffic.
3. Blogs help you gain much-needed backlinks. Companies that regularly blog receive 97% more links to their website.
4. Detailed is better! Google’s top search results have an average of 1,890 words, confirming the hypothesis that users likely want more comprehensive and more thorough articles when looking for answers online.
SEO
5. Do your best to get found online organically—80% of people ignore paid results completely, clicking only on organic listings!
6. Instead of going for the topmost spot on search engine results pages, try to land within the top five. The top five search results draw in 70% of the clicks. So instead of grinding your way to the top spot, you can focus efforts elsewhere once you’ve landed in the top five search results.
Social Media
7. What are the best times to post on social media? The best times to post on Facebook are weekdays between 1-3 pm. On Instagram, it’s on weekdays at 5 pm or 2 am. This is the unique benefit to use social media as digital marketing for small business.
8. Longer posts seem to equate to better engagement. A high-quality article shared on social media:
- Gains 22.6% more likes on Facebook
- Receives 68.1% more tweets.
9. What makes for an effective ad on Facebook? The most effective ads have images (which account for 75-90% of ad effectiveness), a title of about four words long, and contain 15 words for the link description.
10. On Instagram, posts with faces gain 38% more likes.
11. LinkedIn is the go-to social network if you’re after a B2B market. 80% of B2B leads come from this network, versus 13% from Twitter and 7% from Facebook.
Email Marketing
12. The best time to send out emails? The period between 10am-11am has the highest open rates. The best day? Tuesdays give the best results!
13. Improve your email response rates by:
- Personalizing messages.
- Sending follow-up emails. This can triple the response rate.
- Keeping the messages short and sweet. Emails with around 200-250 words have the highest response rate.
14. Make sure your emails are also optimized for mobile devices. Mobile users check emails three times more than desktop users. What’s more, mobile devices are responsible for at least half of all email open rates.
Online Advertising
15. 64.6% of people click on Google ads when they are looking for something to buy online.
16. You may want to shy away from using pop-up ads. Four out of five people leave websites because of pop-up ads, while 72% create a bad opinion about brands merely because they use such ads.
Lead Generation
17. If properly optimized, landing pages could yield a lot of new leads for your business. In fact, 68% of B2B brands bring in new leads by employing landing pages.
Conclusion
Digital marketing for small business might be popular and easy to get into, but making it work for your business entails a great deal of effort.
These 17 online best marketing strategies for small business are a good start for anyone looking for achievable results, but there’s plenty more that can be done beyond this list to bring in more business online.
More useful eCommerce articles and infographics are coming your way. Follow CS-Cart on Facebook and Twitter not to miss them!
Yan Anderson is the Head of Content Marketing at CS-Cart with over 10 years of experience in the eCommerce industry. He's passionate about explaining complicated things in simple terms. Yan has expertise in building, running and growing eCommerce marketplaces. He loves to educate people about best practices, new technologies, and trends in the global eCommerce industry.