Digital Marketing for Your Small Business or Side Hustle: How to make it work

Being a small business owner, you need to have some sort of direction before you jump into the marketing arena. While it might seem hard to get a handle on all of the terminology and statistics floating around the web, there’s no doubt that digital marketing is working for a lot of small businesses.

In fact, 83% of small businesses believe their digital marketing strategy is working for them. The same business owners noted, however, that identifying the right channel along with their specific marketing goals has been crucial in ensuring the best possible ROI when launching campaigns.

If the data supports the fact that digital marketing is crucial in running your own business, then all that’s left to do is figure out how to make it work for you.

The Ability to Measure Your Efforts

When marketing a small business or side hustle, one of the most important things you will be looking for is the ability to measure your efforts. Putting time, money and effort into a strategy that doesn’t seem to work is one of the biggest ways in which small businesses seem to flounder, and the great thing about digital marketing is that it is highly measurable. The pure analytical data generated by an audience’s interaction with your online marketing efforts is crucial in structuring future marketing strategies and evaluating your success.

However, analyzing insights from Google Analytics alone won’t be enough. You will need to use other forms of website user feedback tools to identify your weak points and then address them. By using these tools, you will be able to make sense of what is working and what is not in order to tweak your messaging, content and overall marketing efforts. To see success in this type of endeavor, you will want to also craft a clearly defined online customer value proposition tailored to your different target customer personas, which brings us to the importance of honing in on various target audiences.

The Benefits of Honing in on a Target Audience

If you’ve been in business a while or are just getting started, there’s one thing you’ll want to learn quickly: crafting a small target audience is crucial in your marketing success. Many small businesses often fail due to the fact that they don’t know who their target audience is and cannot effectively market their product or service to them. While your product or business very well might be intended to be used or experienced by a very general population, if you aren’t at least segmenting your marketing to attract niche audiences, you won’t go anywhere.

Digital marketing is great in this way because it can provide insight into the demographics and behaviors of audiences. This means that you can craft marketing messages and content that will speak directly to the people who will be most receptive to it. If you are trying to sell a coffee subscription box, for example, you might find that you are looking to sell to a wide age range of both men and women. While you might run into problems with this strategy, if you truly believe you have crafted a product fit for everybody, you will still need to work on creating different marketing strategies in order to attract smaller groups of the general audience.

Taking Advantage of a Social Market

While there are benefits to a social media-driven world, it also creates an often saturated market in which users feel like they are constantly bombarded with content and advertisements. This is actually a huge advantage for small businesses, and it makes it easy for you to run your own business from wherever you want in the world. Digital marketing is highly shareable due to the fact that people can post or share your content straight from their smartphones to their social media pages. And, as a small business, you want to get the most bang for your buck every time, which is what makes it such a great marketing strategy.

Take Facebook, for example. The average cost per click for a Facebook ad is around $1.72. That’s a pretty high ROI when you consider that there are over 2 billion active Facebook users every day. Retargeting is also a great aspect of digital marketing for small businesses, as it allows you to track a client’s every move and use that data to retarget them in the future when they interact with your advertisement on Google, Facebook, Instagram or any other platform.

Content is King and Digital is the Kingdom

Digital marketing experts understand the importance of these types of strategies and can integrate them into your current or future marketing plan in a way that makes the most sense for you and your small business. Failing to take advantage of these wonderful tools at hand in such a digitally-focused world could mean the difference between your small business or side hustle succeeding or not. If content is king, then the digital world is its kingdom, and it’s time to start learning how to rule.