Small Business UK
Advice and Ideas for UK Small Businesses and SMEs
Digital marketing solutions can really reignite the spark in your business
You may have heard endless praise for digital marketing and how it can revolutionise your business – but where on earth (or, indeed, on the web) do you start?
Here are eight digital marketing solutions that you can implement into your small business. See which ones work best for you. Read on for the whole guide or jump straight to your preferred section.
Email marketing is as it sounds – promoting your products/services and content by email. The main aims are to reach new audiences and build trust with your current audience – bolstering your brand to boot. You could even send a variety of emails to support your content and campaigns, such as newsletters, partner content emails, event promos, one-off sales promotions and emails targeted to certain parts of your database.
If you’re just getting started in email marketing, Mailchimp is an excellent choice. With pre-built and customisable templates, generative AI features, and custom reports, it’s easy to set up and scale effective email campaigns.
Pros
Cons
Read more: A guide to successful email marketing – Email marketing can be an immensely important driver of engagement and brand awareness for small businesses. Here Andrea Blair from Hallam Internet, takes you through a six-step email marketing checklist
Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing involves businesses paying a fee every time someone clicks on their ad. It can be used on social media, but in this case, we’re talking about search engines such as Google and Bing. What you’re trying to get out of it is a boost to your brand visibility, more leads and more sales.
Pros
Cons
SEO (or search engine optimisation) makes it even easier for people to find you. You optimise your content using the very keywords that your target market is searching for. Platforms such as ahrefs and SEMrush can tell you how your content is performing and which keywords and topics you should be targeting next.
Pros
Cons
Read more: Small business SEO: 6 easy wins to boost your website ranking – Your small business SEO can rank alongside big rivals on Google if you follow these six simple steps
Social media might’ve been your first guess on the digital marketing solutions front. When we talk about social media, we can mean organic posts or posts that you’ve paid to be promoted. This is on top of reels on Instagram or Shorts on YouTube, for example, and other content sharing formats.
Pros
Cons
Read more: A guide to social media strategy for small business owners – we present this guide to social media strategy to help your small business grow
Maximising your content helps you build an invested audience who you’ve gained trust with through regular, reliable content. It helps to have someone with expertise in the area creating this content as search engines can connect their author profile to their profiles on other parts of the web to bolster their authority and help the content perform better, linking up back to the trusty SEO.
Pros
Cons
Read more: Why content marketing is essential for a small business – Here, Rebecca Beale, a content specialist for Tecmark, tells us why content marketing is so important for small businesses to focus on
SMS is a relatively untapped market but comes with the promise of a high open rate, as everyone’s on their phones, anyway. As you’d expect, these are promotions sent by text message. Customers will have to give their consent and, with that, you’ll need to supply the option to unsubscribe at any time. It’s best for deals, new products and tips.
Pros
Cons
Read more: Six tips to small business success in SMS marketing – Matthew Winters explores how your small business can use SMS marketing to its advantage
Affiliate is performance-based and a big hitter following the unstoppable rise in social media. As the business, you’ll partner up with a third party (the affiliate) to promote products/service to gain users, data or sales. The affiliate will earn a commission for promotion, be that clicks or sales. Your affiliate may be a blogger, a website with a similar target audience to yours or an influencer.
Speaking of influencers, you could plump for influencer marketing instead. It’s similar in that you collaborate, but your third party is an influencer specialising in your niche. For example, you could approach a beauty influencer, you could ask them to promote your haircare products.
Pros
Cons
Read more: Affiliate marketing – what is it and what can it do for your business? – Not just reserved for large brands – affiliate marketing is the online channel you’re missing out on
You’ll see display banner ads across the web – these are the oblong ads typically found on webpages. It’ll feature some combination of your name, logo, slogan and a call to action. Visually striking is the name of the game here, whether you’re going for a static or animated ad.
You then use an ad network, such as Google’s, to reach your target audience through third-party websites they visit or to be put in specific places.
Pros
Cons
To keep ourselves relevant, it’s wise to look to the future of digital marketing and advertising. Of course, it’s got to be artificial intelligence (AI).
AI can boost your marketing activities and it’s more about how it can make your existing marketing efforts easier. This may be through automation, making the customer experience more individualised and giving you valuable AI-driven insights. Many platforms are already integrating AI tools into their existing offerings.
The upside of digital marketing solutions is that there’s room to experiment with different platforms. Some of them give you the option of a free trial, do flexible tiered pricing or have packages with short term commitments.
Read over reviews to get an idea of whether the pros will enhance your business and you can live with the cons. And, as always, reach out to your small business community to see what they think is worth it.
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Anna is Senior Reporter, covering topics affecting SMEs such as grant funding, managing employees and the day-to-day running of a business. More by Anna Jordan
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