If you are an entrepreneur and are concerned about your company’s marketing and sales, this article is for you. The goal here is to provide some digital marketing tips for entrepreneurs to watch out for.
It is very common to serve this audience and note that many entrepreneurs find it difficult to generate new business through Digital Marketing. And this is often because they do not fully understand how this activity can help them in their daily lives.
Here are 10 Digital Marketing Tips for Entrepreneurs to keep an eye on. Check out:
1. DIGITAL MARKETING IS ALSO YOUR RESPONSIBILITY
As an entrepreneur you don’t have to be a digital marketing expert. You must know your business deeply, your customers, and what problems they solve. Fact.
Trusting 100% of your digital marketing strategy to others is risky. For many years, here at Mirago, we follow stories of entrepreneurs who suffered a lot to be able to get their strategies right in digital. This is because they understood very little about digital marketing and attributed this responsibility to third parties.
See, I’m not saying that you should take care of your digital marketing and get your hands dirty. This may be necessary if you are starting a small business with few resources.
Hiring a partner (agencies, consultants or freelancers) or teaming up internally to handle digital marketing is a good way out. But make no mistake. Who understands your business the most is you. And usually you least understand digital marketing in this scenario, so are you.
In practice what happens a lot is:
On the one hand, an entrepreneur who understands a lot about his business and a little bit of digital marketing.
On the other hand, an agency that understands digital marketing very well and almost nothing about your business.
The entrepreneur sees some YouTube videos about digital marketing and already thinks he understands it. The agency has 2 or 3 meetings with your company and already thinks it understands your business. Both sides are beginning to come up with ideas that may not bring consistent results.
All of this really begins to pay off when the entrepreneur begins to master digital marketing better and when the agency begins to deeply understand the entrepreneur’s business.
How do you expect to know what results to expect from your agency? How to evaluate her work? How to contribute ideas? How do you expect to do all this without understanding digital marketing?
2. HAVE THE KNOWLEDGE INDOORS AND OUTSOURCE?
Often the small entrepreneur finds himself at a crossroads: investing in education and training for him and his team to develop their internal knowledge in Digital Marketing or should they hire a partner or some strategic partners to support them?
Source: Clarion
There is no right or wrong, it just depends on the profile of the entrepreneur. Both choices have their advantages and disadvantages, however, I believe that regardless of the choice, the entrepreneur must have some basic knowledge of Digital Marketing so that he can evaluate later if the actions implemented within his company are having the desired effect or not. .
If he is not interested in the matter and is “in the hands of” his team or even an outside vendor with this knowledge, he may not be able to really assess whether the results he is getting are good or not according to the investments he makes. realized. Therefore, we recommend that a small business owner understands concepts such as Web Analytics (Metrics), Trafficking, and Conversion.
Only then will he be able to understand what is happening in his company in Digital Marketing activities.
3. YOUR WEBSITE MUST GENERATE NEW BUSINESS
A company’s website, especially a small business, should be one of the main channels for generating new business opportunities. The entrepreneur who doesn’t see a website this way has unfortunately stopped in time. For many years websites have gone from being mere “virtual business cards” to gaining relevance in a marketing and sales strategy.
With today’s ability to drive qualified traffic to your site, this should be your number one concern when it comes to digital marketing strategies. Unfortunately this is not what we see in practice.
Source: Web Design team
Every entrepreneur wants to build or already has their website established. However, when asked what turnover this site has generated, we often find discouraging answers. Some common issues we encounter on entrepreneur sites:
- Sites do not have good usability
- Websites are not responsive (do not fit any device – mobile, tablet, etc.)
- Sites without updates (only with institutional content – the same for years)
- Sites with structure not thought of optimization (SEO)
- Design that compromises information consumption
Therefore, keep in mind that any strategy outlined within Digital Marketing will have as one of its main bases your website, which must be strategically planned from the beginning .
4. CREATE VALUABLE CONTENT
Content is and remains the king in a digital marketing strategy . Especially for small and medium businesses, generating valuable content can be a great way to drive qualified traffic to your site, social media, and other channels you use to communicate with your audience. Content production has two main strands as a result: It helps in either generating leads or sales for a business and also contributes to the relevance of the business brand.
And what is valuable content? Valuable content is any and all content that will help your customer in his day to day and your business and that really helps him and has value to him at any given time.
For example: At Mirago we produce courses and content on various Digital Marketing topics, write and create tutorial videos, publish articles on Blog, among other content that may help our audience to work better. This freely available content helps people interested in the topics we discuss solve problems or identify opportunities on those topics. If this happens, then we are facing valuable content. Therefore, every entrepreneur should pay attention to their content creation strategy.
5. UNDERSTAND WHAT INBOUND MARKETING IS AND APPLY, IF APPLICABLE
Currently Inbound Marketing has been one of the main strategies within Digital Marketing and one of the best results. The concept has existed for at least 10 years in the United States, however, gained strength in India only in recent years.
One of the definitions I like best is: “Inbound Marketing can be considered any marketing tactic that is based on gaining people’s interest rather than buying it.”
Source: Medium
Inbound Marketing relies heavily on Content Marketing to drive qualified traffic to its channels. However, before that you need to know your audience ( Personas ) and the stage of the buying journey that each type of customer is in.
Basically there are 4 steps in Inbound Marketing:
Entrepreneurs should pay attention to this way of generating new business. To delve into the theme, we have an Inbound Marketing Course here at Mirago.
6. KNOW HOW TO BUY TRAFFIC
Inbound Marketing and Content Marketing strategies often pay off in the medium to long term, however if you need short term results you should understand that there are a few ways to bring qualified traffic to your business quickly. The main sources of qualified traffic for small and medium entrepreneurs today are Google Ads , Facebook Ads, and Instagram Ads . Of course there are many other ways to buy traffic, but I will focus on these three.
Relying on experts to help bring traffic to your business can be a watershed in a digital marketing strategy . Often small businesses already use these platforms to get new business. The problem is that, in most cases, they cannot measure the return on investment or suffer from technical issues and peculiarities of each platform, which ends up impacting the final result.
It is common to hear from entrepreneurs who have been investing in one or more of these platforms for years that they have doubts about whether the result from these means is good or not. Or if the investment made has been worth it or not. If you are one of these entrepreneurs, it may be a good idea to talk to experts in this area to see if your investment is being well spent.
7. KNOW HOW TO CONVERT
Once you bring qualified traffic to your channels, the goal is to convert some of that traffic within your site or to a specific landing page (either for sale (for an e-commerce) or lead generation ( in the case of a service company, for example).
Source: Metric Theory
This item has a lot to do with item 3 (Your site must generate new business) because the site must be built to be a conversion machine. Of course, adjustments can and should be made over time to increase conversion rates, but it’s important that from the outset your site is strategically built and already thought of conversions.
There is no point in investing resources either in generating traffic via inbound marketing or tools like Google Adwords, for example if your site does not convert visitors into leads or customers . So entrepreneurs, be aware of this important point.
8. RELATE ON SOCIAL MEDIA
If, within strategic marketing goals, it makes sense to be present on social networks (and for most businesses this is true), then your company should be strategic and not just “create a fan page.”
This is the main mistake of entrepreneurs : Initiating their work on a particular social media just because “competitors are doing” or because “we can’t be left out” . The problem is that there is no strategy linked to the company’s participation in a social network. What are the consequences?
- Profiles that insert content at a certain time and then abandon
- Profiles with no or very low social engagement
- Profiles with meaningless business content that do not generate value
- Profiles that do not have established posting frequencies (post a post today after the last 30 days ago).
- Profiles that do not understand the context of each social network (each network has a unique language and should be explored differently and not have the same message for all)
Starting a social media relationship requires planning, strategy, and hard work. So understand this so your brand doesn’t get ugly out there.
9. METRICS – KNOW HOW TO ANALYZE NUMBERS
I already talked a little about this in item 2, however it deserves a separate item. We all know that one of the great advantages of the internet is that we can measure just about everything.Therefore, your company is able to know the return of each dollar invested in digital media. Therefore, it is essential for the entrepreneur to know what are the main indicators to analyze how his digital marketing actions are going. Here we must be careful because there is often a mountain of data generated, however we must know which ones are really important to monitor for each type of business.
An entrepreneur who is unaware of his business metrics is bound to make investments “in the dark” and not knowing which channels to invest or not. Relying on this in-house knowledge or an expert partner is essential for the business owner to make decisions based on numbers rather than guesswork, which unfortunately is still common in small businesses.
10. BE ATTUNED TO EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS IN THE MARKET
It may sound cliché or vague, but in the digital marketing marketplace the speed with which things happen is often greater than our ability to analyze, process and put into practice new activities in our business.
Here are some tips to keep you up to date:
- Frequent industry events
- Maintain relationships with local people
- Consume valuable content from the area of India and the world.
- Worry about spreading this knowledge to your team or hire a specialized vendor to help you (many work on demand – per hour), which gives you flexibility.
In addition to these tips, in India we have the advantage of looking at overseas markets and seeing what is happening there today and identifying which trends are likely to arrive in India in the coming months and years. This is how it was with Content Marketing, Inbound Marketing, and other concepts that apply today in corporate Digital Marketing when we looked at the US market about 10 years ago.
These were the 10 Digital Marketing Tips for Entrepreneurs. Easy? Of course not. But you can have better marketing management by looking at these 10 points and implementing improvements in your business.