How Digital Marketing Is Affecting the Growth of Small Business (SMB)

Digital marketing is an essential and cost effective strategy to promote small/medium business.  An online marketing strategy is an important part of the overall marketing strategy of a business. This is true whether or not a company is doing business online. It is also true for a small, medium or large size company but especially true for a small company.

Small business marketing for a local company can include many offline local advertising methods but needs to include a healthy portion of internet marketing strategies to be successful and maximize sales in today's economy. A small business that is doing most or all of its business online, needs to embrace an internet marketing strategy that helps it be seen by online users.

Five Key Areas of Online Marketing for Small Business  

There are five areas of online marketing to improve the growth of small business. Some of them are more important to local, offline businesses, while others are more effective with online businesses. Many businesses engage in all five areas of small business marketing on the Internet.

Search Engine Marketing
This portion of digital marketing is critical for a small business. It provides a chance to compete with larger companies by being visible in search engines. Since people use search engines to find products both online and locally, it is important that your company place top in search results for words that relate to what you are selling. Professional Internet marketing firms offer this service under the name of search engine optimization. They can make sure your site is visible to those looking for your product when using a search engine.

Local Search Marketing
This includes website optimization for search results, but in addition, integrates a search engine's function of maps. This is especially true with Google, where your business can be listed with mapping and address information, giving a prospective customer what they need to visit your establishment. Your phone number and website address can also be listed. Customer services will often be available to help someone decide if they are interested in your product or service.

Content Marketing
This strategy revolves around providing a prospective customer information about your product or service, as well as information in general. People will attribute a certain level of expertise to a company, and this instills confidence in the consumer. Content marketing in the past was often done with printed brochures and guide books, but today, this can be done with articles and other forms of information on a business's website.

Social Media Marketing

This type of marketing can be tricky. Everyone talks about social media, but the truth is, it can be difficult for companies to integrate social media with their business. The type of media used, as well how it is used, is dependent upon the type of business you have. For some companies being in touch with their customers and giving them breaking news can be an important element of success. Other business such as a local restaurant, have seen success using social media by letting customers know of the latest specials and new additions to their menu. The most important aspect of social media is to use it to strengthen your customer base to achieve repeat sales.

Email Marketing
This form marketing is crucial to a small business online or offline. Essentially email marketing is about building a list of customers and prospective customers. This list of names and emails are people who are interested in your business, and you know this to be true because they have opted into this list themselves. Perhaps they were offered future updates on products as well as coupons to sign up. As this list grows, it becomes more valuable. In fact, many marketing professionals consider this to be, in the long run, the most important small business marketing strategy in the long run.

Steps To Promote Your SMB through Effective Digital Marketing Channel

Importance of Google – with approximately 80% of all searches being conducted via Google, it is critical to primarily focus SEO effort on this search engine. Yahoo and Bing are less important but still an important part of search engine marketing.

Keyword Selection – Pick keywords that are relevant to your business but also fairly easy to rank for. Look for multi-word phrases or ‘long-tail keywords’ as they are usually less competitive

Content is King - Prospects are more likely to buy from you if you are a thought leader, so establish yourself as one by creating extraordinarily helpful content. Take decisive action to ensure prospective customers are attracted to your site as a place to find answers.

Generosity is Also King – Another key part to attracting customers is your generosity in giving away information, access to tools, etc.,

Social Media – Focus on the top three social media venues: Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Remember, ‘be real’ and ‘be there’ to help the community rather than to push products.

Calls-to-Action – It is an important to provide something of value that solves a problem for visitors in exchange for their contact information. Often traffic will not be ready to buy right away, but a tempting call to action will lead them down the sales funnel.

Landing Pages - Everything that has been done to draw qualified traffic to a site, from improving SEO, to generating great content comes to a head in the landing page. Leads should be confronted with an inescapable case for them to leave their carefully guarded personal information on the form. Having one offer, recapping benefits, and a short form are all key.

Lead Nurturing – follow up calls to action with a ‘thank you’ email and a lead nurturing campaign that further entices leads down the sales funnel with additional free offerings– this is a free opportunity to keep touch with a lead.

Tracking Progress – Effective Inbound Marketing is all about experimentation. Select a strategy based on experience with customers and industry to get people to both visit and convert on the website. But anticipate that initial assumptions about keywords, or what it takes to get traffic to convert will not be right (or not right enough) and changes will need to be made. For this reason, it is essential to have a complete internet analysis tool-suite to help figure out what’s working and what’s not.

Patience & Tenacity – It’s easy to become discouraged and frustrated if Inbound Marketing is approached as a point solution. In reality, it’s a long term strategy only rewarding those who approach it with patience and tenacity.

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Conclusion:
Online marketing is the effective channel to promote small business in wide range of geographical area with minimal cost.  Also it will purely depend upon area of business and the industry which you are promoting to your targeted audience.

Above described areas and steps to improve small business through internet marketing are helpful to promote the business in desired geography. Formulating the plan and combining it with other marketing efforts are also very much important to grow in tremendous way.
Online marketing strategies that are often outsourced include social media, search engine and local search marketing, because unless you have time to dedicate it's difficult to stay on the multiple changes that transpire when it comes to strategy. With content and email marketing, you can do much of it yourself, but it never hurts to ask experts for strategy advice to help get you started.
Source: http://www.siliconindia.com/blogs/blogs_new.php?30Sfk6297ltsXB39TX3KE01fg68xhnCy

How Social Media helps to grow the Small Business 

The business press is full of stories about how small companies are using social channels to attract and engage customers. But while there are plenty of individual success stories, the confidence in what to do specifically is not always clear for small business owners that are strapped for time and online marketing resources.

Case study:

I was talking with a small business owner recently who was lamenting not updating his website and also that his competition was showing up “all over the place” online.  The nature of his product requires some education and an effort to dispel common misperceptions. The rapid advancements in technology of his particular product category are not very well known amongst his target consumer market. But there’s a substantial amount of search volume and interest in the solutions his product provides.  He’s also a small business with limited time and budget.

To me, this was a classic opportunity for the power of influence through storytelling.

My tip for him was to start a blog that answered the most common questions prospects and customers ask.  And to do so in a compelling way that his competitors were not:  with video, images and text. Each new blog post would be another potential entry point to his website via Google and social networks where people share links. With 1 post a week, he’d have 52 more pages and videos on his website in a year, each offering interesting, useful content that could position him above the competitors. Along the way, he’d be able to gather insight from web analytics, social shares, comments and interactions with the blog posts to refine message effectiveness.

A few key questions to start with his blog content plan:

• Why do current customers buy your product? This can come from sales people and/or the business owner.
• What are the misperceptions & objections? Document the things that are educational opportunities.
• What type of information helps them change the perception?  What are the tipping points from skepticism to confidence? Is it demonstration, 3rd party data, credibility of the company, word of mouth?
• Where do prospects look for information on this solution? Talk to sales people, look at website stats and any logged information about lead sources.

By answering these fundamental questions, this small business owner can create a blog content plan that specifically addresses the questions, concerns and triggers that will influence prospects to trust, buy and refer.  Understanding the key features of the product most relevant to the target customer as well as prospect tendencies towards finding a solution of this type can literally translate into topics for him to write or talk about on the blog.

Those topics can be run through Google AdWords Keyword Tool to identify the keyword phrases that people are searching for most often. Relevant search phrases can inspire blog post and YouTube video titles, categories, descriptions and tags.

Some basic next steps might include:

Set up a WordPress Blog, template and hosting (Genesis, StudioPress & Synthesis make this a no-brainer). Plan to write one blog post or publish/upload 1 video per week (2-3 minutes) that answers a key question prospects and customers ask.  The video can be captured using an iPhone or other smartphone and iMovie can be used for editing. If you’re on PC, you can use Windows Movie Maker to edit the video.  For people not comfortable just talking to a camera, have an employee ask the question(s) and answer them while being captured on video.

Create a YouTube Channel and start connecting with other channels and video publishers on relevant topics, 5-10 min a day. After uploading a video, embed on the blog, and share on existing social channels like Twitter and Facebook as well as through email to existing customers or opt-in prospect list. Ashley posted some great examples of SMB Twitter promotion yesterday. When embedding the video on the blog, write a description of what is talked about in the video so search engines can make it easy for people to find.

The initial focus for a basic video and photo blog should be on getting used to the habit of creating useful content on a regular basis.  I know many readers might be thinking that more substantial SEO and social media tactics should be setup as well, but without good content, social networking and optimization won’t work to convert prospects to customers anyway.  Time is usually limited for small businesses, so getting a small base of content built is a great starting point.

Creating a cycle of listening for questions, answering them through content and refinement can go a very long way for small business content marketing. Once things are setup, 20-30 minutes per day can be spent interacting with blog comments and social networks. Establishing a feedback loop means you’ll always have ideas to blog or talk about. It also means you’re connecting with real people, interacting with them and providing something of value that they can share and act on.

In time other promotion channels can be added starting with Facebook, Twitter and Google+ as well as SEO best practices with more specific keyword research and link building. If the initial customer research identifies Twitter as a substantial opportunity, a Twitter Marketing strategy might be involved at the same time the blog and YouTube channel are created. The reason I’m keeping these suggestions simple and basic is that I know how much small business owners can get overwhelmed. Needs to grow outside online marketing consultants or training can always be used to speed up things up.

What else? An email newsletter that re-purposes blog content and the Q/A that happens on Facebook, the blog and Twitter can be delivered to existing customers. Viewing every channel of participation as an opportunity to interact and share will help grow networks, trust and credibility as the “go to source” for the product category being promoted. It’s important to create value, but also to not lose sight that this is business. Don’t be afraid to suggest solutions or promote offers. Just do so in a relevant way.

Finally, make sure web analytics (Google Analytics is free) and basic social media monitoring (Trackur starts at $18/mo, search.twitter.com is free) are set up to assess how people are finding and interacting with blog content. Watch for trends in network growth like fans, friends and followers but especially with quality of interaction through comments, likes, shares and the effect on blog/website traffic that drives inquiries and sales.

For a lot of small business owners not used to online marketing, SEO or social media, these suggestions might be out of their comfort zone. But with the way consumer behaviors are changing and increased competition, getting out of the comfort zone and into a place where direct customer interactions drive content and inspire business outcomes is an essential investment.

Source: www.toprankblog.com

Email Marketing Apps for Small Business

Email marketing is one of the dominant ways that a small business reaches out to customers and prospects. Email marketing is about relationships — and successful relationship marketing involves a lot more thought than simply firing off a newsletter via email.

According to MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Report, email marketing is one of two marketing budget items that saw an increase in 2009.  The other is social media.

But where many have claimed that “email is dead,” MarketingSherpa has proven otherwise in its studies.  In fact, they show that email is quite social.  A recent survey asked users how they share information they find on the internet:  78% responded that email is how they do it.  22% use social media sites.

Here are 30 small business email marketing applications to grow customer relationships and your business:

Emma

Emma is a Web-based service that combines do-it-yourself with free personal assistance when you need it (custom email design comes at an additional charge).  They have strong tracking and analytics components that allow you to learn what works, or doesn’t, with your audience.

Constant Contact

They offer a free 60-day trial. They have been around a long time and have a strong arsenal of email marketing tools from HTML newsletter templates to personal coaching on how to get your email campaigns done right.  They have added event management so you can handle online registration, as well as online survey tools to gather info from customers and prospects.

AWeber

AWeber grew very popular because it focused on auto-response emails.  They made it very simple and elegant to create a form a prospect would fill out.  This service is auto-responded to that information with whatever message you had set up. They offer a robust set of tools including email newsletters, emails to RSS, and, of course, auto responders.  First month is $1, and then pay-as-you-go based on subscriber count.  You don’t pay per email with them.

MailChimp

MailChimp is one of the first email marketing providers to offer a “forever free” plan.  Small business users I know love this plan as it gives you up to 500 subscribers and 3,000 emails for free each month.  After that, it has pay-as-you-go pricing.  On top of the email newsletter and database list management, they offer integration with online event registrations and ticket sales via Eventbrite.

iContact

iContact offers all of the same features as the others, but they focus attention on their deliverability rates – often talked about as whitelist agreements. While it may not seem like a big deal at first glance, if your email provider isn’t doing things right, your email may not get through.  iContact partners with a third party, Pivotal Veracity, to score emails to help improve how many get through to recipients. They offer a free trial, no credit card to get started, and a good educational resource section.

Vertical Response

In addition to email, Vertical Response is probably one of the more integrated services out there, with integration to Intuit and Salesforce.  They offer postal mail options, too, so you can send a postcard to a prospect or customer to add another touch beyond email and it has great educational materials also.

EmailBrain

I liked that they had a “no credit card” free trial signup.  More importantly, I really appreciated that they offer an industry-focus approach with 20+ industry examples and case studies.  You could dig in and see what someone else like you was doing — a good way to get a jumpstart on your email marketing.

eConnect

eConnect Email’s claim to fame is their the first provider to offer a tagging system for email.  Look at it as a meta-organizing system where you can see what your customers and prospects find interesting and are clicking on.  You can tag items in a specific email, in a campaign, and across multiple campaigns.  That information is then available on a subscriber level, so you can see the top five tags your customer is interested in.

FuseMail

FuseMail offers email hosting as well as campaign management.  They have a 14-day free trial.  The big area that stood out for me was they have an SMTP Direct service (which is an email gateway) where you can use your existing email newsletter program and gain the advantages of their email servers.  The advantage of this is that you don’t have to get everyone on your existing mail list to “opt-in” to your newsletter again, which is almost always a requirement when signing on with a new service.  FuseMail doesn’t have this requirement with their SMTP Direct service.

SimplyCast

SimplyCast, owned by Mailworkz (offers 300 emails a month “free forever” account, similar to MailChimp).  Some of the key features that SimplyCast offers are worth considering:   Image hosting (so you can easily have your image render properly), easy to include attachments, forward-to-a-friend options from within the email (great for viral stuff), and dozens of template categories.

JangoMail

Many providers tag your emails with “Powered by ABC Email…” and you probably don’t particularly want to see this sort of branding on your email messages to customers.  JangoMail promises “your emails are your emails, not ours.”  Even though they are a web-based email provider, they allow for you to manage your messaging through Outlook or Thunderbird, and other web-based apps like Gmail and Yahoo, too.  Free trial allows for 50 test emails.

GetResponse

GetResponse appears to be very social media savvy.  They offer video email and social media tools.  Your email subscribers, for example, can easily receive your Twitter updates via the GetResponse service.   They also have a split-testing feature so that you can test one email against another to see which one pulls better results.

Contact29

Contact29 is an email marketing provider focused primarily on the real estate and mortgage industries. If you are in those industries, they are worth a look.

SendLabs

SendLabs has created a tool to help you see what your email will look like in the recipient’s inbox.  With a single click, this feature within the SendLabs Summer ’09 release will send a copy of your email to all of the major email programs (Outlook, Lotus Notes, Yahoo!, Gmail, etc.) and provide a screen shot report on how well your email will render for everybody.

Campaigner

Campaigner offers a nifty workflow tool that allows you to determine when and what actions trigger an email to be sent to your customer or prospect.  It is similar to an auto responder (which sends an email when a customer fills in a form on a website usually), but a bit more advanced.  With their workflow tool, you can trigger a specific response based on what a customer does within the email.  If they click a certain link, for example, they might receive an email 1 hour later.  Free trial, of course.

EasyContact

I liked the very simple 3-step plan that EasyContact presents to first time visitors.  You get a clear sense that they have thought about how to make it as easy as possible.   They also offer a free forever plan and low-cost pay-as-you-go options.

Big Response

The other services may have similar offers, but Big Response has a couple of things worth mentioning:  First, they highlight that you can collect an unlimited number of subscribers – meaning you don’t pay to store contacts and only pay for emails sent.   You get unlimited phone and email support from their experts. 

Benchmark Email

Their competitor comparison chart reveals a lot about what they offer that others don’t.  You can tie into your Google Analytics account.  You can view all of your subscriber opens within a map within the reporting feature.  You can segment out all of your email lists easily which is handy as you get to know your customers better.

StreamSend

The big differentiator for StreamSend is they offer every customer a private IP address, which helps you keep your reputation intact.  You are not judged by the email provider you use, but by your email quality.

myNewsletterBuilder

myNewsletterBuilder stands out in the crowd of email marketers by providing pre-written content that you can use in your newsletters and emails, by industry segment.  They also partnered with eVoiceSpot, which is a multimedia rich presentation service that you can embed into your email or newsletter.

YesMail

YesMail has one major awards and recognition for its platform and service.  They have a specific small business offering called YesMail Direct.  This link goes direct to that page. They are connected to InfoUSA, so if you need to build a mailing list you can do it all under one roof.

Mad Mimi

Mad Mimi is a simple email marketing system.  One of the nice features is it comes with free design assistance.  It also has a limited edition that is completely free and includes good sharing functions like Forward to a Friend, among many other standard features.

PoMMo

PoMMo is a free open-source program that bills itself as “mass mailing” software.  It is a no-frills program.  It’s is 100% free.  However, like many open source apps, remember there’s always a cost — it costs you time.  You are pretty much on your own when it comes to installing it and troubleshooting issues.  There is no customer support to call.

CRM EMAIL

Many companies don’t like their email efforts separated from their customer data. Keeping it all together is a lot of work.  Customer relationship management software companies have listened, but these five web-based offerings are aimed at the small business owner.  If you want to enable customized emails to your customers, with full tracking and opportunities to create new campaigns from your customer data, then you should look closely at these companies:

Infusionsoft

Infusionsoft is a popular CRM solution with automated email marketing as a central concept.  As you make contact with customers via email, or via interactions on your website or online shopping cart, Infusionsoft tracks those contact points.  You can then use those interactions to send targeted and relevant communications. Your salespeople can access this info and understand what communications the customer has seen, or where they’ve gone on your site, and have a more intelligent conversation.  (Note:  Infusionsoft is a sponsor of this site’s Internet radio show.)

Zoho CRM

Zoho is an online application suite like OpenOffice or Google Documents, but with a lot more applications and options for managing your business.  Their ZohoCRM tool recently introduced the email within CRM option. The email add-on is $5 a month additional.

Highrise HQ

Highrise HQ is a web-based CRM from 37 Signals (owner of Basecamp, a popular project management tool).  Like most CRM solutions, they allow you to track who you talk to and so forth, but the ability to see all of your email efforts and dialogue with a customer on one page is fairly useful.

Leopard CRM

Integrating your email into your CRM efforts always looks daunting, but Leopard CRM simply says — calls our support team and we’ll walk you through it.

SalesBoom

SalesBoom is an online CRM application that offers an email campaign management tool.  With it, a user can capture leads via a simple web form and then send individual emails, or manage entire drip marketing campaigns where you email customers or prospects a series of emails over a period of time.

SalesJunction

SalesJunction offers one of the lowest monthly costs for a web-based CRM that I’ve found.  The basic edition has a 15 day trial.

Lyris HQ

Lyris HQ used to be known as Email Labs.  It integrates with Salesforce.com, which is the industry-leading online CRM solution, so that’s a plus for the many business owners using Salesforce.  I could not find pricing on their website, which is a downside in my opinion. Small business owners are too busy to talk to sales reps or sit through web demos just to discover pricing.

SOCIAL EMAIL

There’s loads of proof that social networks have changed how we communicate. They increase transparency, build trust, and give people (customers and prospects) the choice to opt-in to our messages.

With social media you can communicate directly to your customers without the traditional email hurdles and miss the inbox altogether.  For example, your company can send messages to people in a Facebook or LinkedIn Group today.  Twitter does not offer a group feature where you can message a group of people privately, but a third party app called Tweetworks does.  You could accomplish something similar by addressing a group with a hashtag although it wouldn’t remain private.  The goal with a private message is to avoid bothering others that would not be interested in the offer or message.

Return on Subscriber offers a solid post on how to achieve more social email:  Making your email marketing social

Finally, remember that programs and offer details change.  But, to the best of my knowledge all information herein is accurate as of the time of publication.

We hope these 30 applications and ideas help you.  What email marketing software do you use now?  Leave a comment below with your favorite.

Source: smallbiztrends.com