The Simple Guide To Digital Marketing For Small Businesses
For any business to thrive, it will need to continuously reach out to new customers with the aim of converting them into paying clients. While this is something that is generally easy for large companies to do, small and medium businesses (SMEs) often find marketing themselves a challenging task.
To gain a competitive edge, most SMEs usually turn to digital marketing, which is a perfect way to showcase your business online at what is usually a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing. However, in today’s increasingly tech-savvy world, the digital space is a crowded one, and not knowing the ins and outs of digital marketing can mean that you are spending precious resources while not getting any great results in return.
If you own or work at a small or medium-sized business, you may want to consider hiring a freelance marketing professional to help you with your digital marketing strategy and run your digital marketing campaigns.
Read on to learn more about the basics of digital marketing and how hiring creative freelancers can help you achieve your marketing goals in a cost-effective way.
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What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing refers to all marketing activities that use the Internet or digital technologies, such as computers, mobile phones, websites, apps, and other digital platforms. Some of the common types of digital marketing that most companies use include:
Digital display ads
Social media marketing
Content marketing
Email marketing
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Before you get started
It may be tempting to start boosting your social media posts with ad dollars now, but before you do so, you will need to do some planning and craft a marketing strategy. This is where your freelance marketer can come in to help you set things up. Read on to find out how digital marketers can help you build your digital marketing strategy:
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1. Know your customers
Do you know who your customers are? If you were asked to describe the profile of a typical customer, are you able to do so? Knowing your customer profile is the first crucial step in crafting a successful digital marketing strategy.
If you have a business website or an e-store, you may want to check the site’s visitor data to see who has been visiting your site or making purchases. Similarly, if you have a social media page, you can go to the admin panel to retrieve your page’s visitor profile data. It is also a good idea to know how often your customers visit your site, what their browsing behaviour is like, or how they are interacting with you online.
A freelance marketing analyst will be able to help you make sense of all that data, especially if you have a well-established website and/or social media pages.
2. Identify your target audience
So you know who your customers are. Chances are, you will see two or more groups of them. For example, your largest group of customers may be mid-career adults aged 28 to 40, while your second-largest group of customers are young adults, from 21 to 27 years old.
Do you want your marketing strategy to reach out to both customer groups? Do you have enough resources to do so? Keep in mind that these two groups of customers may be attracted to different things, and you may need to reach out to them with different marketing messages.
For example, young adults may be buying sports shoes because they see the shoes as trendy collector’s items. However, mid-career adults are likely to be more interested in just getting a good pair of sports shoes so that they can work out at the gym.
Work with a digital marketing strategist to identify which are the most important target audience groups for your business, and how you can best reach out to them. A good strategist will be able to give you solid advice that aligns with your business goals.
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3. Choose your digital marketing channels
How are you going to reach out to your target audience? Are they on social media? If so, which platform are they on: Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok? Do they prefer to browse the Internet on their phones, or on computers?
If you know your customers and your target audience groups well, this step is probably going to be much easier. The best digital marketing channel is one where you have lots of potential customers, and of which the ad rates suit your budget. Work with your digital marketing strategist to select the channels that work best for you, and how you can use different channels to reach different audiences.
4. Craft your marketing messages
Your marketing messages are essentially what you want to tell your customer. Do you want to tell them that your products are of the highest quality? Or that your store has the biggest variety of items to choose from? Is it important to highlight that you have this unique product that is found nowhere else?
Remember the example on sport shoes from earlier? Each target audience group must have at least one marketing message that is tailored to appeal to them.
Freelance creatives are experienced ad people who can help you come up with fresh, engaging messages to help sell your brand, products, or services.
Photo: David Pisnoy/Unasplash
5. Time to get creative
Now that you’ve crafted your marketing messages, you’ll need to create the content or ad assets that will go with it. These assets can be in the form of digital banner ads, content articles, photos, videos, and so on.
It’s important to make sure that your content or ad assets can effectively communicate your marketing messages. At the same time, you would want to be mindful of the cultural and religious practices of your target audience, as well as the countries and communities you are planning to run your ads in.
On top of it all, your creative assets will need to be of high quality in order to capture the attention of today’s very visual-oriented audience. If your ad features a badly cropped, blurry photo with mismatched fonts, chances are that your target audience would not be too impressed with the image your brand is trying to communicate. If you need help creating good-looking assets, you may want to consider hiring a freelance designer.
Now, it looks like you’ll have to hire and manage an awful lot of people for just one marketing strategy, right? With CreativesAtWork, we can help you avoid that hassle by providing you with a cost-effective, complete suite of end-to-end services including consulting and assembling the team you need. This way, you save on time and do not have to worry about choosing the right creative freelancers to work for you.
Running your digital marketing campaign
While traditional marketing (such as print ads, flyers, and outdoor ads) typically run in campaign cycles, digital marketing can be a bit of a different animal.
Depending on the type of channel you are using, and your objectives, digital marketing can be executed in the form of timed campaigns, or in the “always-on” mode, where a business perpetually runs content or ads (or both) throughout the year to ensure that there is a sustained conversation.
Digital marketing also requires constant monitoring and optimization, as the digital space changes very rapidly. For example, your ad may be doing great and getting lots of click-throughs to your website over the last week, while costing very little money. But because ad rates constantly change due to how many people are bidding for the same keywords, the same ad running with the same keywords may be very expensive this week due to more advertisers bidding for it.
As such, your freelance digital marketer will be constantly monitoring and tweaking your marketing campaign in order to get the most out of the ad dollars.
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Ask for help when you need it
Many small businesses are wary of hiring a professional marketer because they believe that such expertise would come at a high cost. This is not always true.
If you need professional marketing services, such as a marketer to craft your go-to-market strategy, or a designer to create your ads, you can always tap on the expertise of freelancers.
Many freelancers have years of solid experience in the industry, and offer a wide range of skills that you can hire with flexible arrangements. These flexible arrangements are especially useful if you just need help for a short-term marketing campaign, or require someone to help you part-time.
Hiring freelancers can help you achieve significant savings on overhead costs, as you do not have to pay for a full-time position but only for the amount of work you need.
With CreativesAtWork’s full suite of services, we can build a complete digital marketing team for you in a cost-effective manner, so you have access to a full team of creatives with a wide range of expertise and skills, while paying a fraction of what it costs to hire full-timers.
Should you be considering hiring freelancers, drop CreativesAtWork a message at contact@creativesatwork.asia to find out how we can help!
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