As a small business owner, you might have tried your hand at doing digital marketing yourself. After all, it’s easier these days than it used to be. You started by getting your email campaigns up and running, writing your own blogs, and designing and building your website. It really is possible to do it yourself. But is it a good investment of your valuable time? Or should you be partnering with an expert in digital marketing services so you can spend time building your business instead?
If you might outsource this valuable kind of marketing, you’ll need to know what digital marketing services are, and what results you can expect from using them. And you’ll need to have a strong grasp of what’s going on with digital marketing services in 2021 so you can find the option that works best for you and your business. Let’s find out more in today’s blog post, using Content First Marketing as an example.
What Are Digital Marketing Services?
There are a wide variety of digital marketing services you can tap into – with or without an agency partner. They provide the opportunity to market your business to people all over the internet, 24/7, without having to plan and spend for a huge budget.
Digital marketing services are a powerful tool for small businesses because they have a much lower barrier to entry than traditional marketing tactics. Your small business might not be able to afford billboards or ads in glossy, high-end magazines, but it can afford online marketing.
How to Find the Right Digital Marketing Services for Your Business
Since there are so many kinds of digital marketing services available, it’s important to find the right ones for your business. Many small business owners make the mistake of spreading themselves too thin on their digital marketing efforts. Instead, it’s better to pick just one or two and get them just right before expanding to other channels.
You can also hire a full-service digital marketing agency to manage all your digital marketing services. This can be more affordable than you’d expect. Plus, the return on investment from having a highly effective, customized digital marketing plan will more than pay off.
Content Marketing Research: The Crucial First Step
Content marketing is one of the most effective ways to build your business. But you can’t just go out and start creating any kind of content – you need to do your research first.
This means researching keywords that your target audiences are searching on Google and Bing, and also thinking deeply about what kind of information those audiences are looking for when they visit your website.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is often a complement to an SEO strategy (find out much more about SEO types and strategies below).
As such, creating content that brings in visitors and viewers who are interested in the information you provide is the goal. And of course the end goal is for them to eventually purchase the products and services you offer. Blogging is a common way to do content marketing, but you can also create white papers, case studies, videos, infographics, and more.
They key is to create truly valuable, engaging content so that your potential customers see you as a trusted authority and a generous resource. You can create the content yourself, or use one of the many content marketing services on the market.
And with a bit of the blogging content plus well-done copywriting, which we offer at C1M, you can convert those visitors to customers with ease.
What we do at C1M:
Through copywriting and blogging at C1M, see how this video explains SEO blog writing as a way we help our clients.
In addition, see how we use Google Analytics for Bloggers to build a better blog site.
Web Designs
What’s the first thing your customers will see about your business on the internet? For most people, it’s your website – your online presence. So it needs to be welcoming, well-written, and well-designed.
Digital Presence
Creating a custom, professional website that makes it simple for potential customers to find you and understand what you do is key in your digital marketing journey. In addition, it needs to be easy for customers to purchase your products or services on your site.
While it’s easy enough to design a website yourself with one of the many existing web builders, good website design makes a difference in your website’s conversion rate. Your digital presence is your online storefront – make sure it’s polished, up-to-date, and welcoming.
Creating a beautiful, functional website for your business through web design and development is a service most digital marketing agencies offer (see how C1M does this below). While it’s possible to create your own website, it might not look or function as well as a professionally designed one, and that can seriously hurt your business.
Digital Marketing and Ads
There are many platforms in 2021 where you can market and advertise your business. Picking the right mix of channels and platforms, and paid vs. organic strategies, can be challenging.
You can end up wasting your valuable marketing budget on misaligned digital marketing strategies without the right guidance. This is one area where professional internet marketing services can make a real difference.
Paid Ads
Managing your Google ads, Facebook ads, website banners, etc is part of effective digital marketing services if you have a larger marketing budget. It’s increasingly difficult to rank organically in many areas on those sites. Hence, paying to have your content seen is a good option for small businesses establishing their presence and prospects.
Since this kind of digital marketing campaign comes with a cost, it’s essential to know what you’re doing before you leap in and start tossing money around on a PPC campaign or other paid ad effort. Know what your campaign goals are before you start, and align your campaign and content with those.
eCommerce Marketing
As consumers move increasingly to shopping online for all kinds of goods and services across almost every industry, ecommerce is becoming a necessity for most businesses. And the good news is it’s never been easier to set up your own online store.
You can use systems like WooCommerce or other platforms to make it easy for customers to browse your products and purchase them directly from your site. You should also have a plan to market your online shop, which is another area where C1M’s digital marketing services come in handy.
Social Media Marketing
More and more small businesses are realizing the power of social media for building their business. You might be looking to increase sales with paid ads, or build brand awareness with organic content, or a combination of the two. In any case, creating an effective social media strategy can pay off.
But the thing to remember about social media is that you can’t just set it and forget it. It’s crucial that you account for social media management too. Since it’s easy to have a two-way dialogue, you need someone to be regularly monitoring for feedback and comments so nothing gets missed.
What we do at C1M:
We talk with our clients about the importance of their digital presence, using this video as a starting point.
We discuss building ad campaigns with our clients. Here’s more about what to expect from Facebook ads here.
In addition, we analyze and create a custom plan for which social media channels help each of our clients.
We also discuss with our clients how to approach the possibilities that stem from SEO or paid ads, and which is right for their business.
And most importantly, we create beautiful and functional websites for our clients, to attract their target audience, leading to more conversions. Find out more about what a good website needs here.
Nurture Marketing as Part of Digital Marketing Services
Once your potential customers are in the front door – looking at your content marketing materials, visiting your website, viewing your social media channels – they still might not be ready to buy.
This is where nurture marketing comes into play. These marketing strategies can help nurture your prospects with information and subtle sales pitches until they’re ready to make a purchase and become a customer.
Email Marketing
Finding a way through the noise of the saturated marketing world is challenging these days, especially for small businesses. But email marketing campaigns are one of the few marketing strategies that do this effectively. You can talk directly to your prospects, and target your messages to their interests.
Your small business can use email marketing to:
- create nurture campaigns to slowly nudge prospects to a sale
- announce special sales and promotions to customers
- build brand awareness and a captive audience with regular updates and newsletters
Online Reputation Management
Managing your online reputation is vital, because the internet makes it very difficult to hide any bad reviews or bury bad press. You need to stay on top of your online reviews and have a strategy for getting more positive reviews from delighted customers.
Having a strong online reputation is key to having a successful business. This can mean setting up a Google My Business profile, tending to sites like Yelp and Facebook, and encouraging your happiest customers to leave you reviews. Just below is how we help our clients do this.
What we do at C1M:
We provide email campaigns for our clients, making it easy to reach prospects through nurture marketing. See more about automated emails here.
The Net Promoter Score is the new benchmark for businesses and their online reputation. See how we incorporate it for our clients here.
The Many Types of SEO with Digital Marketing Services
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a powerful tool for small businesses looking to grow their website visitors. Growing your search engine traffic is high priority in the realm of digital marketing services. This is because it can be done with little or no marketing budget, as long as you know the essentials of SEO.
SEO Services
You want to write content so search engine algorithms can find and understand your site. Yet you also want your human readers to click on your page in the search results and read all its valuable content. And as always, the key is creating the content for your target audience.
What we do at C1M:
At C1M, we provide SEO services to help you create a solid SEO strategy that blends your content marketing efforts and website design. And we offer every type of SEO to maximize your appearance in search results.
Working with Agencies for Digital Marketing Services
Tackling digital marketing by yourself, or with the help of your small team, is certainly possible. There is plenty of existing technology that is available to help, like website builders, email automation services, and blogging platforms. And many of these avenues have free or low-cost options.
But managing multiple digital marketing services yourself, and doing so effectively and efficiently, takes lots of time. It also means knowing how to measure the results of your efforts. That’s when it might be time to call in a digital marketing agency as your partner.
Thus, the key is finding the right partner who will get you real results and not just vanity metrics.
What we do at C1M:
The C1M app is a great tool for doing just that: see more about measuring digital marketing results here.
We Can Help
Looking for the perfect marketing partner for your small business? Our team uses expert techniques and measurable results from our digital marketing services.
Schedule a free business review here to find out how we help businesses grow. You can use these insights for inspiration, and let us do the marketing for you.
