Five years ago (2019 / Pre-Covid) I wrote a version of this article because the most common question I kept hearing from small business owners was “Why isn’t my business growing?”
It’s a tough question to answer as there are many variables, so let’s focus now on just the marketing reasons. I cannot tell you the number of small business owners I have worked with who believe that posts on social media and a DIY website is all they need to compete in a digital marketplace.
The days of free “organic” traffic through the major social platforms have mostly dried up. Algorithms change more frequently than ever and it is much harder to get your brand messaging distributed without investing time, effort….and some money.
For this 2025 update, we will cover some of the most common digital marketing reasons why your business may be stuck in a rut.
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, Squarespace, 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 is anything but these days to get a professional looking and SEO 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 smart advertising principles to target your audience to 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!
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 (if ever!). Work with your PPC marketing professional to design campaigns that will target YOUR audience to get YOU more conversions.
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 while maintaining an affordable monthly ad budget.
Hiring a professional content developer to optimize your website content, create engaging social media posts and to curate your blog content on a regular basis with the proper tags, metadata and keywords is mandatory in 2025 to get it noticed by the search engines.
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 businesses can level the playing field with your competition. Hire an experienced social media marketing company to create your business’s social media profiles and content.
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.
Finally, do not ignore the power of online reviews. While it may seem that every company you do business with online asks for your review, there is a reason for it…..Online reviews are a critical way for your potential customers to evaluate your products and services BEFORE they choose to do business with you. Read this New York Times article for more on online reviews in 2025. Make sure you or your social media professional reviews and RESPONDS to reviews in a timely and proper manner to show customers you take their feedback seriously.
