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Digital Marketing Can Help Your Small Business Grow

When you started your small business, you hoped to be more independent and creative. You’re doing that, and you love it. But you probably need to keep the momentum going – keep building the business and growing your client base. Small business marketing is your tool for that growth.

In our digital world, potential clients are easier than ever to reach. The technology is at your fingertips. As accessible as it is, effective marketing tips for small businesses aren’t as easy to find. Knowing the marketing trends for 2018, and how to use them effectively, can help you turn those potential clients into growth for your small business.

What Small Businesses Should Continue

Most small businesses, up to 71%, use social media to market to potential customers. The majority of these are looking to Facebook for their marketing and with more people using it than any other social media platform, this is indeed a smart move. Did you know that more than half of Australians are now active on Facebook, and almost all of them log in every day?

With Facebook, you can create ads targeted to your ideal client. From digital behaviour to location and interests, it is easy to get your brand in front of the right people. Once you’ve selected your targeting criteria and campaign objective, Facebook optimises your ads. You and your competition plan to spend about 38% of marketing budgets on Facebook advertising. SEO (search engine optimization) and web site analytics spending looks to be around 30% and 24%, respectively.

While the ads themselves are important, SEO works with your search engine, such as Google, to drive potential customers to your web site. Web site analytics monitor the traffic to your web site and let you see how many potential clients convert to use your business.  Monitoring is as important as the ads themselves. When you monitor effectively, you can discontinue ads that are not performing well and enhance the ads that are. Because web site analytics can give you so much information, they can help you reduce ad spending and drive even more business growth, making them well worth the expense.

What Can You Do Better?

As an industry, there are some things that small business owners can do to increase the effectiveness of their digital marketing. The biggest challenges reported by small business owners are – as you might expect – money and time.

Over a quarter of small business owners say that they don’t plan to increase their digital marketing budget this year. Instead, they plan to optimize the budget and look at free or low-cost marketing tools, such as Google Analytics. These tools can be effective, and they may help your business save money on marketing.

Marketing takes second place to small business owners’ primary business function, as it should. Over 20% of small businesses have trouble finding the time to market effectively. This is understandable, as small business owners often take care of every aspect of the business. Researching marketing trends and tools, creating ads, maintaining and monitoring effectiveness can take a lot of time. And, since small business owners love to do things yourselves and have an independent spirit, you hate to ask someone to do these things for us!

As part of that independent spirit, however, you know that sometimes delegation is key to running a successful business. If you have employees, you do that on a daily basis. You are an expert in your own industry, but you don’t need to be an expert in everything else, too. Because marketing plays such a large role in building your business and increasing your profits, you may find that you need extra time to concentrate on what you do best – running your business.

As a favourite marketing agency in Melbourne, Concept Marketing is the expert you need. We can help you navigate those small business marketing trends and put them to work for your business. Whether you are just after help setting up your website or Facebook marketing, or if you want to call us in to work more closely with you on growing your business, we are here to help you and your small business succeed.