An incredible 60% of new businesses fail in the first 3 years. As many people only start a new business after backing their own skills, why do over half of them fail? Well, there are many reasons that a business can fail including a lack of a business plan, mismanagement of budget or exterior circumstances such as a pandemic.
One massive reason why businesses fail is also a lack of marketing.
You might be thinking “I’m only a tiny business, I haven’t got a marketing budget”. Well, a marketing budget can often just consist of your time and hard work to begin with. Once you do have a budget, putting it into high ROI types of marketing is crucial, too.
Marketing used to be cold calling, print advertisements and cards in newsagents windows. Now, marketing your small business is almost exclusively done digitally. After all, internet usage has more than doubled over the past decade and this change has massively affected how people purchase products, book services and generally interact with businesses.
So, what is digital marketing? Very simply, digital marketing is striving to achieve what old school marketing techniques did, just this time, digitally. Marketing, and therefore digital marketing as a branch of this, is a way to build a bridge of communication with and influence your potential customers. The real difference is, you connect with and influence those customers often without approaching them first.
Great digital marketing means a customer will come to you.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing, to put simply, refers to any online marketing strategies or assets. This may include email marketing, social media advertising, pay-per-click advertising. Marketing doesn’t have to be paid for either, as social media interaction and blogging are two great free ways to see an increase in brand visibility and awareness.
Here are some of the most effective marketing tools that yield a high ROI (Return of Investment) to consider when setting up a new business:
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation, is making your site as keyword focused and technically perfect as possible in order to achieve high search engine results.
SEO is often a much longer term strategy as massively successful results can take time and effort to achieve. If you’ve set up a company that specialises in flat pack furniture, you can’t just go above Ikea in search listings in a week on a brand new site. A campaign that large would require extensive time and money. Instead, you can target your products over a longer period of time by building up site authority and showing Google you deserve to be on par with big rivals.
However, a much smaller, local SEO campaign can be done reasonably effectively from the comfort of your home. There is lots of information on how to do an in house cost effective SEO campaign. However these often vary in success rate and very regularly take up a lot of valuable time. For a bespoke, expert led strategy, a company such as MR SEO, an SEO Agency in Essex can help.
Pay-Per Click Advertising
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is actually a broad term that covers any type of digital marketing where you pay for every user who clicks on an ad. For example, Google AdWords is a form of PPC advertising that many people use to promote their services to the top of a Google search.
When you search for a product or service online and see results at the top that say “ad”, this means that the company are paying for this place. For every person that clicks that link, they pay Google money. This can be a great way to increase traffic to the site, however if you are not converting once the customer is on the site, it can be difficult to see a good ROI.
Conversion Rate Optimisation
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the art and science of improving your online user experience, most often once they are on your website. As discussed in the previous regard to converting traffic, whether organic or paid, comes down to the CRO on your site. However, you may think this only applies to sites with an online shop or some form of ecommerce.
This is a myth, as conversions don’t always have to be of direct monetary value to see an ROI. They can be instead, be a completion of a contact form, someone clicking your telephone link or sending you an email. This then generates a sale further down the line, thus still producing your ROI for your SEO or your PCC campaign.
To conclude, starting a new business can be very difficult. It often takes a lot to be successful physically and digitally. Using these methods of digital marketing can put you in a fantastic position to defy the odds and become that super successful brand you dreamt of when you set out on your entrepreneurial adventure.
