Your Definitive Guide to Digital Marketing for SMEs

Here’s a great article from WebFX Blog

You’ve been using traditional marketing methods for a couple of years now, but you feel like they aren’t as effective for you anymore. You’re looking to branch out and find new ways to reach qualified leads for your business.

With digital marketing for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), you can do just that.

On this page, we’ll explain why you want to use digital marketing for SMEs, as well as share strategies for marketing your SME online, which include:

1. Optimize your presence in search engines
2. Create informative content
3. Run paid search ads
4. Craft an email marketing strategy

Keep reading to learn more!

Why use digital marketing for SMEs

If you don’t know much about digital marketing, you may be hesitant to invest in it. There are numerous reasons to invest in online marketing for SMEs. Here are a few reasons you want to invest in digital marketing for SMEs:

1. Digital marketing for SMEs helps you build brand awareness

One of the biggest reasons to use digital marketing for SMEs is to build brand awareness.

Building brand awareness is a critical component for your enterprise business because it helps you earn more leads and conversions down the line. When people are familiar with your brand, they’re more likely to choose you when they’re ready to convert.

When you do online marketing for small business enterprises, you create opportunities for people to get familiar with your company. Running pay-per-click (PPC) ads, for example, can increase brand awareness by 80%.

Whether they follow you on social media or see your ads through search, people get exposed to your brand and get to know your company.

2. Digital marketing for SMEs helps you give people 24/7 access to your business

One of the biggest benefits of using SME digital marketing is that you give people 24/7 access to your business. If you don’t have an online presence, people have limited access to your company. They can only buy your products or ask you questions during operating hours.

With digital marketing, you give your prospects consistent access to your business.

They can visit your website or your social media pages whenever they want to buy a product or ask questions. You can even use things like Facebook chatbots to help answer some users’ questions when you’re not available.

This 24/7 access means that people can discover and learn about your SME no matter the time of day or day of the week.

3. Digital marketing for SMEs helps you obtain more qualified leads

One of the biggest struggles with traditional marketing is reaching your target audience. When you run a billboard ad or radio spot, you’re serving your ad to a lot of people who aren’t interested in your business. It can feel like you’re not maximizing your budget to get the most from it.

With digital marketing for SMEs, though, you market directly to people interested in your business. Whether they search for a company like yours or see an ad while searching for a specific product, you can feel confident you’re putting your enterprise in front of people most interested in what you offer.

These strategies drive more leads than traditional marketing, too. Content marketing, for example, generates 54% more leads than traditional marketing methods. So, if you’re looking to obtain more qualified leads for your SME, digital marketing is the answer.

4. Digital marketing for SMEs helps you increase sales for your business

When you invest in digital marketing for small business enterprises, you’re creating an opportunity for your company to earn more sales. People are already browsing online, looking for the products or services your business offers.

By building your presence online, you’re helping people find your business first. Creating a digital marketing strategy enables you to promote your business, capture leads, and nurture conversions 24/7.

5. Digital marketing for SMEs helps you get a better return on your investment

When you invest money in marketing methods, you want to get a great return on investment (ROI) with them. You don’t want to spend a lot of money marketing your business only to get a minimal return.

With traditional marketing, it’s hard to know if you’re getting a return on your investment. Unless you ask every customer how they found your business, there’s no real way to track your traditional methods’ ROI.

On the other hand, online marketing methods have a documented track record of providing businesses with a great ROI.

Here are just a few examples:

• PPC advertising has an ROI of $8 for every $1 spent
• Email marketing has an ROI of $44 for every $1 spent
• Content marketing drives six times more conversions for businesses that use it than companies that don’t

Not only will an SME digital marketing plan help you reach more qualified leads, but it will help you convert them, too.

6. Digital marketing for SMEs helps you gain more insight into the effectiveness of your marketing

When you invest in marketing strategies, you want to know that they’re effective and working for your business. You want to know what’s working and what’s not. With traditional methods, this task can be challenging because, again, it’s hard to track what brings people into your business.

With digital marketing, you’re never in the dark. You can track your marketing campaigns to see if they’re effective with your audience. You get valuable insight into critical metrics and can take action to alter and improve your campaign.

SME digital marketing: 4 strategies for marketing your enterprise business

Ready to dive into online marketing for small business enterprises?

Here are four strategies your enterprise will want to use to grow online:

1. Optimize your presence in search engines

You can’t do digital marketing for SMEs without involving search engine optimization (SEO) as part of your strategy. SEO is the process of optimizing your presence in search engine results pages (SERPs) to rank higher.

When you rank higher, you drive more qualified traffic to your page, which increases leads and conversions for your enterprise.

Here’s what you can do to optimize your presence in search engines:

• Optimize for relevant keywords

If you want your enterprise to appear in relevant search results, you need to choose the right keywords for your pages. Keywords trigger your site to appear in relevant results, so you’ll want to conduct keyword research using a tool like KeywordsFX to help you find the right ones.

When you conduct keyword research, focus on long-tail keywords — keywords that contain three or more words. These keywords are more specific, so you know the search intent behind someone who searches them. These keywords will help you drive more qualified traffic.

• Optimize title tags and meta description

When someone searches on Google, the first things they see from your listing is your title tag and meta description. These two tags help your audience determine if your listing is relevant.

Stay within the 60-character limit for your title tag and the 155-character limit for your meta description to optimize them. These limits ensure your tag doesn’t get cut off in search results. Additionally, use your core keywords in your tags, so users know your site is relevant.

• Build backlinks

If you want to build your site’s rank in search results, focus on building backlinks. Backlinks are links to your site from reputable sites that help increase your site’s trust and authority in the eyes of search engines.

The best way to earn backlinks is to create high-quality content. We’ll address this more next, but overall, creating top-notch, informative content can help you receive links from reputable sites and boost your business’s trust and authority.

2. Create informative content

Content marketing is a critical component of digital marketing for SMEs. With content marketing, you share information your audience wants. It helps you drive credible traffic to your page while establishing yourself as a knowledgeable authority in your field.

Content comes in numerous forms, including:

• Blog posts
• Infographics
• Videos
• Ebooks
• Podcasts

You’ll want to use a variety of content formats to keep your strategy fresh. Using multiple types of content makes it easy for you to appeal to different audience members who consume content in different ways.

Here’s what you can do to create an effective content marketing strategy:

• Focus on delivering the most critical information

When you craft content for your audience, you want to check that you match your topic’s search intent. If you aren’t meeting your key term’s search intent, people won’t click on your content, which means it won’t rank.

When you have your keywords, do a quick search on Google and see what’s already ranking in that content’s search results. It will help you determine what people find so you can provide the information requested and format your content similarly.

• Write for your audience, not search engines

One of the biggest mistakes companies make is writing for search engines over their audience in an attempt to rank higher. However, search engines deliver content that’s best for your audience, so by creating user-friendly content, you’re creating search engine-friendly content.

When you write your content, focus on making it understandable and easy to follow. Don’t overuse jargon or long paragraphs of information without breaking it up. Using header tags will help organize your page and make it easier to read.

• Create content often

If you want your content strategy to be effective, you need to create content often. Creating content often shows you’re current and active in your industry. Additionally, creating more content creates more opportunities for people to find your business.

To ensure you create content often, use a content marketing calendar. This calendar enables you to see when you’re creating and publishing content so you can identify gaps and ensure you’re posting often enough.

3. Run paid search ads

Next on our list of SME digital marketing strategies is running paid search ads. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a great strategy to help you put your business in front of more qualified leads. With PPC, your ads appear at the top of search results with the word “ad” tagged on them.

These ads are an excellent way for you to get your enterprise business to appear at the top of the search results. It can help you outrank your competitors and drive more qualified leads that turn into conversions.

Here’s what you can do to launch a successful PPC campaign:

• Focus on long-tail keywords

When you run a PPC campaign, you need to select keywords to determine where your ad appears. Like SEO, you’ll want to focus on long-tail keywords for your PPC ads.

Long-tail keywords are best for your PPC ads because they drive more qualified traffic to your site. Since long-tail keywords are specific, they have less competition, which leads to a lower cost per click (CPC). As a result, you can get more from your advertising budget.

• Use ad extensions to enhance your ads

If you want to have successful PPC ads, you’ll want to use ad extensions to take them to the next level. Ad extensions enable you to add more information to your ad that entices your audience to click.

From sitelink extensions to callout extensions, there are numerous extensions you can use to enhance your ad and deliver a better experience.

• Create custom landing pages

If you want to get the most from your PPC ads, you must create a custom landing page for each of your campaigns. A custom landing page helps keep your audience focused on the product or service you’re advertising.

Your custom landing page design should reflect your business so that people get familiar with your enterprise company. You’ll also want to ensure you’re utilizing white space and focusing only on critical information to keep your landing page organized and focused.

This approach will help you earn more conversions.

4. Craft an email marketing strategy

Last on our list of SME digital marketing strategies is to craft an email marketing strategy.

When you do online marketing for small businesses, you want to focus on building relationships with prospects so you can nurture them towards conversion. Email marketing is a prime strategy for nurturing these leads to buy your product or use your service.

With email marketing, you focus on sending information and promotions directly to your audiences’ inboxes. To start with this strategy, you need to have a list of subscribers. You can obtain subscribers by adding an email sign-up bar to your site, using pop-up sign up forms, or asking in person.

To help you craft a killer email marketing strategy, follow these best practices:

• Segment your subscribers

If you want your email marketing strategy to succeed, start by segmenting your subscribers. Not everyone is interested in your business for the same reasons, so you want to segment them to deliver only the most relevant emails.

You can segment subscribers based on demographics, interests in your business, and more. Once you have these segments created, you can deliver information that’s relevant to each one.

• Personalize the experience

In addition to segmenting your subscribers, you’ll also want to personalize your audiences’ experience. Personalization makes your audience more likely to engage with your emails because you tailor the information to them.

Personalization can be anything from using their name in your emails to tailoring your email content to their shopping and buying habits.

• Use tools to help manage your emails

When you run an email marketing campaign, you can quickly get overwhelmed with everything you need to do to manage your email campaigns. That’s why it’s critical that you invest in email marketing tools to help you manage your emails.

A tool like MyEmailFX makes it easy for you to create, send, and monitor your emails in one place. It makes it easy for you to manage your email strategy as you gain more subscribers and send more emails.

Get started with digital marketing for SMEs today

Investing in digital marketing for small business enterprises is a great way to help your SME flourish online. You’ll see an increase in traffic, leads, and sales for your company by building a marketing strategy.

If you’re unsure where to start with your online marketing, WebFX is here to help. We have a team of over 250 marketing experts that can help you craft the perfect digital marketing plan. Our team of marketing experts knows how to design marketing campaigns that drive results.

In the past five years, we’ve driven over $2.4 billion in sales and over 6.3 million leads for our clients. You can feel confident we’ll craft a campaign that drives results for your enterprise business.

Ready to get started with digital marketing for SMEs? Contact us online or call us today at 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist about our digital marketing services!

The post Your Definitive Guide to Digital Marketing for SMEs appeared first on WebFX Blog.

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