The Beginner's Guide to Online Small Business Marketing

If you have a small business then you are probably on the constant lookout for better ways to market it. The internet provides many opportunities for creative and productive small business marketing, so giving your business an online presence can help you tap into the huge market of people browsing the internet. Here are a few things to consider doing when moving your small business marketing efforts online.

Create a Website for Your Small Business

Chances are that you already have a website set up for your business, but if you don’t then it’s time to consider creating one. Taking your business online is a great way to help your business grow and we can help! Making a website is easier than it’s ever been with many web hosts supplying website design software that does most of the work for you as part of their hosting package. You also normally have a choice of free templates that you can use for your site to give it a stylish and professional look, plus templates that you can buy to make your site even more unique. Most of the time you just have to fill in a few details about your business in this design software to get a basic site setup.

A business website is great because it acts as a hub for your online small business marketing efforts. It gives you somewhere to funnel visitors who are looking for information about your business. Your website needs to be set up to take proper advantage of any visitors who arrive on one of your web pages however, or those visitors will click away not having found anything of value for them.

When creating your site make sure that your website has a call to action on each content page that encourages an interested visitor to take some form of useful action. This action might involve purchasing your product or service, sending you a message for more information, signing up for your newsletter, subscribing to your social media accounts, or doing anything else that lets you keep in touch with them.

Your website’s pages should have a smooth and natural flow to them that moves the visitor towards your call to action. If they have arrived on your website to learn something then the page they go to should work the call to action in with the information they are reading.

Create a Topical Blog for Your Business Website

Once you create your business website you’ll need a way to attract web traffic to it. You can use paid advertising and pay per click marketing to promote your site, but that runs the risk that you can spend more than you make from actionable results. Paid advertising requires professional tweaking to get the best results out of it and is best left to a marketing company. If you are not yet ready to hire someone to manage your advertising for you then you need a free method to attract visitors. You need a blog.

A blog is basically a section of your website where you post articles that relate to the topics that your business focuses on. These blog articles can take many forms, but the best approach when using them to attract productive traffic to your site is to post self-help and how-to articles that help people with questions and problems relating to your area of business.

Perhaps your business is a roofing company, for example. You can post useful articles about roofing maintenance, with a call to action at the bottom of the article that encourages people to call you if they need their roof renovated, repaired, or replaced. Or perhaps you run a gardening business. You can focus on articles that give people gardening tips with a similar call to action to promote your business services.

You should title your blog articles so that they attract traffic from search engines. Think about the search terms that someone searching for information may use to find a given article and craft your title from those terms. If your article is about helping people with small business growth then the title might be something like “How Do I Grow My Small Business on a Limited Budget?”. This is the type of thing that someone might type directly into a search engine form, so it is likely to get you plenty of organic search engine traffic.

The most popular and most useful blogging software is WordPress. It is free open-source software and you won’t need to pay to use it as a result. Your web host probably has an installer available to get your WordPress blog up and running quickly, so check your hosting account control panel for software installer options.

Do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Your Website

After you have a website and blog set up you should consider doing SEO and optimizing them to get the best value from search engines. To properly rank your web pages in search results the search engines first need to know what those pages are about. To find out they parse the text on your pages looking for phrases that indicate the topic of the page, and then match the phrases they find up with search queries that include some variation of those phrases. These search phrases are generally referred to as “keywords” although they usually contain more than one word.

For your content web pages to get traffic there actually needs to be people searching for the type of content on those pages. They may use a variety of different search keywords when searching for the information they need. You’ll need your page content to include a few variations of different keywords that relate to your page content and which actually get decent search volume. You can find various tools online that can tell you what the search volume is for different keywords and which will also suggest more related keywords that you can use.

Social Media Marketing

Putting yourself out there in the digital space may seem daunting at first but we assure you that you’ll get the hang of it in now time. Having a Facebook and/or Instagram presence is essential! Today, many customers find and review businesses like your online first, before ever going into your actual store.

Having a Social Media Marketing presence allows you to stay in contact with your consumer base in a much more casual and yet branded way. Think of your consumers as a part of your extended community and you’re simply reaching out to talk with them through Facebook rather than waiting until them come into your store.

Pay-Per Click or Paid Media Marketing

We talk a lot about SEO but let’s touch on at least briefly SEM or Search Engine Marketing. Now, there are other ways of putting out paid media content like through Facebook (disputably social paid vs PPC or Paid), traditional channels like radio and television and even online magazines or affiliate, but Google Ads is probably the most common form of paid SEM in the digital marketing space.

Utilizing the work you do in SEO in researching your keywords you’ll already have a jump start on setting up your Google Ads. From there it’s a matter of setting your audience and budget. Note, some keywords are more expensive than others and depending on your Niche you may end up spending more to reach fewer people. We recommend playing with the ads and testing them so you can get a feel for what works over time and what doesn’t!

In conclusion

If creating and promoting a website and blog sounds like more work than you can spare the time for then you can always get a professional company to do the work for you. At Three Tigers Media, we specialize in small business marketing and can deliver the leads you need to help your business grow. Give us a call or send an email and we will help get your business moving in the right direction.

Some of the services we offer are website design and development in San Antonio, brand content strategy and creative development in San Antonio, and social and paid marketing in San Antonio. If you need any of these services then we can help you out and get you online quickly.

Online small business marketing can be a hugely rewarding direction to take your promotional efforts in. Most people spend at least a small part of their day online nowadays and frequently use the internet to search for solutions to their problems. If your business is focused on providing those solutions then there are likely a huge number of people online who would benefit from knowing about how you can help them out. So start planning your website, blog, and optimization efforts today to give your online marketing the best chance possible to succeed.