Five Digital Marketing Strategies for SMEs

Digital marketing is the process of promoting or marketing your product or service using digital media. It includes using social media, Search engine optimization, influential marketing, content marketing to drive traffic and increase sales.

It is a long term investment and requires consistency to achieve expected results.

Why consider Digital Marketing Strategies?

There are many reasons why digital marketing is more effective than traditional marketing, but I will list some of them.

Your customers are moving online (some have moved long ago). You need to follow them.
Digital marketing is “the Now” marketing.
Lots of companies are winning more clients on the internet using digital marketing strategies.
Cost per conversion is low compared to the traditional style of marketing where you fuel your car, visit the client, spend lots of time and others.
Digital marketing is relatively cheap. You can reach more prospects at a lesser rate compared to traditional marketing.
With time, at least 85 to 90% of the world population will be online.

What is a digital marketing strategy?

Digital marketing strategies are sets of plans designed to achieve your digital marketing goals. These strategies are measured over some time to analyze performance.

Before you start a digital marketing campaign, the first thing to do is to set goals you want to achieve within a time frame and plan on how to achieve these goals.

local business listing — Listing your business on local directories will increase your visibility and probably increase sales

Your digital marketing goal could be to improve brand visibility, increase leads, increase conversion etc.

Digital marketing is a mid to long term investment because your first objective should be to build brand visibility, acceptance and peoples’ trust.

Research shows that it takes time for a brand to be recognized and accepted. For a successful investment in digital marketing, you need to build a strong and lovable brand first before becoming an aggressive marketer.

Here are some digital marketing strategies you can employ to grow your online visibility.

1. Local Business Listing.

Local business Listing is an essential digital marketing strategy for local service providers and a good tool for local search visibility.

Optimizing your company to be visible on the local listing is crucial because when people search for keywords (product or service) with location tags, google search prioritizes and displays local listing first before other sources of results.

Google and Bing are the two most important search engines, and it is wise to optimize your company on Google my Business and Bing Local.

However, Bing local is not available to countries in Africa. As a result, Google my Business seems to be the best option for us in Africa.

Benefits of Local Business Listing to Businesses.

Business is listed on Google my Business and Google Map
Most people that search for information with location tags want to buy.
There is a high propensity to make more sales from Google my Business.
Google my Business has helped lots of my clients increase leads and make sales.
You can measure performances over a period.

Search Engine Optimization.

Search Engine Optimization is a long term traffic generator for companies with online visibility. It is crucial for every company that has a business website.

Search engine optimization allows search bots and spiders to crawl, index and rank web pages so that when prospects in need of your product or service search for related keywords, your website will be visible to potential buyers.

Important SEO factors.

Submits your website to search engines to be indexed.
Submits your website’s sitemap
Run on-page optimization for all the pages on your website.
Runs an off-page optimization
Ensures your web pages are well structured
Avoid slow loading web pages.
Relevant keywords optimization

Content marketing.

Content is king. This digital marketing strategy helps build brand visibility and awareness.

Creative contents are best for inbound marketing. It involves content idealization, content creation, content distribution and content marketing.

If you want to build brand visibility, generate quality leads and make high sales, consider the following digital marketing strategy.

Use video content to build brand awareness and generate qualified leads.
Use text content to grow website authority and ranking on search engines.
Use graphics and infographics to engage followers on social media and build a great brand.

digital marketing strategies — Young man in local store shopping

Social media marketing.

Social media marketing is an essential digital marketing strategy for every company.

Use creative content to drive your social media marketing campaign because the quality of your content will determine the quality of prospects you attract.

Before running social media marketing, define your target market first to know what social media channel is the best for you.

If you want to reach a large number of employed and corporate brands, use LinkedIn
For large adult age groups, use Facebook
if you want large numbers of youths, use TikTok, Instagram and Twitter
For public office holders, government parastatals, use Twitter
To reach social media influencers, use all the social media channels

Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the cheapest marketing strategies with a high conversion rate.

While roughly 281 billion emails were sent and received each day in 2018, the figure is expected to increase to over 347 billion daily emails in 2022.

Email marketing is an old marketing strategy but still one of the most active marketing strategies your company can use to increase traffic to your website.