Being a small business owner is hard work. Trust me, I know. You wear a lot of hats — everything from accounting, sales, and marketing to more. However, small business digital marketing shouldn’t be left to the side as it usually is with the 10 million other things a small business owner must do every day. And it shouldn’t have to be. As a small business owner, you can spend time on digital marketing and be effective if you:
- Know what you are doing.
- Are good with time management.
Honestly, it takes many years of practice and dedication to become good at both of those. I learned to be good at digital marketing through tons of errors, but what came out of those was the knowledge of marketing and time management as a small business owner.
I also learned that it doesn’t take all day to do digital marketing effectively. Here is the checklist of what I do now — and what you can, too, as a small business owner — every day for an hour.
Unique Digital Marketing Ideas that Don’t Take Much Time
Search Engine Optimization (15 Minutes)
Search engine optimization should be a big part of your digital marketing strategy. You want to make sure that all of your main pages are correctly optimized for the keyword phrases that you want to target. There are many things that you can do to improve your SEO.
First, use tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs to find the keyword phrases that you want to focus on. Then make sure each page is optimized for those keywords using the different points below:
- Meta title
- Meta description
- Header tag
- Body content
- URL
After that is completed, you want to make sure you continue to keep up your SEO efforts. One daily task that you can do is to have a blog and update it (using WordPress, I hope). You should be writing unique content centered around your customers and any questions they might have. If your customers have questions, they are more than likely searching for the answer out there. Provide it to them, and you will build more trust with them.
For example, let’s say you own a small clothing boutique. You could write compelling content centered around questions that your customers generally ask every day: “What to Wear During Winter,” “What Styles Are Good for Formal Dinners,” etc.
The goal of creating content is to be there for your potential customers when they need you, making it more likely they will do business with you down the road.
Conversion Rate Optimization (10 Minutes)
You also want to make sure that you are working on your conversion rate daily. This can be tasks such as changing text, changing the colors on your website or learning the newest and best practices.
One of the biggest things that small business owners normally get wrong is not focusing enough on CRO.
One good tip is to read one article on conversion rate optimization every day. Here are a couple of popular conversion rate optimization blogs to follow:
Do not go overboard with it. It is a marathon, not a sprint — and be mindful that sometimes the content/strategies may not be a fit for your business. However, if you do find something that would be useful, work with your website partner (which might be you) to make revisions to your website to boost conversions.
Social Media (10 Minutes)
Social media is one of the best ways to connect with consumers. You should have a presence on Facebook, Twitter, and, for good measure, throw in another one that makes sense to your business and industry (LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram). Then, each day for ten minutes, go in and post content you have, reply to customers, and follow/like other businesses and potential customers.
One tactic that I did when I first started was to search hashtags for people who had issues with their current vendors on Twitter and then tweet to them. I landed a 100-million-dollar-a-year company as a client from Twitter.
You can also schedule your content every week to spend more time scouting for potential customers or replying to customers.
PPC (15 Minutes)
If you are not currently running PPC, you need to be. And, if it doesn’t work for you, don’t blame AdWords. It’s not AdWords’ fault –it’s your skills. If you are interested, here are why most people fail at AdWords.
For the rest who want to jump into my game plan for PPC, we want to go in and do a quick 15 minutes of optimization. I am assuming you have a basic knowledge of PPC and how to do it.
Checklist for 15 Minutes:
- Create one new Ad Group of 10 similar phrases to target. Make the phrases only phrase, exact or modified broad match types.
- Create five new ads to replace low performing ads.
- Put in 1-5 new negative keywords from low performing ads.
- Pause any low performing ads and ad groups, and adjust as you see fit with the rest of the 15 minutes.
It most likely will take you more than 15 minutes to start but, after a while, these can all be accomplished in 8-12 minutes and, over the course of a year, you will have a mean, green and cash-generating PPC machine.
Reviews (10 Minutes)
Last, you need lots of positive reviews. This is more powerful than any SEO/PPC tactic that you can do as a local store. Put down your top five review places, such as Google+, Yelp, Thumbtack, etc. Then personally email customers you have had in the past that you did a good job for and ask for them to tell the world about their experience.
This seems simple, but it is very powerful and needed.
Email Marketing (30 Minutes [Bi-weekly])
Email marketing, like reviews, is also very important. Using a tool like Robly.com, you can send out emails quickly and effectively. Depending on your industry, I suggest to send emails bi-weekly, but this can change depending on what type of business you are. However, every other week I suggest spending 30 minutes to sit down, pick a good template, and give value to your past customers through email marketing.
Giving them a 5 percent discount is not valuable enough. Give them good content, advice or other items that they can really sink their teeth in and get value from.
Conclusion
I hope this 60 minute a day guide will help you become a marketing wizard in your local business. Marketing is difficult, but it doesn’t have to be if you are doing it right.
Clock Photo via Shutterstock
Many SMBs use a set it & forget it mindset with their web presence. If you’re committing time on a daily basis you’ll get better and better results. Good post.
Aira Bongco
I think that social media engagement should be done on a frequent basis. It is not something that you can do one-time and leave it. It requires continuous engagement.
Ridley Fitzgerald
These are some great tips for digital marketing. I didn’t realize that you could do SEO in as little as fifteen minutes! I have heard that that is vital for websites marketing, so it’s good to learn that it doesn’t take a ton of time.
The section that I found most interesting is “One tactic that I did when I first started was to search hashtags for people who had issues with their current vendors on Twitter and then tweet to them. I landed a 100-million-dollar-a-year company as a client from Twitter.”
Please explain the process of searching hashtags for people who have issues with their current vendors and it would fantastic if you would also give a few hashtag examples.
Nice list of regular marketing tasks. I’d approach the SEO section and the daily task allocations differently, but overall very nice work to folks started. Thank you.
Great marketing tasks. I think On-Page SEO factor of the website can be analysed and done in the time frame given, but we need to do Off-Page SEO and Social Media Optimization on regular basis.
huba.L
You’re also getting a leg up on your contestants, who are probably only using an automatic email funnel to nurture prospects (if they’re doing it at all).