Digital marketing is a very broad term that includes website design, social media, online advertising, email advertising, SEO, and more. This can be extremely confusing for a small business owner who is simply looking to attract more visitors to their site. They are usually too busy running operations to research which digital marketing strategies work best for the business.
In an effort to help local business owners like restaurants, dentists, doctors, lawyers, and any other service providers, I’ve created the digital marketing strategies that all local businesses should adopt in 2023.
Your website is the most important part
Almost every aspect of digital marketing is driving internet traffic to your website. This is the mother ship and it must be treated as such. We still see too many websites that weren’t built with responsive design, which means they look awkward and hard to navigate on mobile devices. We are seeing approximately 42% of total customer traffic coming from mobile devices and that number is likely to increase.
Your website should look great with easy navigation on mobile devices. Visitors must be able to click on a phone number or email address to contact you. If they have to zoom in or type in the number, then chances are you’ll lose them to a competitor whose site is mobile optimized. The idea is to convert visitors in a phone call, an email, or a walk-in.
Additionally, Google has beefed up its algorithm to give higher rankings to sites optimized for mobile visitors, and with good reason. You don’t want to be skipped to page two or three of Google search results. Make your site mobile-friendly immediately.
Implement rich snippets on your website
Chances are you probably typed a question into Google to find out how something works. People are changing the way they use Google. People no longer want to search for information, they prefer Google to answer their questions. Google has recognized this and has introduced rich snippets to their search algorithm so that they can provide more accurate results.
Almost any local business – lawyer, dentist, plastic surgeon – has common questions that they often receive from their clients, for example, What is a dental implant? How do you get a green card? What is rhinoplasty? It would be smart to implement rich snippets on your website so that when people are asking these questions from Google, your site can show up first.
Use social networks efficiently
We get a lot of questions about social media. Many local businesses are confused as to which social channels they should be using and how they should be placing. One of the most important rules of marketing and running a business is knowing your customer base. Social media is not rocket science. Tune out the social media experts and tune in to your customers. Social media can be a huge waste of your time if not used properly. No one is looking for a plumber on Twitter or a lawyer on Instagram. They just aren’t. Instagram, Snapchat and LinkedIn combine to have less than 5% market share in social media, while Facebook has more than 40%, .
When it comes to posting on social media, understand that you are creating a voice for your business and often communicating with your most loyal customers, the ones who have chosen to follow you. Therefore, you should be careful when overloading them with specials and promotions. We always tell our clients that social media is not a billboard and it is not a supermarket; they interact with their followers and share information that is relevant to them.
Don’t Forget Email Marketing
Email marketing was overtaken by social media years ago, but now it’s back. For many local businesses, this is a great and inexpensive way to communicate with their best customers. Facebook and Instagram now show your posts to only a fraction of your followers. They want you to pay to reach more of your followers. If you have customer email addresses, you can send special offers, event information and new menu items to all of your customers for little to no cost. Mailchimp allows you to use their free email marketing platform for up to 2,000 contacts.
According to MailMunch, a digital lead generation company, click-through rates can be 50 to 100 times better on email than on social media. This is an extremely effective and low cost digital marketing strategy that could be right for your business.
In short, businesses should constantly review their own website to make sure it’s easy to navigate, has fresh content, and contact information works on mobile. You can start implementing some of the other digital marketing strategies that drive traffic to your site, such as social media, email marketing, and rich responses.
Why use a digital marketing plan?
Where to start if you want to develop a digital marketing strategy? Well I don’t think it has to be a huge report, a strategy can best be summed up on two or three sides of A4 in a table linking digital marketing strategies to SMART goals. However, despite this, it seems that many organizations still do not have a plan.
Do you have a digital marketing strategy?
2017 Update: Since 2012 we have conducted an informal survey to see how widely used digital marketing strategies are. The results have shown some great improvements over the years. A few years ago we found that between two-thirds and three-quarters did not have a digital marketing plan. Now that number has dropped to 49% in the most recent survey, although it’s still quite high, and means almost half are still going digital with no strategy in place.
When we did the research for our free Digital Marketing report we were interested to see how this percentage looked for a defined sample.
But what if you are one of the companies that does not yet have a digital strategy? Well, I think the two simple alternatives to creating a plan may suggest a way forward:
Start with a separate digital marketing plan that defines the transformation needed and makes the case for investment and changes in your digital marketing.
Then, after approval, create an integrated digital plan that is part of the overall marketing plan – digital is fully aligned and becomes business as usual.
So what are the plans to perform here? That seems to me:
The use of digital marketing without a strategic approach is still common. I’m sure many of the businesses in this category are using digital media effectively and could certainly be getting great results from their search, email, or social media marketing. But I am equally sure that many are missing out on opportunities for better targeting or optimization or are experiencing the other challenges I have listed below. Perhaps the problems mentioned below are greater for larger organizations that most urgently need governance. Arguably, there is less need for a strategy in a smaller company.
Many, most of the companies participating in this research take a strategic approach to digital technology. In talking to companies, I believe that the creation of digital plans often occurs in two stages. First of all, a separate digital marketing plan is created. Second, digital is integrated into the marketing strategy, it is a core activity, “business as usual”, but it does not require separate planning, except for tactics.
If you don’t have a strategy, or maybe you want to review which business issues are important to include in a strategic review, we have established the 10 most common problems, which in our experience arise if you don’t have a strategy.
10 reasons why you may need a digital strategy?
1. You have no address.
I find that companies without a digital strategy (and many that do) don’t have clear strategic goals for what they want to achieve online in terms of winning new customers or building deeper relationships with existing ones. And if you don’t have goals, you probably won’t put enough resources into reaching them and you won’t assess through analytics whether you’re achieving those goals.
2. You won’t know your market share online
Customer demand for online services may be underestimated if you haven’t researched this. Perhaps more importantly, you don’t understand your online market: the dynamics will be different than traditional channels with different types of customer profile and behavior, competitors, propositions, and options for marketing communications. See the online market methodology post methodology.
3. Existing competitors and new competitors will gain market share
If you are not devoting enough resources to digital marketing or using an ad-hoc approach without clearly defined strategies, then your competitors will eat your digital lunch!
4. You don’t have a powerful online value proposition
A clearly defined online customer value proposition will help you differentiate your online service by encouraging existing and new customers to initially engage and remain loyal.
5. You don’t know your online customers well enough
It is often said that digital is the “most measurable medium of all time”. But Google Analytics and the like will only tell you volumes of visits, not the sentiment of the visitors, what they think. You need to use other forms of website user feedback tools to identify your pain points and then address them.
6. You are not integrated (“disintegrated”)
It’s all too common for digital marketing activities to be completed in silos, whether you’re a digital marketer sitting in IT or a freelance digital agency. It’s an easier way to package digital marketing into one convenient chunk. But of course, it is less effective. Everyone agrees that digital media works best when integrated with traditional media and response channels.
7. Digital does not have enough people/budget given its importance
Not enough resources will be devoted to both planning and executing e-marketing and there is likely to be a lack of specific e-marketing expertise, making it difficult to respond effectively to competitive threats.
8. You are wasting money and time through duplication.
Even if you have enough resources it can be wasted. This is particularly the case in larger companies where you see different parts of the marketing organization buying different tools or using different agencies to perform similar online marketing tasks.
9. You are not nimble enough to catch up or get ahead.
If you look at the major online brands like Amazon, Dell, Google, Tesco, Zappos, they are all dynamic – trying new approaches to gain or keep their audience online.
10 You are not optimizing
Every company with a website will have analytics, but many senior managers don’t make sure their teams do or have the time to review and act on them. Once a strategy gets you the basics right, then you can progress to continuous improvement of key aspects like search marketing, website user experience, email and social media marketing. So those are our top 10 problems that can be avoided with a well thought out strategy. What have you found that can go right or wrong?