digital marketing

From Zero to Hero: Targeted Digital Marketing Ideas that Catapult Small Business Promotion

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From Zero to Hero Targeted Digital Marketing Ideas

Small enterprises often need help to stand out and gain recognition in the fiercely competitive business landscape. Limited resources, tight budgets, and the presence of industry giants can make it seem like an uphill battle. However, with the right approach to targeted digital marketing ideas, even the smallest businesses can rise from obscurity to become industry heroes. This article will explore creative and practical ideas that will help catapult your small business promotion and turn you into a market leader.

1. Define Your Target Audience of Digital Marketing Ideas

The first step towards effective digital marketing ideas is to identify your target audience. Start by understanding demographics, interests, and pain points. Use analytics tools and customer feedback to gather insights and create buyer personas. This information will guide your marketing efforts, ensuring your promotional strategies resonate with your audience.

2. Craft Engaging Content

Content marketing remains a powerful tool for small business promotion. Craft compelling and informative content that resonates with the interests of your audience. Whether blog articles, videos, or social media posts, focus on providing value. Share expert advice, industry insights, and practical tips that address your customers’ pain points. Engaging content builds trust and establishes your brand as a thought leader.

3. Leverage Social Media

Social media platforms are invaluable for small businesses looking to amplify their reach. Discover the platforms where your target audience is highly engaged and establish a robust presence on those channels. Regularly share your content, interact with followers, and participate in relevant conversations. Use social media advertising options like Facebook Ads or Instagram Stories to target specific demographics and increase brand visibility.

4. Implement SEO Strategies

Search engine optimization (SEO) is vital in improving your online visibility and digital marketing ideas. Optimize your website with relevant keywords, meta tags, and descriptive URLs. Publish high-quality, keyword-rich content that appeals to both users and search engines. Invest in link-building activities to increase your website’s authority. Higher search engine rankings will drive organic traffic to your site and boost your business promotion.

5. Embrace Influencer Marketing

Collaborating with influencers in your industry can significantly boost your small business promotion. Seek out relevant influencers with engaged audiences and establish partnerships. Influencers can endorse your products or services, share your content, or host giveaways. Their endorsement brings credibility to your brand and exposes your business to a broader audience, resulting in increased visibility and customer acquisition.

6. Harness the Power of Email Marketing

Harness the power of email marketing, a powerful strategy for nurturing leads and boosting conversions. Construct an email list by providing valuable content or exclusive promotions to visitors on your website. Segment your list based on customer preferences and send targeted emails addressing their needs. Personalize your emails, use compelling subject lines, and include strong calls to action to encourage engagement.

7. Engage in Online Communities

Participating in online communities can help establish your small business as an industry expert in digital marketing ideas. Join relevant forums, social media groups, and Q&A platforms where your target audience congregates. Provide helpful insights and answer questions related to your niche. You can generate brand awareness and attract potential customers by showcasing your expertise and building relationships.

8. Invest in Paid Advertising

While organic strategies are essential, investing in paid advertising can yield quick and measurable results for digital marketing ideas. Platforms such as Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and LinkedIn Ads allow you to target precise demographics and display your ads to a highly relevant audience. Establish a budget, outline your objectives, and develop persuasive ad copy that deeply connects with your intended market.

9. Monitor and Analyze Results

To secure the triumph of your digital marketing ideas endeavors, diligently monitor and evaluate key performance indicators (KPIs). Utilize tools like Google Analytics to measure website traffic, conversion rates, and user behavior. Identify which strategies generate the most leads or sales and optimize your campaigns accordingly. Regularly assess your digital marketing ideas performance to refine your approach and maximize your promotional efforts.

10. Foster Customer Advocacy

Turning your existing customers into brand advocates is a powerful way to promote your small business. Provide exceptional customer service, incentivize referrals, and encourage customer reviews and testimonials. Engage with your customers on social media and respond promptly to their queries and feedback. Satisfied customers can become your biggest promoters, generating positive word-of-mouth and driving new business.

The journey from zero to hero in small business promotion requires a well-executed digital marketing ideas strategy. You can elevate your small business by defining your target audience, creating engaging content, leveraging social media, implementing SEO, embracing influencer marketing, harnessing email marketing, engaging in online communities, investing in paid advertising, and fostering customer advocacy.

Remember, with determination, creativity, and a targeted approach, your small business can become a market leader and achieve the success it deserves.

Keetria is an entrepreneur, wellness advocate, and brand strategy coach for creatives & entrepreneurs with 16 years of public relations expertise working with some of the world’s leading brands, startups, media personalities, and entertainers. If you would like to work together, don’t hesitate to reach out!

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How Small Businesses Can Use AI Productivity Tools to Grow

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AI is a tool that can be used to both streamline and improve the operations of small businesses. AI productivity tools are perfect for small businesses because they have access to fewer resources than larger companies do. Even though these tools might seem daunting at first glance, they’re relatively easy to use when you break them down into their components. In this article, we’ll cover some tips on how small businesses can use artificial intelligence tools to grow their businesses even faster than they already are.

Artificial Intelligence & its Impact on Small Businesses

Artificial Intelligence is a massive buzzword in tech, but what does it mean? Here’s the short answer: AI refers to intelligent machines that can perform tasks as well or better than humans.

AI has become increasingly important because it improves productivity, efficiency, and customer service. Many small businesses are now using some form of AI-powered tool to help them manage their business more successfully. AI tools can do everything from help you get more sales leads on LinkedIn or Facebook ads by analyzing your website traffic data and learning which keywords are most effective for attracting new customers. From generating automated reports on key metrics like sales pipeline progress that would otherwise take hours each week for someone like yourself who’s just getting started in marketing (or doesn’t have time).

How Small Businesses Can Use AI Tools to Improve Productivity

One of the most common misconceptions about AI tools is that they can only be used for highly technical tasks. While it’s true that some of these tools are designed for businesses that don’t have a large workforce or complex processes, you can still use them to get more done with less effort. Many small businesses are already using AI productivity tools to streamline their workflows and make more money.

One way to use these tools is by outsourcing repetitive or monotonous tasks so that employees can focus on other business areas. An example would be having an AI system handle customer service calls while an employee looks over transcripts and provides feedback on improving performance next time. Another way is by automating data processing so that employees don’t have to do it themselves—and yes, even if your company doesn’t deal with tons of numbers every day, there may still be ways in which automation could help.

How AI Helps in Content Creation

AI helps you create more engaging, relevant, and actionable content.

Say you’re a small business owner looking to launch your first blog post. You have a perfect idea—a product review of Samsung’s latest smart kitchen appliance. But where do you start? How can AI help?

First, when it comes to writing blog posts about consumer products, there are two main types: reviews and how-to guides. Reviews tell readers what they need to know about a product before making a purchase decision; how-to guides show them how to use it once they get their hands on one. When creating these types of posts for your site or social media channels, AI tools can help by advising which type best suits your audience based on past engagement levels with similar content (and other factors).

AI Productivity Tools for Better Marketing & Sales

AI productivity tools can also help you with marketing and sales. These tools can help optimize your marketing campaigns and improve your sales process. For example, AI-driven email automation software can automatically segment contacts into different groups based on their interests and preferences; This allows for highly personalized communications across multiple channels (e.g., social media, newsletters, etc).

The use of AI in marketing has increased over the past few years due to the rise of chatbots and virtual assistants like Alexa or Siri. Chatbots are becoming one of the marketers’ most valuable assets because they allow them to interact directly with consumers through messaging apps like Facebook Messenger without having to deal with pushback from customers who don’t want to talk on the phone.”


Conclusion

As you can see, using AI productivity tools has many benefits for small businesses. They can help you save time and money, improve communication with your customers and make sales more efficient. Using these tools, you will grow your business with less stress and effort.

Keetria is an entrepreneur, wellness advocate, and brand strategy coach for creatives & entrepreneurs with 16 years of public relations expertise working with some of the world’s leading brands, startups, media personalities, and entertainers. If you want to work together, don’t hesitate to reach out!

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Conquer the New Year with These 4 Top-notch Marketing Tools

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Marketing Tools

Digital Marketing is always evolving and there are always new and exciting tools being introduced in the market to make digital marketing more effective. If you have a business, you need to know which of these tools can help you be the best that you can be. The right tools can help you stay updated with the latest trends, help you get organized, and can optimize your efficiency. Here are some tools you need check out this 2018:

Flock

Flock is a communication app for teams. Flock allows you to bring your team together to chat, share information, meet via video conferencing and push efficiency by using its productivity features. You can even integrate all your apps in a single platform. Once you sign up, you can create one big team and hubs for smaller teams. Flock is also faster, slicker and has a more intuitive interface compared to other team communication tools.

Sendy

Sendy is one of the hottest tools in email marketing today. It’s a self-hosted email newsletter application backed by Amazon’s Simple Email Service. Sendy allows you to send attractive emails easily to your email audience and receive a detailed performance report afterward. And the best part is, it’s a lot cheaper than other email marketing apps in the market. You can send 20,000 emails for only $2! If you have less than that, let’s say you only have 10,000 subscribers, the cost can go down to $1. Now, that’s a deal you won’t find anywhere else.

Ptengine

Do you get frustrated when your website visitors suddenly leave and don’t convert? When you have a business website you want to find out why people are leaving your site. Ptengine is a heat map application that records every visit, click, scroll on your site and turns the data into a heat map to help you visualize at what point your customers are abandoning your site. Are they leaving because of usability problems? Pricing problems? Do they find the copy confusing? Once you’ve identified the issue, you can now make adjustments on your site and convert customers better.

Google Trends

Google Trends is a unique tool because it lets you know what people are searching for every day on Google Search. According to statistics, there are 3.5 billion users on Google Search daily and over 50,000 searches every second. Among the 50,000 searches, as much as 20% are from new users, which means that there’s always something new to discover. Google Trends can sift through all the searches and show you, by using keywords, what’s trending worldwide. It will give you an insight on what consumers are really looking for and predict market trends. To see the data, all you need to do is type a keyword or the industry name and press “Enter.” It’s that easy.

Now that you know some of the best tools you can use this year, give one of them a spin and let us know what you think.

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5 Ways Social Media Influences Consumer Spending Habits

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Social Media Influences and Consumer Spending Habits

If you don’t believe that social media has the power to influence shopping decisions, it may surprise you to learn that consumers who involve social media in their shopping process are four times more likely to spend more on purchases. And according to Sprout Social, a whopping 74% of shoppers make buying decisions based on social media.

Sure, social media started out as a platform for people to share their thoughts and photos with their network of friends and family. However, it’s evolved to become so much more than that. We’ve listed 5 ways that social media influences consumer spending habits and you may be surprised to admit that some of these are true for you:

  • Product reviews by friends and family

Consumers are 80% more likely to purchase an item based on a friend’s suggestion. Word-of-mouth marketing is that powerful.

Have you ever posted something you bought or saw a Facebook post by your friend raving about a product? One of your followers may have seen your post and clicked the tag that leads them to the store you bought it from. And admit it, your curiosity peaked over your friend’s new purchase.

  • Social media ads

Marketers are able to place themselves right in front of the consumers they know will be most interested in their products with targeted ads. And as a person scrolls their feeds, ads that appeal to them appear either within the feed or on the side. Either way, it’s enough to call their attention and click through to ultimately make a purchase.

  • Reviews from Influencers

We love seeing what our favorite social media celebrities are wearing, eating, and hanging out. And while we recognize that their posts are probably sponsored, that certainly doesn’t stop consumers from buying the same brand of lip gloss or buy designer desserts that they too can post on social media.

  • Seeing what’s popular or trending first

Facebook and Instagram’s algorithm have changed over the years. You’ve probably noticed how posts you’re more likely to engage with appear first in your news feed. And beyond that, so do posts that have received the most engagement; these “trending” posts could be the latest line of makeup or newest gadget. Whether it is a product, service, or a social media celebrity posing in the lobby of a 5-star hotel, it gets consumers thinking. And maybe they’ll end up buying a tube of lipstick or book a night in a luxury suite for the weekend.

  • A business’s social media presence

Some businesses know how to command social media to their favor. They post content that people love to consume and share. They have strong feeds that attract more engagement. They know how to play to the fantasies of their target market. They have a way of strategically placing their product in the hands of influencers and celebrities who also have strong followings on social media.

Whether we care to admit it, social media has an impact on our purchasing decisions. While we may not buy anything on the spot, the visuals and reviews certainly leave an impression that we may act on eventually.

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4 Free Online Tools to Help with Small Business Marketing

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small business marketing tools

Marketing is easier now than ever before, but that doesn’t mean it’s a walk in the park. You need to know a little bit about psychology, analytics and best practices in order to be a great marketer, but you also need great tools to accomplish your goals and visions.

Luckily it’s possible to achieve your marketing dreams while on a budget. There are tons of free online marketing tools out there, and here’s four I’ve really come to love.

Pablo by Buffer

Visual content is winning these days. It’s not enough to tweet — you also need an image attached. Posts with just text don’t get the same kind of engagement statistics that posts with images or videos do. Explainer videos are more popular than text-based how-to guides — and the same goes for infographics.

Don’t worry if you aren’t exactly inclined when it comes to photography or graphics. Sites like Pablo by Buffer let you choose an image, edit and crop it to fit your social media and business theme. Quickly add text to any image, as well as your logo.

Answer The Public

Your audience has burning questions, and they want answers. What are these questions? Some you can reason out with analytics data, interviews and some research, but that still doesn’t paint a total picture of what information your audience is really looking for.

If you want to know how to truly give your audience content they can find valuable, use Answer the Public. This tool allows business owners to search through keywords and questions posed by Internet users based on keywords related to their business. This makes it easier to produce content that your audience can actually find useful, promoting your brand image and garnering more organic hits.

Moz Local: Check Listing

What is your business NAP? This acronym stands for the most important contact methods you have available: your business Name, Address and Phone number. Get it now?

Your NAP is essential to marketing online, but how this information shows up can vary depending on the particular search engine you’re using. Moz Local: Check Listing allows business owners to enter their business link into the generator and receive information about how their business shows up across popular search engines like Bing, Yahoo! and (of course) Google. This gives you a good picture of how your customers view you online.

Portent’s Title Generator

Finally, Portent’s Title Generator is perfect for those who want to work on their content marketing strategies. A catchy title is the easiest way to get someone to click on a blog or article you have hosted on your website, but not everyone is great at coming up with a valuable yet intriguing blog title.

The way this generator works is that you come up with a subject and type it into the field provided — that’s all the work you need to do. If your business is focused on cosmetics, type in “cosmetics” or “makeup.” If you’re an entrepreneur interested in public speaking, type in “motivation” or “positivity.” From there, all it takes is the click of a button and you’ve got tons of creative titles to choose from.

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How to Reach your Target Audience and Tap Into Their Buying Impulse

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reaching your target audience


Connecting properly in places where they hang out
Even if at the very beginning phase of your marketing campaign you are not ready to participate actively in all aspects of the hunt, knowing where they lurk is crucial. Websites like LinkedIn are becoming more and more popular to find where key groups of people are hanging out; but remember the good stuff doesn’t all happen just in one night. You may have to hang around for awhile and participate in conversations that are not always completely relevant to get the feel of these groups.

Placing targeted ads on LinkedIn would be optimal; but there are other ways to accomplish reaching out to your target market. As far as Twitter is concerned, when you first connect with a new user, you can always send them an introduction email that shows them what you do with a URL attached. Here you are getting into a sheer numbers game, but many product marketers gladly play it, and track its data.

Beware: if you go much farther than this during a first connection, all may not go well! Some of the basics of finding your target market on the internet involve waiting. This is the reason why many marketers have other streams of revenue in the early days; it is well worth the wait to reveal what you are thriving on, or wanting people to purchase. A savvy user and potential customer will hold you in much higher regard if you two chat about other business related topics before you play all your cards and tell them your business.

Even if you are desperate for more customers, the worst way to go about this is to give someone new your entire pitch at first, such as “I am in the business of personal coaching and mentoring. If you want, I can give you a free consultation ASAP!” If you take this route of presentation, you could very easily come off as desperate.

Making sure your plan is able to find and define the target
As far as web and mobile marketing goes, it is more crucial than ever to be involved in conversations about topics that are popular and somehow leaving your mark there. Some marketers think that it is so time consuming that they may not want to leave comments on blogs with their URL and signature, but these can steer you towards some new customers and following.

Even though sometimes budget will not allow, advertising on social media can be a big boost. Some argue that Facebook is not as effective anymore and losing its kick; but hordes of people do hang out there every day and buying ad space there is always bound to reward. Even though it can always change and be hard to nail down daily, the conversion of Facebook ads is about 4.3%, a pretty high value.

Once you have your own Facebook and Twitter pages for your product or idea, your own posts can build organic traffic that may create an even bigger buzz than paid posts, but generating some followers with the paid route is one important tool in the very beginning. If you think that you know exactly who is on Twitter and how frequently, think again; the fastest growing user demographic on the social media site is 55 to 64 year olds. Depending on what your product is, this may give you a whole new dimension of placing paid ads, or simply searching for folks in who you are following. When thinking about the weekends and how to reach your target market, keep in mind that as far as social media is concerned, the weekends are not dead; there is 17% more use and engagement during this time.

The practice of making a Venn diagram (especially if what you are marketing is a book) may seem simple, but can help you figure out your target market. Simplifying where your target market may be by watching where the lines overlap can really show you whether or not to have placement of extra pushes in marketing. It can also help you distinguish whether or not time spent on certain demographics is worth it; as even smaller parts of the circle are potential customers lining up for what you have to offer.

What’s under the cover?
Not just in the book realm but in many others, the cover can really do a lot of work for you in narrowing down your target market. If you are marketing a product that is a clothing line or even Smartphone accessory, you can show the types of people you are going after using it. One surprising fact is that the luxury market stayed a little more intact during the recession, some people who wanted to escape still did. Are you providing an oasis to escape, or a lower cost activity like a coffee show that may be visited with more frequency? If you are providing a lower cost activity or product, you will need to do more volume. This is absolutely possible, but something you need to know up front.

Once you find the target market and the folks that are most apt to buy your product, there is still a lot to be done; and any trends will affect you. After understanding the proper channels, research, and where your target market spends time, you are on your way to success. With proper customer service, SEO techniques, and other web maintenance, the sky is the limit for your brand of product.

As in the surf industry this year, there are still major shakeups in the marketing world, where no one is safe and fear can come creeping around the corner. From “suggested posts” on Facebook to other tactics in social media, there are other ways to gain momentum. Once your target market starts talking to each other about how much they like to use your product, you will be happy you took the time to seek them out, and engage them aggressively.

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