Top 11 Digital Marketing Tips to Promote Your Small Business

In this blog, you’ll learn how to:

• Effectively maintain and use accounts across all social media platforms.
• Claim Google’s profile of your business.
• Request and respond to reviews of your business.
• Send email blasts.
• Pick the best photos for your business’s website.
• Write blog posts that provide valuable information.

For many owners of small businesses, digital marketing can seem daunting, but there are powerful methods by which to put your business on the right track. While digital marketing might ultimately be beyond the abilities of a single business owner, we can share some effective ways to begin the process.

We’ve compiled a list of what we think are the most important internet tips to know about digital marketing in 2023. With almost a decade of experience helping small business owners put their dreams in motion, we’re proud to present the following digital marketing tips for small businesses.

1. Claim and Optimize Your Google Business Profile

Google Business Profiles (GBPs) are critical to a business’s success, monopolizing most of a business’s online reputation. GBPs put reviews front-and-center for prospective customers, 80% of whom regularly examine reviews before visiting a business.

As long as they match a query well enough, GBPs take up the righthand side of the search engine results page (SERP), providing basic information that includes address(es), hours, contact information and site links. Either claim an automatically generated GBP or create one for your business to boost online visibility.

If information about your business changes, your GBP is the first item to update. This may seem trivial, but it’s important to consumers. Every month, Google connects 1.5 billion patrons with destinations, and 70% of searchers go to the nearby store a SERP presents within the day. The more up-to-date your digital profiles are, the more credibility you earn for being so tech-savvy.

Here’s how to set up a GBP:

• First, create a generic Google account if you don’t already have one.
• Visit google.com/business, and click the button in the middle of the screen that says, “Manage now.”
• Type into the search bar slowly enough for it to populate automatically with your business. If it fails to populate, simply click, “Add your business to Google.”
• As a final note, if someone’s already claimed the GBP, you can click, “Request Access,” and the receiver can hand control over to you.

2. Request Customer Reviews — Written and Video

Encourage customers to leave reviews and express how great your business is. Unless they have a problem, most customers won’t feel an inclination to write reviews.

Not only can you claim your GBP, but you can claim Yelp and TrustPilot profiles to earn further credibility and communicate better with customers. Physical signs at store locations, site links and emails are all media through which to encourage reviews.

Across all reviews, maintaining a rating of at least four stars is key. But full-blown 5-star reviews may look suspicious, particularly if there aren’t many reviews in the first place. In addition to providing enough press to invite potential customers, amazing reviews present opportunities to improve rapport with current customers. If you can help it, video testimonials are most enticing, especially now that automatic captions can present information without sound.

Most immediately, ask in-person patrons to tell others about your business. There’s no reason this old technique can’t work, too.

To summarize, here’s how to request customer reviews most effectively:

• Effective reminders include physical signs at store locations, links to review pages on your website and occasional emails.
• Ask in-person patrons to tell others about your business.
• Claim and monitor online profiles to interact with customers, especially dissatisfied customers.

3. Respond to Customer Reviews

If you see a negative review for your business, don’t seek removal or retaliation. As fair as responding to negativity with negativity might feel, a sarcastic reply might worsen the situation.

Rather, respond with empathy and intelligence. Responding to positive reviews is a way of establishing your tone and personality, but responding to negative reviews as promptly as possible will earn your business integrity. Think of a negative review as an opportunity.

In sum, here’s how you can respond to reviews:

• Respond to negative reviews as quickly and as empathetically as possible to earn your business the most integrity.
• When you respond to positive reviews, be sure to stick to a tone and personality that fit your business.
• Responses to negative reviews are mandatory, but responses to positive reviews are optional.

4. Collect Email Addresses from Customers for Email Marketing Lists

Asking for email addresses to populate an email marketing list will allow you to send emails to customers who actually want to interact with the material. Keep checklists of items to remind customers about, like coupons, events or general promotions. A restaurant can owe its busiest nights to karaoke, so reminders are key to include in emails.

Personalize emails to customers regarding what they’ve recently browsed or purchased. Present customers with deals and coupons they’d be most likely to enjoy using.

At each stage of the buyer’s journey, an occasional digital nudge can usher customers through the purchasing process and keep them from abandoning all those carts.

Email isn’t old hat. If anything, its long track record has betrayed its importance among potential and existing customers. Emails are as unavoidable as oxygen, which is all the more reason for small businesses to invest in email marketing with tools like MailChimp.

Here’s how to get more email addresses from patrons:

• Ask patrons after selling them something.
• Provide a handout with steps for how to leave a review.
• Have a sign at your store location inviting customers to leave reviews.
• Use social media posts to encourage customers to leave reviews.

5. Create Educational and Promotional Shorts on Your Phone

The creation of any kind of professional visual content is only going to become more pivotal to a small business’s success. Nearly 100% of marketers agree that videos increase sales leads as well as users’ understanding of a product or service. 90% of businesses leverage videos as genuine marketing tools, so don’t let the competition leave you in the dust.

By itself, the social media powerhouse of YouTube offers 2.5 billion monthly active users. Partner with influencers to take advantage of existing fanbases. If you’re willing to pay influencers, they can make videos on your behalf. The biggest companies do this all the time, so there’s no reason why small businesses can’t do it, too.

But why take videos with your phone? This allows for an up-close and personal look at your brand and products. Every small business is different, but most benefit significantly from a colloquial or casual tone, which a phone video leans into.

Phone videos can also be seconds long, which is suitable to advertising. YouTube Shorts and TikTok are perfect places to sneak into the minds of people with the shortest attention spans. When you make videos with your phone, seek to educate as well as promote. Answering real questions will earn you credibility among those who hate commercials the most.

Here’s how to publish online videos with YouTube:

• Personal YouTube accounts are just Google accounts. If you have one of those, click on your avatar in the top-right corner, and select, “Create a channel,” from the drop-down menu.
• Provide your name and unique handle by which users can find you.
• Once you complete on-screen instructions, you can create a new video by clicking the plus sign inside the camera in the top-right corner.
• If you’re already using a content management system, embedding YouTube videos on your site will be a great way to boost their visibility.

6. Create Social Media Profiles

Social media are literally free promotional tools, so if you’re new to social media marketing, begin with whichever account you think will earn you the most traffic. If you own a restaurant, maintain an active Instagram account to show patrons how hip and fun you are. If you own a consulting firm, keep a LinkedIn profile in order.

Here’s how to create a Facebook business account (Other social media will be similar):

• Navigate to facebook.com/create, and click, “Create Account.”
• Enter your name and confirm your identity with personal Facebook login credentials.
• Follow on-screen prompts to build your account.

7. Share Valuable Content on Social Media

Even if the articles aren’t yours, share helpful and valuable content on social media. Standing by what’s true instead of what’s yours is another great way to increase credibility among current and potential customers alike.

If you maintain a Facebook account, be sure to “boost” posts so that more potential customers see them.

Here’s how you can start sharing material on social media:

• Share simple tips as well as articles from other publications relevant to your industry.
• Highlight past work, which could include your portfolio’s videos and photos.
• Share articles at times when your target demographics are most likely to browse social media. For Facebook, 3PM on Wednesdays is generally the best time to post.
• As for what to include in the text, don’t forget to tag participating influencers or interviewees.
• Most supplementally, respond to comments on your share just as you’d respond to reviews.

8. Monitor Customer Activity on Your Social Media

Remember to monitor and respond to questions and reviews on social media channels. Tweet occasionally. Keep Facebook and LinkedIn profiles up-to-date. Post information to different channels, and make sure you’re active on as many social media as possible, noting a primary social media channel on which to focus.

The smaller your team, the greater your investment in a single social media channel should be. Without a digital marketing team, you might want to focus on a single channel exclusively.

Here’s how you can effectively monitor your social media accounts for activity:

• Instead of posting and evaluating posts at different times, look at how well your account is doing as you post. This will save time.
• Don’t expect to generate activity unless you post often. You can’t monitor responses without creating something worth responding to.
• Respond to all comments and reviews with compassion and professionalism.

9. Check Core Web Vitals to Fix Any Issues

How’s your website doing? How quickly can it load with the worst connections? Is there a mobile site? These are the sorts of questions that can help you keep your online presence at the status quo.

When visiting websites, users are only going to increase their demands for solid visuals and nearly immediate loading times. If a site isn’t easy to access and use, no one will want to waste any time on it.

While small businesses don’t have the incredible budgets of national or international companies, various content management systems leave little room for excuses. Tools like WordPress and SquareSpace can help you achieve the bare minimum, which is all you need to get started on implementing a killer marketing strategy.

The faster your pages load, the more likely users are to remain. Loading times as long as three seconds can steer 30% of users away. Slow loading times will also hurt your ranking because Google tracks user experience as a genuine facet of SEO.

Basically, if you don’t have a website, make one yesterday. If you do, make sure it functions well enough by itself before moving onto improvements in your digital marketing strategy.

Here are some fundamental ways to shape up your online presence:

• Make a website if you don’t have one. If you’re using a CMS to create a website, keep images and text as current as possible.
• Avoid animations in the interest of shorter loading times, as loading times are pivotal to whether users remain on the page.
• Keep graphics as simple and as minimal as possible to prolong their relevance.

10. Avoid Stock Photos in Favor of Your Own

Don’t use stock photos. All those photos of diverse, smiling groups of people pointing at stuff might seem ridiculous, and that’s because they are. Instead, either find photos that don’t contain smiling people or take pictures yourself.

Visual content can’t work without enough professionalism to avoid cheesy photos. Relying on stock photos is a missed opportunity to use your own images for better representation of your business.

Here are a few quick ways to make better pictures:

• Avoid pictures of people unless those people are genuine employees.
• Use pictures for which keywords may serve as titles.
• For more uniqueness, take pictures yourself instead of using an online library.

11. Answer Customers’ Questions with Blog Posts

Blog posts are a potent way to attract new customers and increase credibility among current customers. They’re great for answering questions customers ask, especially if you write FAQ pages that repeat questions people might’ve asked verbatim.

Ultimately, blog posts need to be interesting enough for readers to engage with them, and answering questions to which users really want answers is an easy way to generate organic interest instead of begging for interest with an advertisement.

The more topics you cover in your blogs, the more online visibility you’ll earn. Note that this means your content shouldn’t be duplicative. Addressing many different concerns attracts potential customers and gives you excuses to share material on your social media channels.

Marketing with content is a great way to boost visibility, providing an opportunity to establish your tone and personality. It also allows for you to cater content to users, explicitly giving them what they want instead of what you think will woo them.

To get started on creating blog posts, you’ll need to set up an account with a content management system, like WordPress.  As WordPress is our favorite, here’s how to set up a WordPress account:

• In the top-right corner of the homepage, click, “Let’s get started.”
• Provide your email address, username and password.
• Follow on-screen prompts to create your account.

Let Us Know When You’re Ready to Work with Us

Tackling digital marketing by oneself is difficult. We’ve compiled this list because we know that small business owners take pride in their own achievements, and they don’t need all that much assistance from others. If you keep these digital marketing ideas in mind, you’ll at least be able to get started. We hope you’ve enjoyed learning about local business digital marketing best practices.

Once you create your GBP, update your social media and record some testimonials, Frontier Marketing will be happy to help you reach your new frontier. As a full-service digital marketing agency, we can write highly clickable blogs, encouraging emails and high-profile social media posts. We let over 30 happy clients speak for themselves, and we look forward to working with you.

Please feel free to browse the rest of our site, call us at 847-254-0837 or email us at info@frontiermarketingllc.com.