Simple digital marketing hacks can have a major impact on your business. For example, popups are the most popular type of signup form but they have one of the lowest conversion rates, at only 3 percent. Switching to a landing page signup form could increase conversions to over 20 percent. It's digital marketing hacks like these that will take your business to the next level.
Let’s look at 7 digital marketing strategies that will help you grow your business with minimal expense.
1. Use Social Media To Connect With Customers
Social networks like Twitter and Facebook make it easy to connect directly with customers and prospects. You can use these platforms to support existing customers and find new ones.
For existing customers, set up a business page or group where you can interact directly. You can use this as a customer support channel for answering questions about your products or dealing with problems.
Facebook Ads is one of the most powerful advertising platforms for finding new clients. You can reach extremely targeted groups of people with your ads and in most cases, the more narrowly targeted the group is, the less the ads will cost.
2. Blogging And Content Marketing
There are several blogging for business benefits that make adding a blog to your website valuable, including:
• Build a reputation as a subject matter expert (SME) in your industry
• Answer common questions to reduce the workload on your support staff
• Search engine optimization (SEO) benefits to help your website rank higher in Google
• Let other people share your content
Content marketing offers similar benefits but it goes beyond your blog. You can create content that gets posted on other websites (guest posting) or on other platforms you control like a YouTube channel or Instagram feed.
3. Write eBooks
If you do business in a market where there is an opportunity to share information and knowledge, writing an ebook can be a good way to expand your reach. Being a published author helps to build authority in your market, which can lead to your company being the top-of-mind choice for new prospects.
An ebook can also be a good giveaway in exchange for someone signing up for your email list. This is known as a lead magnet.
Don’t worry about giving away too much information either. Even if you explain how to do everything your business gets paid to do, from A to Z, most customers would still rather pay you to do it for them.
4. Email Marketing
Email might be one of the oldest internet technologies that is still in wide use but there’s a reason for that — it still works great.
More than 90 percent of online adults use email and over 60 percent of them use it every day. That makes it one of the most reliable ways to reach your audience.
Building an email list that you can reach out to anytime is a fundamental digital marketing strategy. It gives you control over your audience that you don’t get with social media and other platforms.
For example, if you have a large number of followers on Facebook, you’re at Facebook’s mercy. If they change their terms of service at some point or decide they don’t like something about your business, you could lose access to those followers with little or no recourse.
With email, you “own” the list. If something happens with your email service provider (ESP) you can take that list of names to a new provider, import it into your account, and continue to contact them.
5. Get Press Coverage For Your Business
If you have something noteworthy to share about your business, you can connect with journalists directly through a service like Just Reach Out. The days of needing a PR agency to do this for you are long gone.
You can also publish press releases through various websites that deliver these releases to a myriad of news organizations and websites. This has the added benefit of giving you more backlinks to your website, helping improve your SEO.
6. Video Marketing
If it makes sense in your market, video marketing is an excellent way to reach your audience.
Google’s data shows that 60 percent of people prefer online video to TV. That means a large part of your audience may already be accustomed to watching videos online.
You can use video in various ways to improve your marketing, including:
• Add video to your landing pages to increase their stickiness
• Create your own YouTube channel
• Use Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and other social video platforms to reach new customers
You can also work with social media influencers to do some of the work for you if creating video isn’t one of your strong points.
The best platforms vary from one market to another so make sure you do some research to see where your customers are most likely to see your content.
7. Repurpose Your Existing Content
If you’ve already got a library of content on your website or in other places online, repurposing it to use in different ways is one of the easiest options. It’s also one of the cheapest, which can be helpful if you’re still in the startup stage.
Repurposing means converting the content into another format or medium. For example, you could take a how-to article on your blog and use it as the basis for an explainer video that you can add to your YouTube channel.
Or you could assemble several of those articles from your blog into an ebook that you can then use as a lead magnet to get more people to sign up for your email list.
Which Of These Marketing Hacks Fits Your Business?
Every business is different so while these digital marketing hacks may not all suit your needs, at least a few of them will. Pick one or two digital marketing hacks to focus on and start implementing those changes. You might be surprised how quickly you’ll see results with your small business digital marketing.
