Most small businesses are working with limited marketing budgets. This means that they have to use everything at their disposal to get the most out of their marketing spend and increase revenue over time.
When it comes to increasing revenue, not all marketing tactics are created equal. Certain advanced digital marketing strategies that are used by professionals across the industry are more effective for helping businesses boost their bottom line.
It’s important to note that there are a seemingly endless amount of digital marketing tactics that you can use to grow your business. But for this post, we have chosen to focus on some of the tactics that professional marketers use to help small businesses increase revenue. These are more focused and advanced strategies but are by no means the only tactics that you can use to help boost your sales over time.
So, let’s get started…
# Website Optimization
How long have you had your current website? When you first created your site, you probably put a great deal of effort into designing your website to be user-friendly, creating a beautiful layout, and developing the perfect copy. But when is the last time you made changes to your company site?
Your website is something that’s easy to set and forget over time. However, it’s important that you regularly update your site and audit it for SEO periodically. That’s because keyword trends and web design best practices change over time. And if you want to remain competitive, you’ll need to make sure your site is updated and remains optimized.
Search engine optimization is a broad digital marketing category that can cover a number of different digital marketing tactics from blogging to web design. However, we are going to discuss how SEO plays a role in website content optimization and why it’s vital that you optimize your business website if you want to increase revenue.
Did you know that most online experiences start with a search engine like Google?
According to Google, nearly every online experience begins with a search query. If you want to be visible on the search engine results page, then you will need to make sure that your website content is optimized for search. This involves extensive keyword research and content development that focuses on the keywords and phrases that your target audience uses most often to find brands like yours.
If you already have a website, there’s a good chance that you have done some of this work already. You may have conducted some initial keyword research and developed website pages based on what you have found. However, things change over time and if you want to remain competitive, you’ll need to make sure that you periodically update your site content.
Site optimization involves ongoing keyword research, which can get a little tricky. It’s more than just creating content around the keywords and phrases that you think searchers might use to find your company. You also need to be aware of different keyword alternatives and competition for these keywords if you want to be successful.
Broad keywords tend to have a higher competition level than those more specific or long-tail keywords. For example, “hiking boots” will have a much higher competition rate than something more specific such as “black waterproof men’s hiking boots.” When you conduct your keyword research, you will need to pay attention to the competition for each keyword and look for long-tail keywords that will help you target more specific and relevant traffic.
There’s no doubt about it. SEO plays a vital role in helping your brand increase revenue through website traffic. If you want to stay competitive in the busy digital marketplace, you need to periodically audit your site for SEO and update your content to reflect what you discover through the audit and keyword research.
# Google My Business
Google My Business (GMB) is one of the most powerful tools that digital marketing professionals will use to help small businesses increase revenue. Google My Business is a free business listing that appears on Google when local shoppers search for businesses on the Google search engine or Google Maps.
If your business has a physical store location or your company often depends on local foot traffic to your store, then Google My Business is a vital part of your small business marketing strategy. When you rank in the top GMB results, you improve your chances of connecting with local consumers who are ready to purchase from your business.
Local consumers are using Google to find and research small businesses in their area.
If you want to boost your visibility for local consumers on Google, you’ll need to optimize your GMB listing. Here are a few ways that you can do just that:
- Fill everything out. Make sure that you complete all of the information that Google asks for, including your address, hours, and phone number. If you don’t fill this in, someone else can by suggesting an edit, so it’s important that you ensure this information is accurate.
- Create GMB posts. You can create GMB posts, which appear as mini ads in your Google My Business listing. Use these posts to let consumers know about special sales, exciting events, or even new blog posts and other content they might find helpful or relevant.
- Include a Booking Button. GMB has a booking button feature that allows you to include a button that people can use to directly book an appointment with you through your GMB listing. By including this button, you can help make sure that your GMB listing stands out from the crowd.
- Turn on text messaging. Yet another way to optimize your profile is by allowing potential customers to text you directly from your GMB listing. This is a great way to encourage communication and directly connect with your leads and customers through the search engine.
- Improve your GMB reviews. Did you know that 97% of consumers read online reviews for local businesses before making a purchase? If you want to get the most out of your GMB profile, make sure that you are encouraging your customers to leave your small business reviews on Google.
Though your GMB listing is free, you’ll need to do some work to optimize your profile. By optimizing your Google My Business listing, you can improve your visibility on the search engines, especially for local consumers. This will help bring more traffic to your physical store location, which will in turn increase revenue over time.
# Google AdWords
Google AdWords is another advanced digital marketing tactic that professionals use to help small businesses boost online visibility and increase revenue. Every second that passes, there are more than 40,000 search queries being typed into Google. Google AdWords campaigns are the best way to take advantage of this large audience and get your brand in front of your target consumers. On average, these campaigns increase revenue by $2 for every $1 spent, doubling your investment!
It’s important to note that there are a lot of different tactics that you can use to help improve your organic search traffic. However, SEO takes a long time to work its magic. Whereas Google ads can help support your organic SEO efforts by boosting traffic to your site immediately. This means that for many small businesses, Google ads have become an essential part of their overall digital marketing strategy.
From the statistics, it’s clear to see why so many small businesses rely on Google ads to help drive more traffic to their site.
Even though AdWords, its paid channel, Google still aims to provide the most relevant and useful search results to its users. This means that you need to utilize best practices when creating your Google ads. You will need to make sure that your ad content is relevant to the to the keywords that you are trying to target and that each ad sends users back to a relevant landing page. All of these factors impact your ad quality score.
Quality score impacts the bid that you will need to pay for ad placement. The higher your score, the lower your bidding cost. This makes it essential for small businesses to create the most relevant and useful Google ads possible. The more relevant your content, the less you will potentially have to pay to place your ads. Not to mention, the more relevant the ad content, the more relevant and qualified the traffic you drive back to your site will be.
By driving more relevant traffic back to your site, Google ads help increase revenue for your small business. The key to getting the most out of your Google AdWords budget and boosting return on investment is understanding how the Google AdWords platform works and how you can leverage it to create ads that convert.
It is important to note that Google AdWords can get a bit complex. This is especially true if you are working with a smaller budget and trying to make this budget work for you over time. Unless you have a Google AdWords expert on staff, you might consider working with a PPC ad agency that can help you get the most out of your Google ads.
# Email Nurturing
Though you may be familiar with email marketing services, email nurturing is its own specific strategy. By sending consumers the right email content at the right time, you can work to establish your business as a trusted expert while simultaneously encouraging them to take the next step in the sales funnel. Building email nurturing campaigns is a specific and focused tactic that can help you build stronger relationships with your current leads and customers.
The idea behind email nurturing is that you automatically send out relevant email content to leads and customers based on an action that they take. For example, let’s say that a customer visits one of your company’s events. They give you their email address at this event. You might then create a nurturing campaign for visitors who stopped by the event. In this campaign, you might offer content that helps answer some of the questions you got asked most frequently at the event.
When you provide relevant and helpful content in your email nurturing campaigns, you are working to build relationships with these leads. These messages help you stay top of mind with consumers who have already shown interest in your brand. Each email in the nurturing campaign also helps bring the consumer closer and closer to converting.
The key to effective email nurturing is deciding which types of actions trigger a nurturing campaign. Consider which actions might indicate that a visitor or lead is interested in your brand. It might be as simple as them signing up for your email list or more subtle like the visitor looking at your pricing page multiple times.
Yet another important element of email nurturing is the content that you send in the email message. When choosing the right content for your email nurturing campaigns, consider the audience’s interests as well as their stage in the buyer’s journey. If you don’t have content available that works for the nurturing campaign, you may have to develop new content.
Not only does email lead nurturing help you bring in more qualified leads, but it can help you do this at a much lower cost than other digital marketing tactics.
Email nurturing campaigns go beyond the typical marketing email as they help you guide leads through their buyer’s journey. The more you foster these growing relationships, the greater your chances of influencing more conversions over time. More conversions eventually equal an increase in revenue.
Additionally, email nurturing can also help you grow and sustain relationships with the customers you already have. By working on building these relationships, you can encourage repeat sales. And as you probably already know, repeat customers are essential for small businesses that want to grow and sustain their growth over time.
One important thing to note is that effective and efficient email nurturing requires marketing automation tools. That’s why many small businesses choose to partner with a full-service digital marketing agency for their email marketing needs. This allows them to effectively nurture their leads and customers without manually sending an email each time they take the desired action.
Similarly, building and maintaining complex nurturing logic requires time and expertise that some in-house marketing teams just don’t have. By partnering with an agency that has email marketing experts on their team, you can leverage their knowledge and expertise to ensure that you’re getting the most out of your nurturing campaigns.
# Final Takeaways…
Some of these more advanced digital marketing tactics are designed to help small businesses like yours increase revenue over time. In the end, taking an integrated approach to digital marketing is the best way to maximize your results and get the most out of your marketing budget. This means taking a look at your overall strategy and finding ways to get these separate tactics to work together to support your overall business goals.
While some small business digital marketing tactics may be easy for you to implement in-house, others require a unique skill set and experience. This is especially true when you are employing tactics like PPC management and social media advertising, which require you to invest an additional budget.
If you want to achieve a return on investment for these advanced digital marketing tactics, you may want to partner with our digital marketing agency. Our experienced team can help you increase revenue while getting the most out of your marketing budget.
Contact us today to set up a one-on-one meeting with one of our digital marketing experts.