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Digital

Marketing for

Beginners

Guide for Small Businesses Getting

Started with Digital Strategy

x x

Welcome

Getting into digital marketing can feel like taking a dive into the unknown for a lot of small business owners, especially if you don’t spend all your time online yourself. But relax. Nobody starts at the deep end, nobody has all the answers before they begin and, even better, getting going is probably cheaper and quicker than you might think.

Speaking of budget, there’s plenty you can do in the realms of digital marketing without spending a penny – but when it comes to reaching new audiences, that’s when a little budget can go a long way. Every part of your digital marketing is a great opportunity to learn something – so it’s all about starting small, testing, learning, and growing over time.

In this guide, we’re going to take you through the easy-access ways to get started – from making the most of search engines to buying your first online ads. All the channels will be familiar to you – Facebook, Twitter, Google, email, and your own website – but we’ll give you the steps you need to feel confident you’re testing and investing in the way that’s right for you and the growth of your business.

Nobody starts at the

deep end, nobody has

all the answers before

they begin and, even

better, getting going

is probably cheaper

and quicker than you

might think.

SETTING YOUR STRATEGY

Set your strategy WHAT DO YOU WANT? Strategy, in spite of being a word favored by the shiny suits of the world, really just means thinking about why you’re doing something before you do it. So starting your digital marketing strategy is as simple as deciding what you want to do, how you’re going to do it, what you expect to happen, and when and how you’ll measure your success.

RESULTS:

Do you want more people to know about your brand and get your products and services more widely known?

Brand awareness:

Do you want to reach people who’ve never bought from you before and bring them into your buyer’s journey?

Acquisition or lead generation:

Do you want people who’ve already bought from you before to buy more frequently or a different kind of product?

If possible, set a specific goal – one with metrics attached to it and a time limit. These might include:

Growth from existing customers:

• X Number of leads from a piece of downloaded content in one month
• % of old customers buying a secondary product within the year
• % Follower growth on social media within two weeks

SETTING YOUR STRATEGY

5 steps for setting

your strategy

Looking at the types of goals we’ve set out on the previous page, pick one to concentrate on. Really understanding the goal you’re trying to hit is the first step to reaching it!

01^ SET A MEASURABLE GOAL

Give me an example!

Misha is a photographer and recently, she’s started producing video for clients too. She wants to let all of her regular customers know that now she offers this extra service so that some become both video and photography customers. She writes the following strategy for this campaign:

“I want to make sure 100% of my current customers know I now offer video services as well. I will run email and social promotions to share this message for two months. After three months from the start of the promotion, I want to have at least one video commission from 15% of my current customers.”

“Really understanding

the goal you’re trying

to hit is the first step

to reaching it.”

SETTING YOUR STRATEGY

Your brand is how and why your customers choose you over your competitors. You can think of it as your company’s personality. So it’s something that’s worth defining clearly – what do you stand for? What are your strongest character traits? And how does that translate into your presence – from the images you use on your website to the language you use in your emails?

03^ KNOW YOUR BRAND

“What are your

strongest character

traits? And how do

they translate into

your presence - from

images to language?”

BRAND HEALTHCHECK

DO YOU REALLY KNOW WHAT YOUR

BRAND STANDS FOR?

Get your personas lined up, visualized and ranked first of all

• use them to help you answer the following questions.

Who is your customer?

This is like a pledge. What will you always do for your customers? This is the other key part of your proposition that separates you from the competition.

What’s your brand promise?

From your customer’s perspective, what challenge are you solving for them? Visualize your perceived value.

What problem do you solve?

Take your answers so far and try to craft a single paragraph that covers them. It’s ok if things merge and overlap – the aim is to end up with a unique message.

How does it fit together?

List three to five benefits your customer gets from choosing your product/service that customers don’t get from going somewhere else.

What are your distinctive benefits?

Now, refine. Take your time, review again and again until you’ve distilled your value proposition to one clear line that captures everything you want to say.

Can you make it shorter?

SETTING YOUR STRATEGY

Your competitors aren’t just those who offer a like-for-like product or service. You can think of your competition in three ways:

You want to know what you’re up against, and you can learn vicariously from both triumphs and mistakes. Get inspired by your competitors’ wins, and use your differences to highlight what’s unique about what you’re offering.

04^ WATCH YOUR COMPETITION

• Direct competitors – those brands who offer the same products or services as you
• Indirect competitors – brands that may offer different products but compete for the same space or budget as you
• Comparators – these might have a similar look and feel as a brand to you, or be other brands that your target customers use frequently too

USER PERSONAS: A TEMPLATE

Name and bio – job, family, age, and location

How you can help them overcome their challenges

How you can help them reach their goals

Their objections

Goals at work

What they like about your service

Challenges

Your elevator pitch to them

DOWNLOAD AN EDITABLE TEMPLATE

SETTING YOUR STRATEGY

Having brilliant ideas for how you’ll drive traffic, build brand awareness, and grow your customer base is just the beginning. It’s crucial you know how you’ll track progress, so you can adjust your plan based on what gets the best reaction. There are lots of different things you can measure (metrics) – but a benchmark of what a ‘good’ score is (KPI), will depend entirely on you.

05^ GET READY TO MEASURE

“There are lots of

different things you can

measure (metrics) – but

a benchmark of what a

‘good’ score is (KPI), will

depend entirely on you.”

Give me an example!

If you posted a new blog post that included some video content on the page, look at how many:

Before you start any campaign, familiarize yourself with important metrics associated with your goals, like those examples we’ve listed above. There are plenty of different things you might want to measure depending on your goals – so bear in mind things like geographic or demographic information that you’re interested in tracking as well. Track performance of these metrics and you’ll start to get a benchmark number for how your content is performing.

• Views you get
• Views of the video
• Engagement with the video (likes, comments, shares)
• Clicks to your blog CTA
• Leads from the post
• Increase in leads from the post vs. posts without videos

Digital marketing can sometimes feel like a guessing game. With so many strategies, channels, and topics to choose from, it’s becoming increasingly challenging to know which tactics will drive the greatest returns.

With limited resources, small businesses don’t have the luxury of throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. They don’t have the time or budget to test and learn from every possibility.

And really, who does?

You need a better way of determining what resonates with your target audience and which marketing strategies have the most significant impact. The answer? Competitive analysis.

Digging into competitive analysis data makes it possible to uncover strategies used by competitors and gain an understanding of what succeeded and what didn’t—so that you can learn from their experiences. This will enable you to make well-informed business decisions and craft data-driven campaigns that meet your goals.

Understanding your competitive landscape is a key step in growing your business. Monitoring the performance of competitors and up-and-coming players in your industry makes it possible to find inspiration and optimize your marketing efforts at every stage of the funnel.

What Does Competitive Analysis Say About My Small Business?

Incorporating Competitive Analysis

Data into Your Small Business

Marketing Strategy

Featured Content

This information is campaign gold. By understanding both the successes and failures of your competitors, you can stop strategizing in the dark and start using real user data to drive decision-making.

Now it’s time to take a look in the mirror. Look at your own data compared to the competition and highlight which areas you are outperforming them in and where you may need to rethink your own strategy.

PRO TIP:

Conduct market research to benchmark your competitive set against industry standards. You’ll get even more context into how your growth was impacted by market trends and fluctuations.

Dig into which strategies succeeded and how you can use the takeaways to improve your own tactics. As a benchmarking best practice, you should always determine not just what happened, but why. Set reasonable goals for yourself by applying your learnings and optimizing one area of your strategy at a time.

But remember, the analysis doesn’t stop here. The competitors you identified (and the addressable market) will continue to adapt and optimize as you do, so it’s crucial that you continue to monitor performance on a regular basis. Also, new players are popping up all the time, so you should keep an eye on the data and keep your competitor list updated.

For your analysis, clearly define what types of competitors you’ll be looking at, whether direct or indirect. You can perform separate analyses on different types of competition in order to highlight different information.

Once you’ve defined the competitive set, dig into the data to analyze their performance and strategies over time. You’ll want to look at changes in website traffic and engagement metrics to determine both the quantity and quality of traffic received. This will allow you to discover which of their marketing strategies are most effective, where they are underperforming, and spot opportunities and threats that can inform your own strategy.

You want to focus on answering questions like:

• Which marketing channels are driving the most traffic?
• Which content resonates most with audiences?
• Where does the majority of their traffic come from?
• Which search terms fuel the most user engagement?

Featured resources to empower your competitive analysis strategy:

• Competitive Analysis Examples to Help You Get It Right
• Know Thy Enemy: Seven Competitor Analysis Frameworks To Give You an Edge
• Build Competitive Analysis Reports Your Management Can Rely On

Digital marketing

techniques

So, you’ve got your plan. You know who and what you’re going after, you know what you’re going to measure, and you know what you’re trying to achieve. It’s time to get going.

The good news is that it’s easy to experiment with different ideas to reach your audience on social media, search engines, and your own website. You can try different types and formats of content to find the best results.

The great thing about most digital marketing campaigns is you can begin to track reactions soon after they’re launched. That means you can soon work out which campaigns are delivering the best return on investment (ROI) and which techniques are most efficient for your brand.

Blog Keywords Social Publishing

Forms Calls-to-Action Landing Page

CRM

Email Workflows

Surveys Smart Content Social Marketing

STRANGERS VISITORS LEADS CUSTOMERS PROMOTERS

ATTRACT CONVERT CLOSE DELIGHT

DIGITAL MARKETING TECHNIQUES

DIGITAL MARKETING TECHNIQUES

SEO Audit

An SEO audit will give you an idea of how SEO-friendly your website is overall. Here’s how you do it

• Export all of your site pages to a spreadsheet, then sort them by the most frequently visited.
• Take your keyword categories and see which fit best by page. Add that category into a column alongside the page name
• Add another column for any keywords you’ve not currently got covered

Get a list of your pages

Don’t hide your keywords – or stuff too many of them into your copy. This includes forcing them into places they don’t belong to try and rank for terms that don’t come naturally to the page you’re on at the time.

Keyword stuffing is the oldest trick in the book when it comes to SEO

• and nowadays, search engines have been developed specifically to detect it. Not only does it look spammy, but it’s not approved by search engines and will result in penalties.

Learn to avoid search penalties

This is where your content comes in. You’ll need to work in those keywords to your priority pages on:

• Titles
• Descriptions
• Headings & Content
• Images Titles & Alt Text
• URLs

Add keywords – naturally, of course

The most important thing to consider is your visitor’s user experience. While optimizing your website for an algorithm sounds purely scientific, remember that the goal of search engines is to deliver the best experience possible to their end-users: searchers. If you keep that goal in mind with your SEO strategy, you’ll be more likely to make good choices. Think about humans first and search engines second, and you’ll be alright.

Promote a good user experience

DIGITAL MARKETING TECHNIQUES

User experience

Your website is your chance to show off exactly what your brand is all about and connect with your customers on your home turf. Here’s where you want your customers to go for information, helpful content, and to buy your products.

Your conversion rate is the number of visitors to your site that end up converting into leads through a form submission.

Thinking about user experience when you’re putting your site together means you can help visitors find which product is right for them, help them decide yours is the brand they want to buy from, or help them keep in touch – for example, by signing up for a newsletter.

So check your site’s analytics and note how people are behaving on your site - where they click, and which pages they spend the most time on. Your overall user experience probably needs improvement if you see a high bounce rate (people leave the site after clicking on only one page) or a low dwell time (if it’s less than 30 seconds, it’s likely visitors haven’t found what they’re looking for).

“Thinking about user

experience when

you’re putting your

site together means

you can help visitors

find which product is

right for them.”

WANT MORE? Check out these 10 tips that can drastically improve your website’s user experience.

DIGITAL MARKETING TECHNIQUES

Paid Search Ads

Having a great website helps you organically turn up higher in search results, but you can also leapfrog to the top of a page of results by using paid search ads linked to a set of keywords relevant to your brand.

You pay for each click on your ad (which is why these ads are also known as pay-per-click, or PPC).

Getting an ad into that highly visible area involves winning an automated auction that takes into account the price-per-click you bid on a given keyword, as well as the quality (as determined by SEO principles) of your site.

“Having a great

website helps you

organically turn up

higher in search

results.”

DIGITAL MARKETING TECHNIQUES

GETTING STARTED

You can have an ad built and online in a matter of minutes using platforms such as the most widely used Google Adwords, as well as similar offerings from Yahoo and Bing.

Find which keywords your ideal customers would search for. Start with a specific description of the product or services you sell and include your location to help you target the most likely buyers. Instead of ‘knitwear’ (too broad), go for ‘hand- knitted angora sweaters, North London’. Write your ad. Who’s your customer? You have one line to catch their attention and get them to click your link in a sea of similar looking links.

Set your maximum daily budget. Keep in mind that popular keywords cost more per click than less common terms (because other companies are bidding for them too).

Use your platform’s conversion tracking. If an ad isn’t driving the traffic or sales, reword it, and test, test, test!

“You have one line to catch their attention and get them to click your link in a sea of similar looking links.”

Download HubSpot’s Getting Started with Adwords

PRO TIPS

Much quicker than waiting for your natural search ranking to rise

Fast results

Common search terms might be expensive

Competitive

You can’t show images or have much control over how your ad will look

Text only

You can bid by keyword, and by region

Easily targeted

You know your leads are quality - the people who clicked on your ad had searched for something you’ve got

Costs are easy to manage, as you pay on a cost-per-click basis