Why isn’t my business growing? With the daily grind taking up all your time, it’s a question that you don’t think about often – but should.
This article will cover some of the most common digital marketing reasons why your business may be stuck in a rut.
1. Ensure Your Website is User Friendly with a Simple Design
Many small businesses want to keep expenses down and are lured to the self-designed website companies (Wix, etc) to design and publish their website. “You can have your website up in 30 minutes!!!” is a common claim from these companies.
Problem is – you get what you pay for. Website design may look simple, but it anything but these days to get a professional looking and optimized website to help grow your business. That doesn’t mean spending money unnecessarily on features you may not presently need. It does mean making an investment to ensure it is optimized for search engines (aka SEO), is branded consistently to properly represent your business and uses tactics to increase organic growth (aka non-paid traffic to your website) and drive sales and revenue.
Lastly, the speed and performance of your website is critical. If your site is slow to load, people will just go somewhere else. Every additional second that a user needs to wait to visit a site page means lost views, lower traffic and a lower conversion rate. This means that you need to optimize your website to make sure that it is fast and performs well even under high traffic.
Google offers this free tool to help measure your sites’ speed and performance. Try it out to see how well your site is currently doing!
2. Make Time for Marketing Planning
If you don’t make time for marketing, you are limiting your reach and your ability to expand. Marketing helps prospects find out about you, but it also enables you to stay in touch with your existing customers, ensuring that you continue providing the products and services that they want and need.
It is easy to get impatient with a new marketing campaign. It takes time and patience when trying a new approach, so you need to let the campaign run long enough to provide some insight. Remember that organic campaigns can take a lot longer than paid ad campaigns to generate results. Avoid focusing only on how long a campaign runs, but also consider the number of impressions the campaign has had as well as the conversions.
3. Plan a Content Marketing Strategy
A content marketing strategy is perhaps the most important way to grow your business with digital marketing. You need to create valuable and relevant content to attract and build an audience. This allows you to get more targeted traffic from search engines without spending a fortune on paid ads.
The easiest way to add customer-focused content to your website is by adding a blog. Read here to learn about the many benefits of having a blog on your website.
Hire a professional copywriter to develop and curate your blog content and have your website designer post it to your blog on a regular basis with the proper tags, metadata and keywords to get it noticed by the search engines.
4. Leverage Social Media to Drive Traffic
With billions of users, social media platforms bring great opportunities for small businesses. Affordable social media marketing for small business can level the playing field with your competition. You can start by hiring a social media marketing company to create your business’s social media profiles and start sharing your blog posts.
Engagement with your audience on social media is key. The key is to keep your profiles active, grow your following, and bring traffic back to your website. Focus on social networks important for your industry. If your business is B2C (i.e. restaurant or clothing retailer) you may find Instagram more helpful than LinkedIn.
Another common way to leverage social media is to join free communities on the internet such as Reddit, Quora, TripAdvisor, and others. Determine which communities are more relevant to your business and where your potential customers may visit to find answers to their questions. For example, if you run a travel agency website, you may find TripAdvisor or Booking.com more helpful to post questions, content and help boost your authority.
In summary, ignoring the benefits of digital marketing can restrain your business’s growth potential. You can start small with social media marketing, pay-per-click advertising, or other digital marketing strategies to help you expand your outreach without breaking the bank.
