How Small Businesses Can Use Digital Marketing to Maximize Their ROI

Internet and online marketing is becoming more of a critical focus for small business owners. As the majority of the public heads to the Internet for information, you must realign your business to be visible in the right places. This means reassessing whether your traditional media advertisements and promotions are working for you. The amount of ad space, paid content placements, and business promotion that is available online is huge; however, you need to be wise with your budget as it can be wasted easily if you’re not careful.

The advantage of online advertising is twofold:

1. It is cheaper than print or radio advertising in terms of cost versus reach; therefore, getting you higher visibility for your budget.

2. The ability to track engagement from online marketing campaigns is easy, which gives you the scope to fine-tune efforts to give the best ROI.

The reason why online marketing is cheaper is that the information processing and delivery costs are much less. Unlike with print advertising there is no distribution network necessary, the content/promotion can be made visible instantly, and the volume of information consumed online is higher. This creates a marketplace with a lot more ad space to be sold and more traffic to see it.

Some examples of high yielding online advertisement opportunities are PPC keyword targeting, paid advertorial content, and high traffic directories. All of these -- like most forms of marketing -- have to be executed correctly to hold value. But the point to take from this is that online marketing can work, and when done well it provides exponentially more value than traditional alternatives.

PPC is a strategy that many small business owners try once and never come back to. The fact of the matter is that it’s a minefield. There are a lot of different parties ready to advise you on PPC, each of which have their own agenda. Your job is to cut through the nonsense and understand what will work for your business.

The thing to remember when trying PPC (Google adwords is the main program people use) is to keep it simple. There are many different bidding strategies that people can implement to try and achieve their goals. But if you start off with a down-to-earth account setup, you can grow it steadily from there.

Here are some easy ways to make sure you don’t waste your initial budget when running PPC:

• Only bid on exact match keywords! This means that you will only be paying for clicks on the exact keywords you bid for. Most accounts are set up by default to bid on broad match, which means that the search engine will include a huge bulk of variants on top of the keywords you’ve specified. A lot of people don’t realise this and their budget is misspent month on month.
• Limit your budget and apportion it out evenly over the month. There is nothing worse than your budget being blasted away in a few days with nothing to show for it. Having a steady trickle of traffic allows you to assess what might be working and adjust as the campaign continues at a manageable pace.
• Geo-target traffic if your business is locally based. There is no need to waste money on a national campaign if the traffic is never going to convert. You can be very specific with where you want your clicking audience to be situated.
• Put tracking in place so you can see what is working. Tracking with Google Analytics is easy to do -- you just have to assign goals to certain user actions such as reaching a confirmation page. Goals in Google Analytics are way of recording when a user reaches a certain page such as an order/enquiry confirmation. That way you can track what keywords and ad campaigns are actually bringing in business. Goals can be applied across the board for different traffic sources so you have data on all your spending and not just PPC.

Paid advertorial content, when in the right places, can be a great source of referral traffic and boost brand awareness. Many high-end publications (including national newspapers) allow paid articles that are provided by a 3rd-party company to promote their goods. The only thing to be careful of is that the article should be explicitly marked as a sponsored feature and any links to your site should contain a “nofollow” tag. These nofollow tags basically tell search engines not to use the link(s) in question to help decide the priority of their results. Paid links without nofollow tags are against search engine guidelines and can actually get your site severely penalised if discovered.

High-traffic directories such as Yell.com in the United Kingdom are a great source of traffic and help build trust. These directories actually send traffic, which is what you have to look for when investing in such platforms. There are some people who claim that directory listings help with SEO and your site’s organic visibility in search engines. However, the days where this was true are numbered and investing in directories for quality referral traffic is the only profitable/sensible option now.

Keeping your online strategy simple and down to earth is what works in 2013. Fancy online marketing activity can help, but only if it is built on top of a solid base. There is a lot to be said for walking before you can run.

Be warned that when seeking the services of professionals to help you out with your online marketing it’s always best for YOU to make the enquiries. Small businesses are the target of a lot of snake oil salespeople who will tell you outright lies to make a sale. Low-quality paid directory advertisers are the worst for this. So many businesses get cold calls from people selling space in their directory or a visible spot in an email blast. The truth is that 99 percent of these opportunities will be a waste of money. High-value publishers usually have to choose between bidders and not beg for business by cold calling over the phone.

The key takeaways here are to remain in control, keep it simple to start with, implement tracking, and make sure YOU approach the professionals when thinking of expanding.