4 Things to think about before doing digital marketing for your small business

If you’re a small business owner, especially one with a fairly new business, you may be considering creating a website or joining a social media platform – maybe both. Before you do take your small business digital – there are things you should consider.

Here are 4 things you need to think about before doing digital marketing for your small business (not listed in order of importance).

Your Resources

When joining social media or creating your website, you want to carefully consider your resources, here are a couple of things to think about:

• Time – From creating content for your website or social media, to managing your profiles, and more, taking your business digital can be very time consuming. Especially on top of running your business. If you don’t have a lot of time to dedicate towards your online presence and if you feel like you don’t have the knowledge and experience to do these things, it may be in your best interest to hire someone to do these things for you.

• Money – Can you create a website for free? Yes. Can you have a presence on social media for free? Of course. But can having a budget take things to the next level? Definitely. Being able to set aside a budget can mean hiring a professional to take things to the next level, or it can mean boosting your social media profile or posts, and more.

Have a Plan

You may think that joining social media or creating a website is easy and straightforward, but it’s not as easy as you think. Planning is an important step to launch ANYTHING related to your business.

Here are a few things you should plan out:

• Branding – Such as your brand voice, visual style, fonts, and colour(s). This should be consistent. For example, the colours you use should also be used in your logo, website, and social media content so that it’s easily recognizable (think: Coca Cola, everyone knows the red and white).

• Strategy – Being successful on social media isn’t as easy as simply posting content whenever you want. If you’re planning to launch on social media, you should have a strategy and that strategy should fit in with your business and marketing strategies and goals.

Content

Whether you’re joining social media or creating your website, you’ll need content! Let’s break down some of the content you’ll need for each.

A website

• Content (which can include writing, images, audio, or video) for each page – pages may include: a homepage, an FAQ, and services or product pages.

• Blogs

Social media

• Videos (like Instagram Reels or TikTok videos) or images along with captions.

Creating content can be time consuming and even difficult, it’s not as simple as taking an image and uploading it to your profile. You need to know what resonates with your audience (more on that below), you need to take or create images or videos, and you need to craft a message (caption) that fits the image or video and matches your brand voice. Before launching, we suggest planning ahead and creating content for at least a few days but preferably a week or more in advance. This will ensure you have content going out consistently and that you aren’t scrambling to post something last minute.

Your audience

Before taking your business digital, you need to think carefully about your audience.

When it comes to your website you need to make sure it’s user friendly – especially for mobile users. Google found that 48% of users say they feel frustrated and annoyed when they encounter a website that is not mobile friendly. Additionally, 48% said if a site did not work well on mobile, it made them feel like the company didn’t care about getting their business. You don’t want to lose a customer because they find your website frustrating to use or because they feel like you don’t care about them.

It’s important to think about your audience when it comes to your social media presence as well.  If you don’t know your audience well, then you run the risk of not reaching your target audience or you run the risk of creating content that doesn’t resonate with them. For example, if you don’t understand your target audience’s habits, you might be on platforms they don’t frequently use, which means you’re not engaging with your potential customers.

Whether you’re launching a new website or launching your business on social media – we hope these tips can help you start off on the right foot!

If you need a little guidance, we can help with content development (like website content and blogs), social media (like content creation and management), and more! Book your 20-minute consultation and let’s discuss how we can help kick things off!