Blog by Susie Mitchell,
Director Florence & James Marketing.
Digital marketing covers a wide and deep remit of areas such as your website, SEO, email, social media, online ads (of which there are many variants), influencers, ePR and more.
So as a small business, where should you start? It can often feel extremely daunting; you have limited time, you’re short on resources and it feels like there is some much ground to cover.
In this blog, I am going to provide five top tips on how to help you gain some clarity, and focus to ensure you set the right foundations to help accelerate your business growth in 2024 using digital marketing.
None of this is rocket science and often the best thing a small business owner can do is put some time aside to work on their business and dedicate time and head space to their marketing efforts rather than trying to do everything in a reactive fashion and do nothing well.
So, here’s my list of five simple ways to help you start to perform better with digital marketing in 2024:
1. Know what you want to achieve
There is no point in doing any digital marketing and wasting valuable time and money if you don’t know what you want to achieve. Use your business objectives to shape your digital marketing objectives. Create SMART objectives with clear KPIs. Do you want to gain more brand awareness, drive leads, or improve rate of sales from existing customers? Or all three?
Your marketing won’t be successful if you don’t understand what you want to achieve. Start by clearly defining your goals and then determine what strategies work best to reach them.
2. Glean insights from your performance data
If you’re a new start-up you may lack data, but if you have been operating for a while ensure you glean as much insight as you can from ALL of your performance data and metrics. Look at every channel in detail and understand your website analytics (if you don’t have analytics, setting them up is a must) and look to see what is working and what isn’t.
Use this knowledge to refine, improve and optimise your digital marketing approach. Find out what days work best, which content gets the strongest results, and what call to actions (CTAs) drive the most traffic.
Knowledge is power so use all of the data to maximise your success. This should be your starting point alongside your objectives for your approach for 2024.
3. Niche on your target audience
This is one of the most basic and important parts of marketing. Who are you talking to? Who is most likely to buy your product /service? Where do they hang out, what do they want to know, what problems do they face that you can solve? How can you talk to them in their language? How can you resonate and engage with them?
Do some research and really understand who your audience is and what they look like. Give them a name, a job, a personality and write and create your content for that person.
Your creative will become much stronger, sharper and more compelling if you write and talk directly to your audience about the pain points they have. How will you help them? What do you offer that makes their life easier and why should they care about your product/service?
Plus, when you know who your audience are and where they spend their time you can concentrate on those digital channels making you more efficient and effective with less wastage. One of my favourite sayings is “fish where the fish are” it will drive a much stronger ROI.
4. Get your house in order with a strong digital footprint
Before you start spending any money on paid channels do your housekeeping. Your website is your online shop front and the single most important place people will visit to find out information and to buy from you.
Your website needs to be all singing and all dancing, and yes you do need a website. A Facebook page does not cut it if you want to be a serious, credible business. Ensure your website is performing as well as it should be - load times, image sizes, links working, user experience etc. If you are unsure about this, get someone to help you undertake a website review and look at ways to optimise performance. Go back and look at your analytics data to see where improvements can be made. Google Search Console data is also incredibly helpful with this.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is another vital component of your website, so ensure you maximise this and take the time to develop a strong SEO footing. Some simple ways to do this and increase your digital footprint is by using Google My Business, listing your business with free directories and ensuring you have relevant keywords on your website pages and your website is tagged correctly in the back end. Get help with this if you need it. Doing it right will help save money on marketing in the long run as you will be found organically rather than having to pay to be found via ads.
5. Buddy up with relevant partners
As a start-up or small business, it can be hard to gain traction and generate reach and awareness when you are competing with much larger businesses. A way to help with this is to buddy up with other brands and like-minded businesses. Think about companies/sectors, influencers, associations, and professional bodies who you could create a strategic partnership with where you both benefit from the association.
I recommend quality over quantity here and focusing on long-term partnerships where you both gain something from the relationship. For example you may want to run several joint promotions throughout the year where you give away your product for free (they can offer this to their customers), and they promote it across all their channels; you then reach a large relevant audience in association with a likeminded brand giving you kudos, credibility and large reach and awareness – all for a few products!
This type of approach is a great way for smaller businesses to be found and known by piggybacking on larger partners or influencers and is often overlooked. The most vital thing here is it must be a good brand fit. Do some research and then just approach the companies/people – the worst that can happen is they say no.
I hope these five digital marketing starter tips can help you begin to focus your digital marketing in 2024 and help you find ways to reduce the time and effort you feel you need to spend on your marketing.
If you are interested in finding out more and gaining support with your marketing, module two of the Build Your Business programme is starting in February with a focus on marketing support looking at markets and customers, building your brand, marketing strategy and plans and digital marketing.
You can book your place on any of the webinars here:
Events, Webinars & Workshops in Northamptonshire for Business | Business & IP Centre Northamptonshire (bipcnorthamptonshire.co.uk)
All sessions are FREE to attend.
I’ll be running the sessions, so I look forward to seeing some of you there. Plus, I’m more than happy to help give bespoke advice for your business in the sessions and you can also book an additional 121 consultancy session courtesy of BIPC Northamptonshire.
Module 2 of the Build Your Business Programme will be delivered by our webinar delivery partner Susie Mitchell of Florence & James Marketing.
With over 20 years of international marketing experience, Susie's career has seen her working across a huge range of industry sectors and businesses (start-ups through to blue chips) launching, strengthening and growing brands to deliver ROI.
F&J Marketing works with clients across their brand development, marketing strategies and marketing campaigns managing all channels that are relevant to their clients whether it's PR, events, websites, search, traditional advertising, digital advertising, email and social media management and more. They also offer consultancy support and training alongside their outsourced marketing support which can be retained or ad-hoc.
Visit: Florence & James Marketing to find out more or email Susie at susie@florenceandjames.co.uk
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