It’s crazy to think the first quarter of 2019 is nearly at an end. January is over, February felt like it lasted about a week and we are already chipping into March. I’m sure if you are a business with the correct mindset; ending 2018 you set yourself and your business goals and targets to hit in 2019. How are you achieving these goals? Whether it’s increasing sales, increasing leads or increasing social performance. You can do this using digital marketing. It could be as simple as increasing engagement or reach. Whatever it may be you are all interested in one thing:
How do I grow my business in 2019?
It’s not the strongest businesses that survive. In fact, it’s actually the ones that adapt. Companies that have not turned to digital marketing for business growth are missing out on a huge market. Think about it. How many people do you think are online every day?
As you are reading this right now, there are 3.2 billion other people using the Internet. We are living in a digital era; an era that probably won’t ever end. Everything we ever use to do traditionally from shopping to talking or even reading and writing, we now do online. Whether you like it or not, you have to adapt or your business will be left behind.
Digital marketing is a much more user-friendly engaging way of marketing than the traditional methods. It allows you to interact with your audience or even your targeted market in real time. It gives your customers a chance to engage with your content and interact with your brand.
In terms of expenses, it is way cheaper to market digitally than any other way. Technically with a lot of digital marketing it is free, but we will get into that later in this article. Traditionally the way we think of marketing or brand awareness campaigns use to be advertisements on TV shows. If you had just 5 seconds of AD time on channels such as BBC or ITV it would be BIG. The problem with this was how unnecessarily expensive it was (it still is). Only large household brands were ever able to advertise on TV; leaving small business struggling and big brands growing even bigger.
The great thing about digital marketing is that it has the same effect at an infinitely more affordable rate. A campaign can be set up in multiple different ways to provide a message or service in the form of an AD and it can be targeted to the audience that are most likely to buy it.
How to grow your business through social media – the basics
It’s 2019 and social media is HUGE. What some businesses don’t realise is how effective Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn etc… are when it comes to business growth.
You can use social media to first increase brand awareness; by posting across different social channels. Nearly half the worlds population use social media. It’s a great way to start spreading awareness for your brand. You may think users are only following businesses that they know but you are wrong.
Over 60% of Instagram users say they have discovered new products on the platform.
Social channels humanize your brand and can massively boost your reputation, this is purely based on the fact that your followers are always able to engage with your posts and are in instant contact with you.
Social media can increase traffic to your website. Sharing website content on social media is a great way to get people to discover your brand which in turn; will generate leads.
Not only is it great for brand awareness but also for building business relationships with clients and potential customers. With the right approach and strategy in place LinkedIn is a great tool for B2B leads. However just simply throwing up an update every now and again will not generate leads. With the right content, in front of the right people you will generate engagement. Do this over time and it will result in leads.
Business growth and exposure through content
The idea behind writing blogs and sharing content is not to hard sell to your audience but to actually inform and raise awareness to your product, brand or service.
Content writing is one of the most favoured methods of digital marketing. Not only does it have the ability to raise brand awareness, but can also build entire communities. Blog writing alone has the power to bring in new customers. It is recommended to post content to your site as much as you can to rank higher in Google searches and to gain more traffic to your site.
3.5 billion Google searches are made every day. This volume of Google searches grows by roughly 10% every year.
Unfortunately, it is not as simple as just writing an article based on your product or service, uploading it and that’s it. In the nooks and crannies of blog writing, you’ll find SEO, keywords and a whole host of other things you need to keep in mind in order to create the best blog possible to get search results.
Your two main goals of a blog are engagement and reach. Freshly uploaded content regulary on your website that is based around your product or service shows potential new customers that you are experts in your field. It helps to rank your page higher in searches which means more people will find your website. Try targeting a long tail keyword and once your article has been indexed by google; there are plenty of tools out there to help you track and monitor the ranking performance. There are a number of key factors that will help your articles rank. I’ll cover more detail on this in another article.
Email marketing for business growth
We all get spam emails claiming to grow your business within 2 months or “do this one simple trick to earn yourself £100,000”. Believe it or not, a lot of these emails are actually email marketing campaigns that have just gone horribly wrong. It’s a case where it is actually damaging your business through its reputation or even worse where your domain becomes blacklisted and you can no longer send emails to your customers! This is an example of what you don’t want to do with email marketing!
The idea behind email marketing is to increase sales or brand awareness for your product or service and done in the correct way it can be very powerful. A good email marketing campaign keeps customers informed without being too irritating.
The great thing about email marketing is that you can actually personalise every email to each customer. You can even target particular groups of customers. This could be people who have bought a certain type of item and if you have certain types of information such as birthdays, genders and names. This information can be saved and be used to send personalised emails, one option for this would be to send offers on customer’s birthdays. These are just a few personalisation options.
Just like social media marketing, email marketing is a great practice for small businesses due to its low cost and ease of use. It’s relatively inexpensive but extremely easy to track and manage performance through analytics and goal conversions.
You may be sat here thinking why you would bother with email marketing over social media marketing or alongside it. The advantage email marketing has is that customers are more likely to see an email over a post on social media. An email will sit in someone’s inbox until it is read or deleted. Whereas a post from a business page on Facebook would only be seen by a % of your fans. A study by Edgerank Checker discovered that between February 2012 and March 2014, organic reach for Facebook Page’s dropped from about 16% to 6.5%.
That means a Page with around 10k followers could only expect around 650 of their fans to actually view your business Page’s posts in their Facebook news feed.
Ideally, social media marketing and email marketing should work hand in hand. You can add social media links at the bottom of your emails such as “like” or “share” buttons which give customers another way to connect with you. It’s a fantastic way to drive traffic to your website or blog which usually results in an increase of income if you keep the viewers engaged and informed in with the right email structure. This can all be automated so once setup you can concentrate other tasks within the business; each month monitoring results and making changes to improve performance.
Where do you start?
Some of you reading this could be in charge or a small business, a large business or just wanting to start up a business. We recommend identifying the areas that you are not doing and start doing them, this is business, you won’t grow unless you adapt.
At unit36 we specialise in digital marketing and we get results.
1 year ago we signed a new SEO client. They wanted to improve their organic rankings and increase organic conversions. In 12 months of working with the team, we have improved their visibility score by 250% and more importantly increased organic sales by 65%. The client in question sells quite high ticket products so this has brought them a huge ROI they are very happy with. We’ve just been signed for a 2nd-year contract and we aim to improve on these results further.
Before working with any client we make sure your expectations and budget align with the results we can realistically achieve. This is one of the most important details when signing up any new client.
- What are your business goals/budget?
- Can we achieve these goals in the given timescale?
If these 2 align then it’s given the green light from us!
Every client is different. Get in touch if you want more information on how we can help your business growth. We are the first of many stepping-stones to get your business back into meaning business!
