To break it down, the majority of the workforce works for a small business and if you were to randomly sample a given person on the street, chances are they work for a small business over a large corporation.
That’s huge!
My goal with DIY Digital Strategy is to empower small businesses to win with digital. I wrote about this in the past, but it’s worth stating again. Medium and large businesses have been making a ton of money via digital. They caught on to the trends that people are spending more and more time on their digital devices and far less time with traditional media (radio, print, TV, etc.). Additionally, they are well educated on the top digital strategies that drive business outcome (i.e. sales) as they have the resources to pay agencies, consultants, marketing teams, etc. This has left the small businesses in the dust, as agencies don’t want to work with small businesses as the revenue isn’t as great, and small businesses don’t have the resources or time to understand how to make digital work for their advantage.
That’s where DIY Digital Strategy comes into play. I’ve been working with large enterprises throughout the past 13 years and deployed the top strategies to significantly grow their revenue. What excites me is sharing the top strategies to the small and medium sized businesses. What works for the big dogs, certainly still works and applies for the small and medium sized businesses. The only thing that’s different is the scale.
For example, remarketing is a very effective tool for businesses. As I blogged about earlier, it gives businesses the chance to display an ad to a user who has visited their site, but didn’t purchase. In this instance you’re reaching the hand raisers, those who are on the brink of transacting with your business. In this case, you’re reminding them of your business and bringing them one step closer to becoming a customer. See this happen daily, both with small and large businesses.
The only requirement to get started with remarketing is users visiting your site. With large companies they have thousands of users visiting their site per day. For small businesses, you may have a thousand or two per month. However, that’s still big enough and these are meaningful users that you should be in front of. While you’re not making an incremental $X million, you will (note the definitive wording), make incremental revenue through this tactic.
Another example is with search ads. While large corporations will serve on relevant keywords for their business throughout the US or even potentially worldwide, small businesses may only care about customers within 25 miles of their zip-code. You will use the same search strategies that work well for the big players, but it will just be on a much smaller scale. However, you will (again note the definitive wording), make incremental revenue from search ads.
Now, you might get overwhelmed with all of the ways you can market your business, digitally. My recommendation is to focus on the 80/20 rule. Focus on the top strategies that will have the biggest impact. For most small businesses, that’s Google Search, Local Directories and a Remarketing campaign. If you do those three things, you’re in fantastic shape. Once those three strategies are very mature and a fine-tuned machine, then yes – you can expand to other platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Bing Search, etc. However, the level of incremental revenue you’ll get from the other players will be much less.
For those small business owners who are still with me and want to take action, shoot met a line at hello@diydigitalstrategy.com. We’re empowering small businesses to win with digital by offering either an affordable DIY solution, which consists of how to videos, proprietary marketing guide and weekly office hours, or full-service management to be live on all the mentioned platforms.
The best part about this is it works, really well. Unlike other traditional advertising, it’s completely measurable. If you don’t think it will work, try it out and let the data tell the story. Data and analytics don’t lie, if you invest $100 and your analytics shares that you drove $500 in revenue AND drove people to your store AND increased your brand awareness, that’s a big win.
My call to action on this is simple, let’s have a conversation to discuss the state of your business, your goals and a few cost-effective strategies we can implement to get started.
