It is well acknowledged that 73% of small businesses lack confidence in their marketing strategies, and only 16% are confident that they’re using the right marketing channels – even though 82% agree that multi-channel marketing gets better results.
The reality is that small business owners just do not have the time or the brain capacity to put as many resources into their marketing as they wish they could. 56% of those surveyed by Constant Contact say that they only have an hour or less per day to spend on their marketing, and 34% outline “marketing more efficiently” as their biggest area of opportunity.
This is where a freelance digital marketing specialist, like myself, can help. Outsourcing simple jobs, such as a regular blog post for your SEO strategy or a social media strategy for your organic profiles, can take the weight off your shoulders for a small fee and help you begin to unlock those benefits of multi-channel marketing.
Understanding digital marketing for small businesses
Digital marketing is any online touchpoint that a potential customer comes into contact with your business. Whether that’s by Googling your brand (search results, search ads, Google Business Profile), searching on social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, TikTok, LinkedIn), or directly visiting your website, all these facets are important in ensuring you are where your audience expects you to be.
According to Small Business Majority, one of the most significant challenges facing small business owners is understanding which tactics work and how best to measure performance. They reported that roughly ~60% of small businesses find this difficult, in the wake of the pandemic, which caused consumers to switch to shopping online rather than in-store. Further to this, they also reported that ⅓ of the smallest businesses don’t even have a website, and the same source also reported that around half of those same businesses need help understanding social media marketing.
These things are easily solved when working with a digital marketing specialist. I can help you understand small, simple, and cost-effective ways to improve your digital presence and set reasonable KPIs for growth over the next six months. A month’s social media strategy costs £150, but will give you a full evaluation of your current organic profiles, the building blocks and content pillars for you to develop your own posts into, and the key hashtags or seasonality moments your brand can tap into.
Having a strong digital presence can level the playing field for a small business, giving you access to the same audience that bigger players tap into every day, for a reasonable return on investment. It just takes the right strategy for your niche, product/service, and local area.
Key strategies in digital marketing for small businesses
ExposureNinja underlined that ROI is a large contributing factor to small businesses being behind on their digital marketing, with 65% reporting that they don’t see a beneficial return. Three free digital marketing channels that can help build your business’s online presence are search engine optimisation (SEO), social media marketing, and email marketing.
SEO takes time to develop, but compounds together
Starting with SEO: it is free to do, and it compounds forever. You cannot expect quick results from an SEO strategy, as it takes between 3 and 6 months for you to start to see the growth on Google. If you don’t have time to write your own content, I charge just £15 for a 1,000-word article, fully optimised for search performance. Each visit to your website through this article begins to drive that initial outlay down. If you’ve had 10 clicks after six months, they were £1.50 each; but after 18 months, it could well be at 45 clicks, so a £0.33 cost per click. This is compounding traffic, which for a small business can be utterly invaluable.
Leading SEO platform Ahrefs details that organic search accounts for 53% of all website traffic. Whilst paying for search ads (pay-per-click/PPC) effectively rents your visibility on the search term, SEO means you own the visibility on that search term. The adage goes: “The best time to begin your SEO strategy was yesterday. The second-best time is today”.
Organic social media marketing is free and can build a loyal audience
Social media marketing has two factors, and it is important to stress that you can be successful on social without running a paid ad campaign. Posting high-quality content consistently on the platforms that best suit your product or business, and where your audience engages, can build a loyal audience and give you a strong digital presence. Rival IQ’s 2024 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report details that the best organic reach for a B2B profile is on LinkedIn at 1.68%, and for a B2C profile is on Instagram at 1.56%. Whilst these aren’t headline-grabbing numbers, this is achieved with a cost of £0.00, so even the most modest reach is pure ROI. Video content goes further, particularly for B2C profiles on Instagram, with Reels and Carousel content generating a median of ~65 interactions per post organically (that’s views, comments, likes, and shares combined).
SimpleTexting summarises it best: having a documented social media strategy correlates with a +300% higher chance of success for your business. Combine that with organic social having no media cost whatsoever, and a consistent, well-planned presence built on the right platforms, costs nothing beyond just the investment into the time and expertise of a strategist, like me.
Email marketing returns the highest ROI for the lowest ongoing cost
Saving the best until last, email marketing is your strongest free channel that can generate a high return on investment. Mailchimp’s free plan covers up to 500 email sends a month to 250 contacts. For a small business, that is more than enough to get you started, building a newsletter contact list based on customers who sign up when they purchase from your company. It costs you nothing to reach these people, month after month, with your latest seasonal special offers or to launch a brand new product line. Litmus outlines that, on average, email marketing can return $36-$45 for every $1 spent: given that spend is effectively zero on a free plan, your returns are almost entirely pure profit. Mailchimp’s own website highlights that their users generate 141% more revenue and 58% higher click rates versus non-users. No other marketing channel gives a small business a free-of-charge direct line to their warmest audience, i.e. the people who already chose to hear from them.
All of these three channels are important to a small business, given their extremely low operating cost and no ongoing outlay. If you’ve read these paragraphs and thought to yourself that now is the time to act, you can contact me to arrange an initial 30-minute consultation to discuss where you would like to capitalise for your business and how you would like me to help.
Optimizing your digital presence
Once you have the basics ready, you can begin to consider optimising these channels to accelerate your results at key moments. Small, targeted investments can deliver outsized returns without operating a full advertising budget.
Boosting a Facebook or Instagram post can be done from as little as £1 a day, which can promote your seasonal promotion or a new service launch to a targeted audience outside of your current followers for a week, all for the price of two coffees from your favourite high-street chain.
Mailchimp also has paid tiers that unlock predictive segmentation, something they outline can double revenue per campaign, which can be extremely valuable to upgrade into temporarily for a particular product launch or seasonal campaign, before reverting back to the free tier once the month is over. Budget-conscious businesses can still benefit from small digital marketing costs, as and when appropriate.
Small businesses can compete with larger brands with their digital presence
As you have learned, having a strong online presence is incredibly important to stand shoulder to shoulder with the bigger businesses in your space. Having a user-friendly website is an essential part of this process. There is almost no point in having a strong SEO strategy for visibility if your website is underperforming. Poor navigation is cited by 61.5% of web designers as a top reason why visitors quickly leave, or bounce out, of your website back to where they came from.
Optimising your existing content is as simple as creating an easy-to-use website with simple navigation and then generating a list of relevant SEO keywords for your business, updating your website copy to reflect them. This can mean altering your article subheadings, creating stronger calls to action, and even adding high-authority backlinks to leading resources in your subject matter.
If this sounds like something your business would benefit from, I can help you with that for a small hourly fee. Whether you want me to assess where you need to optimise, or even what SEO keywords best suit your business, these are things that my expertise can help you identify, as well as give you realistic metrics to target and monitor, to prove that your changes are delivering an increase in traffic.
Measuring the success of your marketing efforts
Setting yourself up for success involves selecting relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) that are relevant both to a business of your size and the digital marketing channels you want to focus on. According to Marketing Week, over a third of brands don’t measure marketing ROI at all. If large brands struggle with it, it’s no wonder that small business owners also feel lost. Let me help you set up your reporting, breaking down how to interpret the results for each channel specifically.
Google Analytics can be an extremely strong resource for every small business owner. Making sure that any links to your website track back into your Analytics dashboard will give you all the information you need to understand which channels are working best for your audience. We call these tracking links UTMs, and by listing what channel and which platform your visitors arrive from, you can quickly see how email is performing versus social media and your organic social strategy. The most recent edition of Analytics, GA4, uses machine learning to better understand and distribute your conversions across a wider range of touchpoints: if a customer found you via organic search, then came back through a social post before converting via an email link, that entire journey is mapped out rather than only crediting the last click.
Once you have six months’ worth of data, it is possible to identify trends within your results. Adjust the strategy, then let’s you capitalise in areas that strengthen digital marketing for small businesses, whether that be increasing your blog content on a popular search term or creating more engaging social media posts for your highest performing platform.
Let me help you build your digital marketing strategy
Digital marketing for small businesses doesn’t have to be expensive, overwhelming or a mystery any longer. As I have outlined here, three major channels all have very little running costs: SEO, social media, and email marketing. To unlock these, you just need the right strategy, a little consistency, and perhaps a touch of expertise from someone who knows what they’re looking at once the data begins to roll in.
The businesses that make digital marketing work for them aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets; they’re actually the ones who have the right strategy. Making sure your business appears in the right places, to the right audience, and with the right message is the key to having a strong digital presence. Understanding whether your current content is working is the underlying foundation of a good digital marketing strategy, and what even a simple one can do for your small business.
All that’s left to say to you is… if you made it all the way to this final paragraph, and you’re sitting there nodding along and thinking “I really do need this, but I have absolutely no idea where to start”, then that’s where I come in. Whether it’s to get your SEO foundations into place, build a solid social media strategy on the most appropriate platforms, or set up GA4 so you can finally see what’s actually happening on your website, I’d love to help.
Get in touch with me for a free 30-minute consultation. We can talk about where your business is, where you think you’re lacking, and what support I can provide to get it to where you want it to be.
