Local Business Digital Marketing: 33 Tips for Your Small Business

Let’s break these down to their core elements.

1. Create a customer persona

This really helps you understand who you are marketing to. When you create messages, art, copy, and videos you have an idea of the person you are speaking to. The more specific you are with this persona the more likely you are to create the right content that your consumers want to see. You can create this persona by looking at your existing customers, defining what they search for, understanding the media the consume, the personalities they follow, and trends they pay attention to.

2. Define your brand identity

This can be hard, especially if you are doing it from within your company. Nonetheless, do your best to create a vision for your business. What words best describe your company? How do you want people to feel when they think of your company? The answer to these question helps you define your writing and creative style when you communicate about your business. Are you modern and sleek? Folksy and happy? Funny and laid back? Serious and noire?

3. Understand what customers want from you

You may start your business thinking you are one type of company, but realize that your customers want something different from you. A prime example of this is Instagram, which started as an app called Burbn. This app was trying to compete with Foursquare for location check in dominance in the early 2010s. When they looked at their data they found their most engaged customers were the ones who shared photos. The rest is history, and in 2012 they were bought by Facebook for $1B.

4. Understand where in the world your customers are

You may be a dance studio able to work with people who are 3-5 miles around your address. Or, you’re an eCommerce website that can sell to people in the US. Maybe you are a news publication for people in English speaking countries across the globe. Whatever it is, this is important because your messages will change depending on where your customers can buy.

5. Learn how to run Facebook ads

Facebook is expected to be a $36B business in 2020, and along with Google, the single most important advertising platform. This is even more true for small businesses. So, learn how the Facebook and Instagram platforms work for ad buying. Learn what their ads look like, how to target ads, how to segment audiences in the platform, and what type of ad messaging works for your business.

6. See where your ads perform better – Facebook or Instagram

Once you start buying ads on Facebook, which also includes Instagram and Messenger, learn where your ads perform better. This is part of testing infrastructure, and gaining knowledge for your business. Learn if you get more leads or sales from Facebook, Instagram, or Messenger.

7. Create videos that explain your offering

Most businesses can create content that explains who they are and what they do. For trade businesses the strategy is straight forward: teach people how to do that you do. For example, if you are a plumber, teach people the basics on video, like how to unclog a toilet. For knowledge based businesses opine on trends in your industry, or use video to talk about your blog posts. Teach people what you know and how to do the services you provide. You can use Ssemble, a free video editor to make videos.

8. Use on-site SEO tools to grow your website traffic

There is no shortcut for SEO traffic, because when Google changes its algorithm any website owner who tries to game the system gets exposed, flagging a site for long term de-ranking by Google. Instead, setup for long term success by using an SEO plugin like Yoast. Set focus keywords for individual pages, and follow guidelines for making the URL, URL snippet, and copy the most SEO friendly it can be.

Don’t miss key SEO tactics to ensure you are found in Google.[/caption]

9. Build your website with a visual designer

Elementor, Beaver Builder, and Divi, are great website visual design tools that help business owners develop websites without extensive coding skills. Simply use visual cues to build your website for long term success. These tools integrate with WordPress.

10. Create SEO-optimized blog posts

If you are a blogger use content to attract your audience by writing informational or entertaining written content. The topics should all surround your core business idea. A plumber can write lots of posts containing instructions on how to do basic plumbing work. A knowledge based service can write about trends in the industry. These blog posts should be written with basic SEO principles in mind, noted above.

11. Commit to writing blog posts that explain your offering

Writing a blog post once in a while is good, but to gain traction for SEO, write blog posts on a consistent cadence so that Google understands that you are both an expert in your field, and that you have up to date information. This pattern will help Google show your blog post on the first page when people are searching for information you provide.

12. Learn inexpensive ways to create ads

There are plenty of tools and services to create ads. Ads on Facebook require an image, text, and a headline. The image can come from your stockpile of business images, or from a stock photo site like iStockphoto, or from Facebook’s own repository of stock imagery. Your copy can be written directly for Facebook.

The easiest way to create banner ads is to make static jpg ads that don’t animate. The key ad sizes you need in 2020 are 300×250 and 320×50. You’ll access about 70% of all available ad inventory with these two ad sizes. Your ad should contain a call to action like “learn more”, “buy now”, and “download”; an image about your business, and up to eight words of copy. You can create banners inexpensively with bannersnack.com.

13. Create a testing framework

When you run ads and marketing you want to create a series of small tests to learn more about your business. These tests can answer any of the following questions:

• Which ad platform works the best between Facebook, Instagram, and banners
• Which audience does the best: males or females, over 35 or under 35
• Which sites work the best for advertising: yahoo.com, aol.com, or cnn.com

One of the most important things you can do for your business is always be testing to understand what works and what doesn’t for your marketing efforts.

14. Engage in conversation on your Twitter account

Twitter is a real time conversation, and people are talking about a whole slew of different topics, including your industry. Get right in there and engage with people authentically so they know you are someone who can offer great insight. When people know and trust you, they start buying from you.

15. Answer questions on Quora

This is a great way to connect with potential customers and create the foundation for content marketing in your business. By answering questions in Quora around your subject of expertise you are both demonstrating that you are an expert in your field, and giving back to the community of people who you are helping with your business. These people will see that you are an expert and a small number of them will end up buying once they get to know you.

16. Help people looking for your expertise on Reddit

People who need your help are on Reddit are in subreddits. You can create a personal brand on this site by being helpful and answering questions. If you see you are answering the same questions multiple times maybe it’s time to write a blog post about that topic on your website. Do this and you’ll likely earn some customers who want to work with you because you’ve demonstrated your expertise.

17. Add alt text and descriptions to all images on your website

This is a key tenet of SEO. By using alt text on all of your website images you are giving Google the ability to have greater understanding of what the page and the site is about. So, when people are searching for the information you offer Google is more likely to search for you.

18. Work with contract workers to round out the work you don’t know how to do

Whatever you are not good at, have someone else do it on freelance or contract basis from sites including DesignCrowd, Upwork, and Fiverr. I use this sites for some design and tech work.

19. Ask happy customers to share testimonials

This is especially good if you have high customer count. By sharing testimonials you are helping new customers find you. Yelp, Google, and Facebook like to share testimonials as a way of bubbling up the best businesses. Often customers trust other customers to speak for how good a business is.

20. Learn how to target ads to people searching for your services on Google

On Google you can run ads to people who searched for specific key terms. This is really valuable for niche marketing efforts. For example, if people are searching for “plumber in Los Angeles” you have two pertinent ad opportunities. The first is search ads, where the ad appears directly beside or under the search term. The second opportunity is to run banner ads to people after they have made the search, and they are on a sports, news, portal, or informational site. For example, if a person just searched for “plumber in Los Angeles” and they are on Yahoo.com reading the news, your ad can appear there, which is really valuable.

21. Post on social media as a method for social proof

The effectiveness of social media is strong as a social proof mechanism. Social proof means demonstrates that you’re a real business with real customers. It’s similar to walking on a street and seeing three restaurants. One restaurant has a lot of people in it. Two don’t, and you’re more likely to go into the business that’s busy. That’s just how people work. So, use social media to prove that you’re a good business to connect with.

22. Go live for more engaging videos

As you get comfortable creating videos for YouTube, consider going live with Facebook Live. Streaming tools including OBS and Ecamm allow you to create live videos with beautiful visual overlays. Engage with commenters, stream comments into your video, and have a share the screen with clients and peers with live video. 

Separately, the video meeting company Zoom has a webinar add on, which allows your live content to be shared with functionality of video conference meetings as a stream on Facebook live.

23. Create an email marketing cadence

When a new person shares their email address with you they can have a full automation sequence get triggered. Use this technology to welcome them to your email list, share really important information on deals, communicate about the work you’ve been doing, share testimonials, and talk about new customer experiences. This is where you maintain connection to your customer.

24. Offer a monthly free webinar sharing your services

If you are a knowledge business this is a great way to give something away that captures user attention, but then gives potential customers a way to work with you. Your monthly webinar will probably contain the same information month after month, and it speaks to the core solution that you offer. What will be different every month is that you’ll have new attendees, it will be a live webinar, and questions will be different. So, there is dynamism here, but it’s the same content month over month. You can also think of this as a group sales pitch.

25. Connect with new prospects on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a great way to connect with other business people, and potential customers. The benefit is that when you post content on LinkedIn, some of your followers will see it. You can most multiple times a day, and you don’t have to worry about being spammy. LinkedIn will ensure their algorithm gets your content to the people who are really interested in it.

26. Engage with influencers in your industry and incentivize them to call out your business

Just like the press and media were gatekeepers in the past, influencers are the more democratized version of a gatekeeper in 2020. They have large audiences on social platforms, and they speak to an audience. You can work with these influencers to promote your product or service in exchange for a fee, free access to your product, or a reciprocal trade. What makes this an exceptional opportunity is that influencers often under charge for what they offer, so you can get outsized value if you choose the right partners.

27. Start a niche podcast for your industry

If you want to approach prospects, but you don’t want to sell to them, this is a great way to offer them a platform. By creating a podcast you are offering someone the opportunity to be the star of your episode in a way that is usually new to them. While you may not have large scale listenership that’s ok, because what you want are a small group of key decision makers in your industry to get to know you and feel comfortable working with you.

28. Write guest posts on publications

Work with publications in your industry to exchange ideas and value. There is value in even small publications, because often small publications, if chosen correctly, will yield outsized value. Simply approaching the editor and offering a unique perspective is a way of getting featured in trade or lifestyle publications. As you get more opportunities to post you’ll reach a larger set of potential customers, and more publications will be open to allowing you to contribute. The more you are seen as a thought leader and expert, the more new people will discover you, and business opportunities will grow.

29. Leverage easy to use photo and image creation tools

Photoshop is the defacto tool that’s available from Adobe, but for many it may be too complicated. A great alternative is Canva, a tool that has pre-designed templates to create great looking imagery for use in advertising, social media posts, and website content.

30. Use free stock photos for your marketing

You can get great looking photos from from paid platforms including Adobe Stock and iStock Photo. Unsplash is a free stock image platform.. Use these in ads, website content, blog posts, and social media posts.

31. Use a customer relationship marketing tool to keep track of customer communications

If you are like me, after 10 reachouts it’s hard to keep track of these conversations, so instead we use a customer relationship management (CRM) tool that reminds us to reach out to people in the future. For example, Hubspot has a free CRM tool that lets you capture new lead information, and lets you note when you contacted leads, how you contacted them, and what the next steps are.

32. Design an inexpensive logo

The logo that I’ve used for my business cost $150 and I got it made on DesignCrowd. You can get a number of different versions of your logo, and you can keep the version that you like the best.

33. Automate everything

If you want to scale your business automation can help you do really well by taking out the monotonous and time sucking tasks. Zapier is a great tool that allows you to condense three or four actions into one. For example, if you enter an email address into your Hubspot CRM, Zapier will connect it to your Mailchimp email automation, and then into your Facebook custom audience for email address remarketing. Just be careful not to automate processes that are against terms of service of platforms. For example, it is against the terms of service on LinkedIn to scrape email addresses from LinkedIn profiles. Taking actions against a site’s terms of service can result in being banned from the site.

There is a lot of opportunity for small businesses to build massive presences and businesses on top of the robust digital marketing ecosystem. Some elements take time to work, but as you know in business, it’s never a straight line to success, and business rewards perseverance. Stick to the process, focus on the fundamentals, and build your business.