Introduction – 1 Powerful Digital Marketing Strategy for Small Businesses and Startups
Every business owner and entrepreneur is dying for the 1 Powerful Digital Marketing Strategy for Small Businesses and Startups. They don’t want 177 tactics that might work, they want the one that will work everytime.
As the owner of a small business or startup, you face the biggest problem getting your next client or sale.
In fact, I bet the number one thing that keeps you up at night is this very concern.
- How will I get my next client?
- Will I get another sale soon?
- Will I make enough to pay the bills?
- Will I be able to keep the business open for another month?
- Introduction – 1 Powerful Digital Marketing Strategy for Small Businesses and Startups
- Download Our Free eBook
- What is Digital Marketing and how can it help my business grow?
- How can you get more traffic to your website?
- What Is Search Engine Optimization and How does it generate traffic to my website?
- What is Content Marketing and how does it generate traffic to my website?
- What is inorganic traffic and how can I use it to get more visitors to my website?
- How do I convert more website traffic?
- The Digital Marketing Strategy For Explosive Growth
- The magic is in email – Grow your email list
- Build a Sales Funnel
- How to build your own sales funnel for explosive growth in your small business or startup
- 1 Powerful Digital Marketing Strategy For Small Businesses
- 1 Powerful Digital Marketing Strategy For E-Commerce Businesses
- 1 Powerful Digital Marketing Strategy For Larger Businesses
- Promote Promote Promote!
- Conclusion – 1 Powerful Digital Marketing Strategy for Small Businesses and Startups
Download Our Free eBook
As Mark Cuban once said, “There is no business problem that can’t be solved with more sales.” As the Founder and Owner of over five internet businesses and the CEO of another, I know your pain all too well.
I have been down in the trenches for years and I’ve developed a sense of what will work and what won’t work.
Are you struggling to convert more website traffic to sales and leads? Are you struggling with client retention? Then read this blog post we wrote on eBook on the 10 Worst Reasons Your Website Isn’t Converting.
Download our free eBook “Your Website’s Conversion Mistakes: 26 Reasons Why Your Website Is Scaring Away Customers” here and take our Website Income Quiz.
If you’re already spending money on Google Ads then you should also read this article on how to improve Ads Conversion.
We share these articles for one simple reason: They are absolutely important as the quality of your digital marketing strategy doesn’t matter if you are faced with these issues.
It would be like using a bigger bucket to fill a drum with water that has no bottom – it doesn’t matter how much water you pour in it won’t fill or make a difference.
There are many digital marketing strategies that can be implemented for small businesses and startups to help them grow.
In this blog post, we’ll explore:
- What is digital marketing
- How it helps you generate leads
- The best ways to optimize your website for better conversion rates.
- We’ll also discuss some of the digital tools that every business needs in order to thrive online.
Having a good understanding of Digital Marketing Strategies For Small Businesses And Startups will be critical for your early business success.
Let us get started
What is Digital Marketing and how can it help my business grow?
Digital marketing is the use of digital media tools to promote a business and its products.
Digital Marketing strategies for small businesses and startups use tactics such as SEO, SEM(search engine optimization), social media promotions, content creation, video promotion (YouTube), and email campaigns in order to reach customers on computers or mobile devices online via websites.
By combining multiple effective digital marketing techniques to form a fluent process to generate leads and sales you will have an effective Digital Marketing Strategy to grow your business.
Digital Marketing helps your business grow:
- By attracting new customers
- Maintaining customer loyalty.
- Building brand awareness
- Generating leads
- Generating sales
- Building a relationship with your ideal client
- Providing your product or service to internet users who are searching for you
Now that we understand what Digital Marketing is and how it can help your business grow let us discuss how to get your strategy together.
How can you get more traffic to your website?
There are two ways you can get traffic to your website:
- Organic Traffic
- Inorganic or Paid Traffic
What is organic traffic and how does it work?
Organic traffic is free and it increases as you create quality content.
It can be generated from:
- Organic search engine results
- Shares on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter
- Referrals from other websites that have linked back to your website or blog post
- Links in emails from customers who are happy with the service they received
The most popular and effective ways to generate organic traffic is through:
- Search Engine Optimization
- Content Marketing
What Is Search Engine Optimization and How does it generate traffic to my website?
Search Engine Optimization is the process of increasing organic search engine visibility and ranking in major search engines such as Google.
It involves optimizing your website and web pages for search traffic.
When a user goes to Google and searches for the product or service that you offer Google will return the best Search Engine Optimized result to the searcher.
That means that SEO will be pivotal in connecting with Google’s over 3.5 billion daily searches.
What is Content Marketing and how does it generate traffic to my website?
Content Marketing is a form of marketing in which the company creates and shares relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined target audience—with the objective of driving profitable customer action.
With content marketing, you are providing value to your searcher and a potential client. This shows them that you are an expert in your field and that you know how to help them.
By establishing this relationship built on trust with them you are now in a position to offer them your services and they will be more likely to convert and become customers or clients.
The reason is simple: People don’t spend money with who they don’t trust.
Now that we’ve looked at the ways to generate traffic organically let us look at how to generate traffic inorganically.
What is inorganic traffic and how can I use it to get more visitors to my website?
Inorganic traffic is any form of digital marketing that doesn’t come from search engine optimization and social media. This includes paid advertising, email campaigns, banner ads on other websites (aka “outsourced link building”), etc…
The key to inorganic traffic is understanding the conversion rate: how much effort you put into acquiring a visitor vs what are the returns on your investment. This is often called ROAS – Return On Ad Spend.
The advantage of inorganic traffic versus organic traffic is that inorganic traffic can start generating website visitors in a matter of hours while organic may take months to generate any amount of returns.
Additionally, with inorganic traffic because of how fast you see results you can pivot and change strategies faster. This will help you to save time and money.
The major disadvantage with inorganic traffic versus organic traffic is that it can be costly. This is especially so if you have any of the conversion mistakes on your website listed in our free eBook.
It would be like spending money to fill a drum with water that doesn’t have a bottom. No matter how much water you pour in it won’t be filled.
The other major disadvantage is that when you stop paying for inorganic traffic you will not get any more traffic.
In fact, your traffic will dry up as fast as it came – almost instantly.
Similarly, with organic traffic, just as it took months to start generating, it will almost run indefinitely without any effort on your part once it starts working.
How do I convert more website traffic?
Now that you have done all the work to get more traffic to your website it is important that you start to convert it into leads.
It is highly unlikely to convert traffic into a customer or client on their first visit.
The reason is simple: they need to build a relationship with you, build up trust, then they will feel comfortable enough to work with you.
In fact, website conversion rates can be as low as 3% on average with e-commerce conversion being as low as 1%. This means that for every 1,000 website visitors that come to your site only 3 will ever convert on average.
You will need to take steps to improve your website’s conversion rate.
We will not spend too much time here as we have stated previously the ways to fix your website’s conversion issues and improve the number or leads and customers you generate.
Download our free eBook to learn more about fixing your website’s conversion issues.
Additionally, you can check out our post on generating more traffic to your website that will be posted here to learn how to generate more traffic to your website.
Additionally, we are currently writing an eBook on website traffic mastery.
This eBook will not only teach you all you need to know about the types of traffic but will also give you strategies to convert this website traffic and over 130 ways to generate traffic to your website.
You can get that book by clicking here.
The Digital Marketing Strategy For Explosive Growth
In this section, we will briefly mention the marketing strategy to get your business explosive growth.
In this section, we will explain the strategy in a general way. We will do this by explaining the core part of the strategy.
Once we have shown this part we will go into detail for three different business types: Small and startups, e-commerce, and larger businesses.
We will make tweaks in our explanation that will fit each size business.
The marketing strategy is very simple and is built on the assumption that:
- you have enough traffic on your website
- You have a product that is actually in demand
- Your main priority is sustained sales or new customers to fuel profits and growth
Building on those previously mentioned assumptions we will jump right into the strategy.
Now that you have a website that is fully optimized for conversions and you are getting enough traffic you need to know what to do with this traffic.
The best thing to do at this point is to offer something of incredibly high value to your visitors in exchange for their email addresses.
The item of incredibly high value should be for free and should be something worth paying for.
Some things to consider offering for free are:
- Discount codes
- Free consultations
- Free product
- Free ebook or book
- Free audit
- Free strategy
- Free webinar
- Access to a course you may have
- A trial version of your software or other services
You can also learn more ways to generate leads for your business using email marketing by reading 16 Powerful Email Marketing Lead Generation Strategies.
Now that you have your target audience’s email address we will move onto the next phase: building a relationship with them.
Competition on the internet is fierce and is like a bloody pool of predators who devour each other at any moment.
You don’t want to be the prey in this environment but sadly you most likely are. It’s time to evolve into a dominant predator who ceases market space and grows like a cheetah on steroids.
How will we do this and how will a list of emails do this?
It’s very simple: people don’t spend their money with someone they don’t trust/
Imagine walking into a bar and telling the most beautiful girl you see who you are, what you do, and that when she is ready she should call you over for a fun night.
What would happen?
Getting slapped in the face is putting it nicely and rather kindly. You might also be hit with a harassment charge, restraining order, and kicked out of the bar for life.
Doesn’t sound like the romantic wedding you intended, right?
That’s the same thing people do when they try to convert a website visitor to a customer on their first visit. Don’t be the prey. Be the predator.
The magic is in email – Grow your email list
Instead of asking them to trust you and hand over their hard-earned cash two minutes after meeting them, it’s best to do this instead: offer them your freebie that we settled on above.
What this does is show that you are genuinely interested in helping them and want to offer amazing value that will solve their problems. Besides, an email isn’t nearly as intrusive as requesting credit card information.
If you annoy them they can just block you, not read your mail, or report you as spam, not go through credit card fraud charges – this is their line of reasoning and number one fear.
Of course, you won’t be any of those things to them. In fact, you love seeing your clients or customers grow and enjoy life. If only they knew you and who you are they’d understand, right?
That is what we do with the email addresses: Build a relationship with them so they know you well enough and trust you enough to work with you.
The way to do this is by offering more value to your subscribers. Value can be in the form of:
- Updates from your blog with helpful information to solve their core problems
- Resources you’ve created
- Sharing links and videos that can be helpful
- Sharing a funny, painful, or emotional experience that helped you grow and become successful
- Special offers to products and services you offer.
As you build a relationship with them your objective should be to educate them, answer questions, and help them understand that their is a solution to their problems.
This will position you as a thought-leader and industry expert as well a as trusted figure they can count on.
You must decide on your email schedule. I have found that once per week is too little to build a strong, lasting memory and relationship quickly and 5 times per week is like daily news – who wants that unless its exceptionally good?
My suggestion is two to three times weekly with consistency for months. 8 out of your 10 posts should be informational and helpful. Only 2 or none at times should be commercial where you look for a sale.
The objective, again, isn’t to make a sale. It is to educate and build trust.
Learn 22 more ways that email marketing can benefit your business by reading the article we wrote 22 Powerful Email Marketing Benefits To Grow Your Business.
Do you want to learn more about how you can make the best returns on your email marketing investments and start growing your business with your email list? Read these posts we created to get 15 powerful tips to grow your business with email marketing and 3 Effective Sign-up Drip Campaigns for Effective Email Marketing Conversions.
After all, they aren’t experts and you educating them will only serve to positon you as the expert they know personally (you’ve been emailing for months!
You’re like a friend in a foreign land at this stage, or next door since COVID has us locked inside all day) and so the first on their list to solve an issue.
You should also be sure to read and reply to as many replies from your email subscribers as well. This will only strengthen your relationship.
Build a Sales Funnel
Now that we have a list of email subscribers who know us, love us, and trust us, we will now need to present them with an offer than will be helpful for everyone no matter where they are in the buyer’s journey – whether problem aware or solution hunting and on extreme cases they are hitching to solve the problem.
To do this we will use a sales funnel to offer our products and services to our audience.
What is a sales funnel?
Sales funnels are the most common way to track conversions and ROI. They’re a series of steps that lead visitors from acquisition, through conversion, up until they become customers
A sales funnel is an important part of any digital marketing strategy because it helps you understand how your content impacts leads and ultimately revenue.
How can a sales funnel grow my business?
There are many ways a sales funnel can grow your business. Some of the key advantages of using a sales funnel in your business is:
- Generate more revenues per lead
- Offer more products to each customer
- Offer a more complete set of solution to each customer instead of just one product
- Sell more only to those who are willing to spend more
- money
- Eliminate old products or services that are no longer relevant to your customers
- Make it easier for prospects to buy from you.
Now that you understand what a sales funnel is and how it can help your business grow and offer better services to your customers, we will now discuss how to get a sales funnel added to your business.
The easiest way to add a sales funnel to your business is through the popular Funnel Software company ClickFunnels. You can sign up for an account here.
They will also teach you how to create different kinds of funnels to generate leads, sales, email subscribers, customers, and more.
If you have a WordPress website the best way to get a funnel integrated is through the use of the best WordPress funnel building software Cartflows.
You can get the free version here or purchase a premium version for added functionality.
You can learn how to set up Cartflows by watching tutorials on our YouTube channel.
If it’s too much trouble for you then you can have our marketing team design and implement a sales funnel for your business. Just sign up here
How to build your own sales funnel for explosive growth in your small business or startup
In this section, we will give a simple outline of a sales funnel that you can use to get more sales from your email subscribers.
For more examples, you can visit our YouTube channel.
Additionally, you can send us a message on our Contact Page of types of funnels you would like or even a problem you’d like your funnel to solve and we will consider making a video around it.
The most basic funnel you will use will be this one:
- You start by offering a low-cost product. This product can have a one-time discount that is only available to visitors of that page.
The initial offer must be so good that they can’t resist it or go somewhere else. - After offering your low-cost product the next thing that you need to do is offer a complementary upsell that will make that product work better or faster.
An example is offering a discounted Vegan cookbook in the first offer. To improve on this you offer a vegan baking book as an upsell. You can also offer something like a vegetable peeler.
The idea is that it must be something that improves the value of the first offer, not replaces it. - With the upsell, only a few or a small percentage of people will take the upsell. This is where you make your money by offering a downsell.
This downsell must also be a complimentary item for the initial item but must be priced lower than the upsell.
An example of a great down-sell following from our previous example could be a knife set and blade sharpener. It could even be an apron with matching pot handlers.
Keep your buyers entertained and excited with awesome value. - I also like to offer one final upsell after this initial round. I rarely like to end things after just one round of sales.
After all, someone who just bought is more likely to keep buying and it’s easier to sell to someone who has already bought from you than to encourage someone else to buy from you.
In this final upsell I go for something a bit more expensive. It’s my final offer, sometimes discounted, and only hyper buyers – people who spend a lot and spend easily, will make it this far.
Following our previous example, we could offer our vegan cooking course at 25% off.
Let us look at how this would make money by assigning prices to the items we sold in our funnel:
- Vegan cookbook – $9.99 –> Initial offer
- Vegan Baking Book – $16.99 –> Initial upsell
- Knife-set and blade sharpener – $4.99 –> Downsell
- Cooking course – $74.99 –> Final upsel
Let us assume that we have 1,000 email subscribers that read this offer and only 60% of them visited the landing page to view our offer.
This means we got 600 landing page visits.
Of these 600 landing page visits, we had a conversion rate of 20%. This means that 120 people bought our initial offering of a vegan cookbook.
This gives us an order value of $9.99 per cookbook X 120 sales = $1,198.8
Of these 120 sales, we have 30% of them taking us up on our initial upsell. That means that we made 36 more sales on our Vegan Baking Book.
This gives us 36 X 16.99 = $611.64 in upsells.
Since 30% of the original 12 sales took our Upsell we will not have the remaining 70% being funneled into our downsell.
This means that 84 people viewed our downsell offer and of the 84 people who viewed our downsell offer only 15% took us up on it.
That means we made 13 more sales. This gives us 13 X $4.99 Knife set and blade sharpener = $64.87
Lastly, I like to funnel all my traffic into my final upsell offer.
That means that all 120 customers will be shown my final upsell.
We will assume only 10% of those who viewed the cooking course upsell actually went ahead with it.
That gives us 12 more sales which mean we made an additional 12 X $74.99 cooking course sales = $899.88 for this final offer.
This means that instead of making only $9.99 for offering our Vegan cookbook we made a potential $2,709.68 at most for our troubles if we count all who took our upsells.
That is up from the potential of only making $1,198.8 for all our work.
The only difference is that we offered another product to those who are potentially ready to spend more and solve more problems.
1 Powerful Digital Marketing Strategy For Small Businesses
If you own a small business the best way to get results from this strategy is by creating different products or services at different price points.
This gives you the opportunity to get your foot in the door by offering a simple starter offer that can break the initial ice with potential customers or clients.
By doing this, you allow yourself more opportunities to earn more revenues.
It might not be possible to sell your product at $300 right off the bat, but if you offer a lower-priced entry offer then you can get to the point where your leads will feel comfortable spending $300 or even $30,000 with you.
1 Powerful Digital Marketing Strategy For E-Commerce Businesses
This strategy works easiest with e-commerce stores and does not need much tweaking.
The reason is that an e-commerce store will already have many different products priced at different rates that can easily build a Funnel.
To improve on this you might want to make use of what is called a One Time Offer (OTO). This is a special offer only showed to a certain group of people.
Cartflows and ClickFunnels allow you to add these offers right on the checkout page to make it easy for customers to add them to their orders before checking out.
1 Powerful Digital Marketing Strategy For Larger Businesses
Larger businesses will want to follow the instructions given to small businesses and expand on them.
The way to expand on it is by adding higher-priced offers and more steps that will lead customers or clients up to your ultimate offering.
Some of these offers can even cost over $10,000 and need a telephone call to close but will be worth it. If you don’t offer it and ask for the sale you will never sell it.
You should always be looking to serve your audience and providing them with real value. Withholding your best offers from them is doing them a disservice and will not help them.
Additionally, a larger business will want to make multiple funnels as they often have a wider range of products and services and solve a wider range of problems.
The more offers you have the better it will be.
Promote Promote Promote!
Now that you have a sales funnel that works and increases your revenues you will want to put as much effort as possible into promoting it.
You do this by offering it to your email subscribers, placing links to the landing page in an ad campaign, placing links to it on high-traffic sites, placing links to it on your social media profiles, and even sharing it on your personal social media pages.
Do as much as you can to get as much traffic as you can to this page. This will give you a higher chance of making a sale.
Remember: if you don’t offer it and you don’t sell it they won’t buy it and it won’t be sold.
Conclusion – 1 Powerful Digital Marketing Strategy for Small Businesses and Startups
You’ve probably heard about the importance of a strong conversion funnel to get more customers for your business.
But what if you don’t have one?
If that sounds like you, we can help with your digital marketing strategy and design needs!
We offer website optimization services so small businesses can be in front of their target audiences on search engines such as Google or Bing.
Maybe people are finding your site but not converting it into paying clients because they find it too difficult to navigate around the page? Our team will work closely with yours to build an easy-to-navigate user experience that converts visitors into sales leads.
With our help, all those hours spent working hard on building out content won’t go unnoticed – customers will come and so will sales and profits
If you’re looking for a digital marketing strategy that works, we can help.
We’ve compiled our best tips and tricks to get more traffic to your website, optimize your site for conversions so customers see what they need when they visit your site, and build rapport with them through helpful content or offers.
All of these steps are sure-fire ways to drive sales by making the customer feel confident in their purchase decision before sending them off into the sales funnel.
Do any of these strategies sound like something you want us to work on? Let’s chat!