Are you on the lookout for online marketing tips for small business?
When you’re running a small company, your focus is usually on delighting your customers and building up business bit-by-bit. Perhaps you’ve already been trying your hand at some digital marketing or content marketing techniques, but want to find some nifty tips and tricks that will help you see results faster.
As an experienced marketer for over 20 years, I just love helping my clients to identify ‘quick wins’ that will contribute to getting them where they need to be in terms of business growth.
So in that spirit, I thought I’d share some of the best quick and easy online marketing tips you can even try for yourself right now. Enjoy!
1. Optimise older content or blogs
If you already have a blog with some older content on it, I’d recommend having a look through what you already have and optimising your call-to-actions (CTAs) and keywords by analysing your data and seeing if there’s anything you can do to make these stronger.
Remember, your CTAs – in other words, bright buttons or ‘touch points’ – should be clear and say exactly what people will be getting once they click on them; whether that be downloading a piece of premium content, or simply subscribing to your blog or newsletter.
TIP: Perhaps you even have a more effective CTA you’re using now that you just haven’t applied to some of your older content – go and add it in!
If you’ve been doing any kind of research into your SEO and keywords, perhaps you can spot some weaknesses in your older content that can be optimised with stronger keywords that will help you rank better in search engines.
2. Repurpose existing content
Perhaps you started your content marketing efforts a few months ago, and already have some good, helpful blog posts under your belt based on some of the questions your best customers are asking – but now all it’s doing is sitting on your blog whilst you scratch your head for new ideas.
Instead, you could look at repurposing some that content! Perhaps you have a collection of blogs on one particular subject – why not edit them all together and turn them into a piece of premium content, such as an ebook, that you can then offer as a free download to visitors in exchange for some basic contact info?
Maybe you have a ‘how-to’ blog that’s doing particularly well – why not adapt it into a video script and film yourself going over these points for your YouTube channel? Or, perhaps you have a white paper or ebook packed full of great statistics and research, that you could then turn into a really stunning infographic!
3. Try running a social competition
Running an Instagram, Facebook or Twitter competition can be a great way to generate a bit of excitement and raise brand awareness for your small business. You could perhaps make the prize one of your products or services to give people a taste of what your business offers.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be difficult, either; sometimes all you need to do is ask participants to ‘like’ the post and your page, and leave a comment – simple, and means that you’re not asking anyone to go out of their way to be in with a chance to win!
4. Optimise your social media profiles
Taking just a few minutes to write a strong bio and ensure your social media profiles are optimised with the correct keywords and descriptions can make a difference when it comes to helping you get found by new followers. And it only takes five minutes or less!
Having vague descriptions or even worse, leaving these spaces blank, can put people off as they won’t be able to get a quick summary of exactly what your business actually does – and if this is unclear, they might not stick around to investigate further.
5. Check your bounce and exit rates
Take a closer look at your pages and investigate which have the highest bounce and exit rates, as you may be able to find problems with your site that way that can lead to higher conversions if fixed.
Often, high bounce rates are a bad thing, although it really comes down to context. It could be that some of your pages just don’t have that much for users to engage with, and they get exactly what they want from it. Bounces are one-page sessions, so it doesn’t count if someone arrives on one page and quickly moves to the next.
Typically, exit rates are much more important than bounce rates, as they usually always signifies there’s a problem – and means people are leaving your site from that page. If a particular page has a high exit rate, look at whether you can give visitors something else to do once they arrive there – like an offer or CTA.
TIP: Check out this informative article where you can read more about difference between bounce and exit rates.
6. Optimise your site’s metadata
completing and optimising your site’s metadata is important for your SEO. However, I’m going to elaborate on this in a bit more detail here, as some metadata is more important than others.
- Meta titles – Yes, optimising your meta titles to include the correct keywords is particularly good for your SEO and I’d recommend doing this where possible
- Meta descriptions – These have no bearing on your rankings, but they do show up in online searches – so if you leave them blank, Google will pick what is displayed at random
- Alt tags – It’s good practice to add these in, but if you have hundreds of blank alt tags, going back and optimising these really won’t be worth your time
I’d say going forward, it’s worthwhile adding all of the above in, but your existing meta Titles are the only ones that are particularly worth optimising retrospectively to help improve your SEO. As for meta descriptions, check how Google currently displays those pages, and use your discretion.
7. Claim your Google MyBusiness page
Claiming and setting up your Google MyBusiness page to display all your current and updated information is so important for attracting local customers to your small business. Your listing will show important information such as your contact details and opening hours, plus any ratings and reviews people have left.
Another great reason to set up your MyBusiness listing is that it’ll also help your website to rank better when people search for the products or services you offer. This can make a difference, as if you’re not quite high up in the list, people won’t bother to dig too deep through pages and pages of results.
8. Have a quick brainstorming session
Sit down with your customer-facing team (or anyone involved in your business who deals with customers) and ask them the questions they hear from your best customers on a regular basis. Write all the answers down, as what you’re left with could be a potential goldmine when it comes to creating new blog content.
This need only take a few minutes, but you could end up with months’ worth of amazing titles and content ideas that will help more like-minded customers find you via search engines. Just be sure to echo the same language and keywords they’re searching for when it comes to producing the content itself.
9. Look at your blog and respond to comments
Take 10 minutes out of your day to look over any comments people have been leaving on your blog, and respond to the ones that require replies. I personally think this is important to do, although some of our clients are (understandably) simply too busy to keep track of all the comments they get.
However, it’s wise to bear in mind that ignoring comments from people who are asking vital questions about your products or services could mean you’re missing out on business.
TIP: If you see any particularly good questions in the comments that you haven’t already answered elsewhere on your blog, make a note of them – they could be turned into great ideas for future blog titles!
10. Set up a heatmap on your site
Heatmaps are a fantastic way to see exactly how visitors are behaving on your website; what they’re reading, where they’re clicking, and any problems they might be having on their buyer journeys – it’s all about looking for ways to improve the overall user experience and make things as easy and enjoyable as possible.
For instance, at Stargazer, we recently found that around 5% of our visitors seemed to be clicking on the rocket graphic on our homepage, despite the fact that it did nothing. We thought it would be nice to give those visitors something extra for clicking, so we created a new page (kind of like an easter egg) for those people to find.
Here are some examples of heatmap tools you could try:
TIP: For a better idea of which heatmap tools to use, check out this review of the best on offer right now.
11. Optimise your landing pages
Pick your most popular landing page and look at it objectively – is there any way you could improve the copy? Try running A/B tests (which involves changing one thing at a time) until you increase your conversion rate to a percentage you’re happy with.
It’s also a good idea to look at the forms your landing pages use, as having too many fields for people to fill in can lower your conversion rate even more. Is there a way you can take out one or two fields and still get the information you need? It might make people more likely to fill them in.
TIP: According to SearchEngineLand, only the 10% of advertiser accounts have a landing page conversion rate of 11.45% or higher – can you beat that?
12. Check your best pages are easy to find
Look at which of your web pages convert the most, and check that these are actually reachable from your homepage. If they seem hard for new visitors to find, you could be making things a lot more difficult for yourself than necessary, and it may be worth finding a way to make them more prominent.
You could even use the above-mentioned heatmap tools to see which pages people are barely visiting/spending any time on, and switching your navigation around a little bit in favour of your most popular pages. Just remember to keep your navigation as simple as possible – don’t over-complicate it.
13. Install an exit pop-up plugin
Finally, if you’re finding a lot of your visitors are leaving for one reason or another, it might be an idea to try installing an exit pop-up plugin or app on your site. This essentially comes up with a special offer or promotion when a visitor is about to leave to browse a different website.
Some people find them annoying, however, if some of those visitors are seriously considering buying your product, an extra 20% off or free shipping could be the tipping point that encourages them to stay and buy your product or service. You won’t get everyone this way, but it’s certainly worth a try!
Below are just some examples of exit popup tools you can try:
- NinjaPopups
- Picreel (recommended)
- Bloom
- OptinMonster
- OptiMonk
TIP: Check out some of these inspiring examples of how this type of popup can work in practice.
Conclusion
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading some of my favourite quick online marketing tips for small business – maybe there are even a few in here that you haven’t tried yet!
TIP: If you’re interested in how a digital marketing agency could help with all of the above – and more – check out my blog ‘How to Find the Best Digital Marketing Agency in Edinburgh‘.
If you have any specific questions about any of the tips above, please feel free to leave a comment below and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible – after all, I’m here to help!