Digital marketing covers a wide range of activities and channels, and it’s hard to know where to begin when it comes to increasing your online presence, especially when new trends and channels are popping up more regularly than ever before.
That being said, there's a few key tasks that cost nothing other than your time to help more people find you online, and here they are:
Invest in evergreen content
What is evergreen content? It’s content that is relevant and applicable to promoting your business any day of the year.
This is the opposite of seasonal content which is specific to a limited sale or different times of seasons of the year.
Evergreen content is essential to having content on hand to use for advertising and other promotional activity. This could mean investing in some photography, videography, blogs or graphic design for your business that you can reuse over and over again as required.
It’s usually worth investing in evergreen content before any online advertising so you have high-quality content you can use in your advertising to get a better return on investment and make a positive first impression.
Revisit and repurpose old content
It can be hard to come with new ideas for posts all the time, this is perhaps one of the biggest barriers to posting consistently. Fortunately you don’t have to reinvent the wheel each week.
Go back a year or two and review what you were posting then (assuming your business was around then), repurpose what you can or expand or renew any of your older posts of the key ideas or messages in them.
Fully utilise online reviews
Word-of-mouth is the best form of marketing out there.
Customers trust recommendations from friends or family far more than a self-promotional post or advertising ever will. Online reviews are the digital equivalent and something many small businesses are neglecting to include on their marketing strategies.
Both Facebook and Google have links you can share with customers to make it easy for them to leave you a review.
Reviews and testimonials make for great social media posts as well.
Use AI to give you ideas, but don’t overuse it.
The big topic of the past through years is of course Artificial Intelligence and it’s great for coming up with some ideas and inspiration but you should not become overly dependant on it.
AI generated content is only as good as the inputs given to create it and you don’t want to end up with generic copy or visuals that may be similar to that of competing businesses using the same generative AI tools.
For example, I see many new businesses, especially in the web design and marketing space, using AI-generated posts and captions in order to make daily posts on social media. There posts lack consistency in their design and communicate a general low effort mindset.
Google Business Posting
Google Business Profile is perhaps the most underrated marketing channel in a world where everyone loves to jump on and just as quickly abandon the latest trends or new platform.
While many features of the Google Business Profile have come and gone over the years, what many people are not doing is making posts on their profile, this can be done similar to making a post on your social media accounts and often takes less than 5 minutes to copy and paste a post onto Google Business as well.
Google rewards consistent activity and making a new update at least once a month takes no more than 5 minutes.
Understanding and defining your target audience/s
If you have a Facebook Ads account, the Saved Audience tool is great for inputting parameters such as location, age, gender and interests and providing an estimated audience size of people who fit your criteria so you at least have a rough idea of how many people are actually in your target audience rather than it being some abstract concept.
This takes no more than 15 minutes and updates as peoples interests change over time. Of course it’s always great to get insights and feedback from actual customers too.
Collect your marketing data
Vanity metrics such as likes and followers increasingly have little correlation to making sales, and many people are actually greatly overestimating their social media reach as only a small percentage of your existing followers see the posts you make, and posting more frequently doesn’t always increase this.
Every business should have an idea of many people on average are actually seeing each post they make and businesses in the e-commerce space should be focusing on how many people are actually making their way to their website from social media accounts.
Tools like Google Analytics help you track activity on your website and are great for providing trends over the long term and measuring the impact of different marketing campaigns. Google Analytics only begins tracking data from the date it’s installed so if you have a website and don’t currently have this set up, talk to your web developer or similar contact or search ‘Google Analytics set up’ alongside your website provider for more information.
What next?
The above are great ideas to get you started if you want to increase your digital marketing efforts and aren’t sure where to start.
Many businesses get so overwhelmed with the many options available to them that it falls further and further down their to-do list. I’m a big believer in sticking to the basics and focusing on the low- hang fruit opportunities.
To end this article, keep in mind that:
Not every business needs to be posting on a weekly basis
Not every business needs to be sharing trendy Reels
Not every business needs to be on TikTok
Not every business needs 1,000+ followers
Not every business needs to make a post to celebrate every public holiday
Have some questions or want to see more?
For more information feel free to contact me via info@jasonbenbow.co.nz, I’m always happy to provide free resources your business may benefit from.
About the author
Jason Benbow
Small Business Digital Marketing Consultant
Jason has been in the digital marketing space for 7 years and is passionate about helping self-employed individuals and small businesses owners grow their brand awareness and client base using the wide range of digital marketing tools available with a focus on Meta and Google platforms.
He applies his experience from working in agencies to provide flexible and accessible digital marketing advice and services to the small business community.
