If you’ve been looking for cost-effective, DIY digital marketing for small business owners like you, you are not alone. Being a small business owner comes with its opportunities, responsibilities and challenges. One of such is getting customers and clients and growing the business profitably. Then there is the challenge of limited resources and inability to hire extra hands for marketing or pay marketing agencies. But without putting some effort into marketing, growth will be really slow if not impossible. This means the burden then lies on you as the business owner to be the primary marketer of your own business using cost-effective means. 

A cost-effective marketing solution will help you achieve the following:

• Reach your ideal customers with limited budget
• Build long-term brand awareness that guarantees customer retention
• Produce maximum ROI through the implementation of marketing strategies with measurable impact.

There are tons of small business marketing ideas out there that are just vague or lacking the required details to implement them successfully. We have carefully selected some great, effective, practicable and time-tested digital marketing strategies for generating demand for your small business consistently. We have also provided as many details as you will need to start implementing them.  

You can quickly preview the sections here and then continue reading to learn more.  

1. Start With The Basics – Market Research

2. Create a Brand Strategy For Your Business

3. Build a Functional and Attractive Website

4. Use SEO To Build a Solid Foundation for Organic Traffic

5. Grow Your Small Business with Content Marketing

6. Level Up with Social Media Strategies

7. Go Big on Video Marketing

8. Use Email Marketing to Engage, Nurture, and Increase Conversion

9. Leverage Free PR Opportunities for Small Businesses

10. Explore Collaborations and Partnerships

11. Use Paid Marketing To Accelerate Results

12. Be Strategic On Performance Tracking and Results Analytics

13. Final Thoughts On DIY Online Marketing for Small Businesses

1. Start With The Basics – Market Research

Good market research will help you in understanding your market, target audience  and competitors. This is crucial in creating and implementing a marketing plan; an outline of goals, strategies, and tactics that will help you achieve success. 

Understand your target audience

Your target audience are those specific groups of consumers most likely interested in your product or service. You can identify them by their age, gender, location, income, interests, or other factors. Knowing your target audience enables focus and efficiency in tailoring your marketing messaging and strategies to achieve maximum impact. Understanding your audience needs can help to ensure that your offerings are truly valuable to them and your messaging easily resonates with them.

Create buyer personas

Who is your ideal customer? That customer that crosses the ts and dots the is of your offering? Make a fictitious persona for this person with their name, age, location educational attainment, family size, pain points, interests, hobbies, political leanings, worldview, buying behaviours, purchase triggering problems, motivations, where they love to go, the type of device they use, the social media platforms where they are most active and everything else you can use to define them.

Sometimes, you will need some additional research to come up with your ideal personas. You can actively solicit and analyze feedback from your existing customers to understand their needs, preferences, and pain points. You can also get insights from your CRM tools, web analytics, social media conversations and email conversations with customers

Conduct competitive analysis

Use keywords relating to your business, product or services to find competitors online. Find relevant keywords using Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner. You can also localize the keywords by adding your area, city, country or region.

For example:

plumbing service + providers + city

luxury perfumes + e-commerce stores + country

buy AC filters + city

Visit the websites and social media pages of the businesses that come up in the results and take note of their content, branding, messaging, offerings, pricing, following, years of experience, portfolio, etc. 

You can also go a little step further by checking their domain authority, backlink profiles, organic keywords, organic traffic, paid traffic, and social traffic, etc. You can use free services on SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Ubersuggest to get that information about your competitors. 

Create a table in excel or use services like airtable to outline what you find for each competitor. Place your business alongside them to know where you stand, what you need to do to compete, and how you can be a significant player with a unique selling proposition.

Create a marketing plan

Create a marketing plan for your small business based on your findings conducting research on ideal customers, buyer personas and the competition. Write out your immediate, short term and medium term goals. Also come up with strategies and tactics that will help you reach your goals. It’s better to have a working plan that you modify regularly than not have any at all. A thorough and research-backed plan keeps you focused in the midst of distractions and market pressure.

These basic steps provide a solid foundation for everything else you do. If you know the right audience for your business, who your ideal customers are and where you stand among the competition, you’ve gotten almost half of the job done. The rest is the implementation of practical steps to reach out to your customers, win them over, and keep them coming back. 

2. Create a Brand Strategy For Your Business

At the very basic level, branding is anything that you do to make your business distinct and unique from any other business. It’s how you want to build your small business and position it in the market. Your brand strategy includes brand identity, messaging, and experience to achieve specific goals.

Set a clear sense of direction

Branding is a long term agenda, therefore you need a clear sense of direction to carefully choose your brand identity, messaging and the experience you want to create. You should know what you want to communicate and what resonates with your target audience. 

If your business were a person and you have the freedom to determine what they look like, what colours should they have and what language do you want them to speak? What are the specific features you’ll want in them, what should be the content of their speech and what should be the tone of their voice? It’s your business, isn’t it? Now go ahead and give it its unique identities in a way that makes it appealing to your target audience. 

Consistently communicate your brand values

Use every opportunity you find to communicate your brand values, objectives and unique selling points. Incorporate them on your website, social media pages and posts, business proposals, elevator pitches, presentations, letterheads, business cards, product labels, and other means of communication.  Brand consistency is essential in building trust and recognition. You should really know your business and your brand. Know what you are selling and what you are saying, and remain consistent with your message. 

Understand your unique selling proposition (USP)

Your unique selling point is the essence of what makes your product, service, or brand more preferable to your competitors’ and it is aimed at convincing customers why they should choose you over others. Your USP can be based on affordability, superior materials, superior technology, personalized services, ethical sourcing, unique customer experience, offering of free trials, sales support, value added services, prompt customer service, ethical branding, years of experience, and more. Whatever you will choose as your USP must be something that can resonate quickly with your target audience.

Know who you are as a business, know what you sell, and your brand. Be consistent in your messaging across different platforms, mediums, and channels. Use your USP to perfect your elevator pitch, win and retain more customers to your brand. 

3. Build a Functional and Attractive Website

Having a website for your small business is essential for establishing an online presence. It allows you to connect with potential customers and clients from your area, city, country and around the world. It is the place where customers can easily find information about your products/service, contact your business or potentially make purchases. By the power of search engine optimization, your business can get easily discovered. 

Talking about a functional DIY website for your small business, how do you go about getting one when you probably don’t have an idea of coding? No worries, things have gotten easier when it comes to setting up a website, especially with the aid of AI. Here are simple steps to follow to get a website up for your business.

Use website builders

Platforms like Wix, GoDaddy, Bluehost, Hostinger, and Squarespace offer easy domain name and web hosting services together with AI-assisted website builders that can get your website ready in minutes. There are several other service providers with similar offerings, a simple search on Google will bring up tons of them. 

Before you sign up for a domain name and web hosting services, compare their packages with other providers, read reviews from customers to ascertain the quality of their service. Do they have good customer service? Are they available 24/7? Also can you easily move your domain name and web files to another service provider if you need to? You don’t want to get stuck with any provider.

Build a mobile responsive website

Ensure that your website is mobile responsive. Most people access the web from their mobile devices, therefore your site can easily adjust to different screen sizes without any form of distortion. Some website themes are automatically responsive while some require manual adjustments. If you have limited knowledge about websites, it’s better to choose themes with automatic mobile responsiveness.   

Pay attention to core web vitals

Core web vitals are a set of metrics that measure the loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability of a web page, based on real-world user experience. This can be tested in Google Search Console or Page Speed Insight. A website with poor core vitals and poor speed will lead to poor user experience, and this may increase bounced traffic and reduce ranking chances. 

Build a user friendly website

Your website should be intuitive, site visitors should not be confused as to how to navigate around your site. Your site should look good and attractive with readable fonts and nice graphics. The site should have great content that will benefit a site visitor, they should be able to easily find answers on your website to satisfy their intent so they can keep coming back.

Include clear calls to action

Your website should not just be a showcase or content platform, it should be designed and wired to generate leads, customers and sales. You can achieve this by including clear calls to action on what users should do with whatever information they are getting. Some sample calls to action phrases you can include on your pages are as follows:

• Get started now
• Sign up today
• Buy now
• Shop now
• Download now
• Claim your discount
• Act now
• Join us
• Try it for free
• Don’t miss out
• Start saving today
• Learn more
• Watch now
• Request a demo

The idea of placing a call to action is so that site visitors should not just come and leave your website without taking action. You can offer a free download, free trial or discount so you can get their email for further engagement. 

Every business regardless of size, needs a website, even if it’s just a single-page site. A good hosting service is important for reliability. Passing core web vitals, site responsiveness and a good design are all important for providing a great user experience. Your website should be intuitive, navigable, and easy to read, and lastly, put a call to action to generate leads, get customers or make direct sales.

4. Use SEO To Build a Solid Foundation for Organic Traffic

There are multiple ways to get traffic to your website but the one that guarantees long-term sustainability is search engine optimization. When platforms like ChatGPT and other search-based AI tools emerged and gained ground, some were of the opinion that SEO is dead. Nothing can be further from the truth. The reality is, SEO is never dead, it just got new enhancements. Therefore, you will be doing your business and brand a great disservice if you don’t incorporate SEO into your marketing strategy as a small business. Here are steps to follow for effective SEO implementation for your website. 

Submit your website to search engines

The first step in SEO is to manually submit your website to search engines for indexing. Although, search engine crawlers can still find and index your site on their own. However, that can take a longer time than when submitted directly. Consider submitting your site on Google Search Console, Bing, Yandex and maybe Baidu. To submit your website, you will need to generate an XML sitemap in the format https://example.com/sitemap.xml. If your website runs on WordPress, there are plugins like Yoast SEO and AIOSEO that can easily help with generating your sitemap. There are similar features or plugins on other platforms as well. 

Optimize your website for SEO

Optimizing your website for SEO is about making sure your web pages, content, images, videos, etc are all incorporating the right elements and structures that can make them to be easily crawled, indexed, and ranked by search engines. 

Here are the important SEO elements a page/content must have.

A target keyword

Usually a phrase representing the main idea of the page. This keyword is expected to be used in the page title, in the first paragraph of the content on the page, a few times in the content and at least once in the remaining htags. You can use similar phrases with the same meaning in some cases to avoid your page being penalized for keyword stuffing. 

SEO Title

Ideally between 50 and 60 characters. This is to ensure that your title is clear and completely shows up in search engine results pages (SERP). without being truncated. This makes the title visible to both search engine algorithms and users. With the help of SEO plugins or features, you can have a page title (H1 tag) that slightly differs from your SEO title. The SEO title is what shows up in search engines, while the page title can allow more characters to expand your title if you deem it fit. 

Header tags (Htags)

Header tags show the arrangements of thoughts, ideas, and features on your page. They define headings and subheadings on your webpage and structure your content for readability and SEO.

• H1 tag for the page title
• H2 tags for the main ideas 
• H3 tags for sub-topics
• H4, H5, and H6 tags for micro-topics

Use header tags based on the hierarchy of thoughts on a page. Start a main idea with H2, and break it down to whatever micro-level possible and then pick another H2 tag for the next idea. If there are no sub-topics or micro-topics, you can simply use H2 tags throughout the body. 

Image optimization (image alt tags)

Images are important elements on a page, and they also require optimization for search engines. For every image you add to a page, you should include an image alt text which tells the search engine what the image is about. It is also a good SEO practice to insert the focus keyword of the page in the alt text. 

Internal and external links

Links are the juice of web crawlers, they enable them to move faster around the web. Ensure each of your web pages has links to other relevant pages on your website using the appropriate anchor texts relevant to the destination page. In the same manner, it is also a healthy SEO practice to link to one or two external resources on each of your pages. 

Keywords planning

One of the ranking factors in search engines is the number of organic keywords your site is ranked for. There is an art and science as to how this is achieved and it starts with researching keywords that are relevant to your small business and incorporating them into your website. Keywords are generated by search engines aggregating search queries done by users on a monthly basis. These are known as organic keywords and they are estimated in volume.

Through keyword planning, you can predict the monthly organic traffic available and how much of that your business can get if your site ranks top in search engines.  Once you identify profitable keywords for your small business,  you can begin to develop content using each of keywords in a page. Tools for keyword planning include Google Keyword Planner, Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, Semrush, SurferSEO, and others.  

Implement local SEO

Implementing local SEO will help your business increase visibility in local search results as it focuses on optimizing your business’s online presence to attract customers in a specific area or city. Some local SEO measures include listing your business on Google Business Profile and optimizing it with relevant keywords. You can add specific city names to your webpages, and also list your website on local business directories online.

SEO is the most reliable means of securing long term website traffic. By submitting your website for indexing in search engines, optimizing your pages for web crawlers, using relevant organic keywords in your pages and content, and ensuring your site shows up in local searches, you are building a solid foundation of digital growth for your small business.  

5. Grow Your Small Business with Content Marketing 

Content marketing involves creating and sharing online materials such as blogs, videos and social media posts. The goal is not primarily for  promoting your business but to stimulate interest in your product or service. It’s your first step in drawing attention to your brand, and attracting your target audience to visit your website or social media pages where they can later get to discover your products and services. Here are some popular and effective content marketing ideas. 

Blogging

Blogging started with people journaling their activities and thoughts but it has since become a business technique for sharing interesting and educative content relating to a business’ target audience. An effective blogging technique begins with keyword research; understanding what your target audience are already searching for, and creating blog content based on those keywords.

Blogging can help you populate your website really quickly and get you ranked for organic keywords in search engines. Below is a list of things to do to get your blog up and running. 

1. Conduct keyword research
2. Check out what competitors are posting and the organic keywords they rank for
3. Create a content calendar 
4. Create, optimize, and publish each content
5. Monitor your results and reoptimize
6. Publish new content

Don’t forget to include links to your product pages and other pages and posts in each blog you publish. You can also link to any useful external resource that is not in direct competition with your business. One other thing is to include a call to action at the end of each blog. There should be something you want them to do after reading the blog. 

Guestposts and backlinks

Search engines ascribe authority to a website based on the number of other authority websites linking back to the site (or specific pages on the site) with a do-follow link. Having quality backlinks boosts domain authority and by extension, promotes ranking in search engines. 

One of the ways to acquire backlinks is through guest posting. Reach out to industry blogs for a guest posting opportunity. You will have to create a unique educational content and follow the style guide of the host blog. The host site should give you assurance of including one to two do-follow links in the blog and will not mark your content as guest posts on their site. 

Search engines are beginning to downplay links from guest posts because some websites now charge for guest posting. Hence the reason why you should want your post to appear as a native post in the host website. 

Other ways to build backlinks is by submitting linked content to online directories and also by asking customers to mention you on their sites with a link pointing to your site. 

Leverage user-generated content

User generated content like reviews, testimonials and social media posts can be used or converted into pieces of content that you can push out there to stimulate the interest of your target audience and establish credibility. You should also learn the art of thoughtfully managing customer reviews. A negative review can be turned into an opportunity to display integrity and good character whereas leaving it unattended can create doubts in the minds of potential customers. 

Recycle your old content

Sometimes, old is gold. Look into your content archives, recycle them and make them more relevant for current day reality and reshare across all your platforms. It’s possible that some of your past content have dropped in ranking in SERPs, check out the sites that outrank them and see what else you can add to get back up. 

Content marketing is one of the best techniques for attracting your prospects, and it is the first step towards potential leads capture and customer acquisition. Content marketing is also effective for lead nurturing at every stage of the customer journey. 

6. Level Up with Social Media Strategies

Social media is another place your business can show up actively to build brand awareness, engage with customers, expand your reach, and even make sales. You can connect with potential and existing customers, promote your products or services and foster brand loyalty. Your presence on social media can also boost your web traffic and has a magic way of also enhancing your SEO. Here are the things you can do to enhance your business presence on social media. 

Find out where your audience are and connect with them there

There are at least 15 – 20 well-known social media platforms out there where you can potentially place your business page but you will agree that it will require a lot of work to be actively present on all of them. Many small business owners are doing more than necessary in the name of being active on social media when they only need to identify the platforms that are most relevant to their audience. While you can open accounts on about 5 platforms, you only need to concentrate your efforts on one or two places where your audiences are mostly active. This helps you save energy, resources, and stay focused on providing quality content and engagement. 

Be consistent with your social media activities

Be consistent with posting writeups, images, quotes, short videos, and infographics regularly on your social media pages. Post something at least twice in a week. You can post as much as possible but don’t overdo it. 70% of your social media content should be to add value and build brand recognition.

Add memes, quotes or posts of your own that can easily go viral. 20% should be for sharing the ideas of other people. This includes other people’s blogs, YouTube Videos, Facebook posts, Retweets, and other content. The remaining 10% of your posts should be promotional including posts about new items, items or services on sale, discounts, coupon codes, etc. You can create a social media content calendar to stay focused and organized in your social media strategy. 

Repurpose content for social Media

One of the ways to keep content flowing on your social media pages is by repurposing your website content for social media. A singular blog post can generate multiple social media snippets, videos, images and infographics. Anytime you are planning a new blog post, think along the line of how you can also use it on social media. Most people just share their website posts on social media, hoping their followers would click the link and read. But not all people have the time for reading long posts. Therefore, you can serve it to them directly in a social media format and engage them further right there. 

Engage meaningfully with your audience

Engage with your audience by responding to comments, participate in discussions in the comment section and show appreciation when necessary. You can deliberately start contests or games with incentives to create excitement and buzz on your platforms. These are essential in building a loyal online community. 

Automate with social media management tools

Keeping up with posting on social media can be challenging especially when you have other areas of your business to attend to. But things get easier when you automate with social media tools like Hootsuite, Buffer or Later.

You can use any of these tools to plan, schedule and post your social media content simultaneously on different platforms. You can also use social media chatbots to start engagement conversations with your audience. The bots can send a welcome/acknowledgement  message or answer predefined questions before you then come in and continue the conversation. 

Social media holds a great potential for your small business growth if you know how to leverage it. You don’t have to do too much, just find where your audiences spend most of their time and connect with them there. Create a plan for your content and focus on brand and community building while you also promote your product or service on the side. Get more content by repurposing your website content for social media and automate things so you can save time for other aspects of business. 

7. Go Big on Video Marketing

Video marketing involves strategically creating and distributing videos to increase brand awareness, customer engagement, and ultimately generate sales. This can be a standalone strategy and can also be used in conjunction with other marketing efforts like social media, and blog creation.

Use videos to promote your brand/products/services

People love to see things in action. Use videos to highlight your process, products and service in action in a way that makes them more relatable and engaging. Apart from raising awareness and engagement, well-crafted videos can also stimulate viewers to take specific actions like making a purchase, downloading content, or signing up for a newsletter.

Create a viral reach for your brand

Video content can easily go viral because they are highly shareable. Consistently creating viral videos can help you reach a wider audience, and this boosts your brand visibility and interaction. 

Distribute videos on multiple platforms

Use videos in your website content, blog pages, on different social media platforms and most importantly on video-based platforms like YouTube. Use different types of video formats based on the platforms you are targeting. You can have explainer videos on YouTube and then create shorts of such videos and post them on platforms like Instagram, Facebook and YouTube while you link back to the main video on YouTube. You can also produce short clips that you can distribute across all social media platforms. When you are making your videos, ensure they fit the recommended sizes and formats for the target platforms. Some video tools can help you automatically convert your videos to different platform sizes.

Use AI-generated videos

With AI-generated videos, you can create personalized, engaging videos content quickly and at a lower cost. You can generate  a variety of meaningful videos quickly and on a limited budget. AI algorithms can enhance the personalization of video content by analyzing customer data and tailoring the content to individual preferences. This can lead to higher engagement and conversion rates.  

Optimize videos for SEO

For every video you post online, ensure you include the right keywords and titles to optimize them for search engines. This ensures your video has a chance of showing up in search results, and in recommended videos by platforms. Also, remember to include a link back to your website on your videos, description, or in the comment section. 

Video marketing is very effective in creating emotional connection with your brand and increasing engagements. You can have videos in different formats such as product demos, testimonials from customers, explainer videos and how-to guides, branded content, and general social media shorts.

8. Use Email Marketing to Engage, Nurture, and Increase Conversion

Email marketing is one of the oldest forms of online marketing, and it remains an effective means of reaching out to your audience and customers.  According to OptinMonster, there are 4.5 billion email users in the world. A significant 87% of marketing leaders view email as crucial for business success while 44% of professionals rate email as the most effective marketing channel ahead of social media and paid search.

Start building your own email list

An effective email outreach has to be a warm outreach. Therefore, it is not advisable to buy lists or use lists of people who have had no personal interaction with your brand. It’s better to build your own list from the ground up. Here are some ideas for building your list:

Email signup forms

Strategically place newsletter signup forms on different pages on your website. Put a CTA on blog articles, downloads, etc. to ask your site visitors to provide their emails and get regular updates and newsletter.

Targeted Popups

Create specific popups for lead squeeze when people are about to leave a webpage or leave your website. Provide a juicy value proposition that makes them drop their email address for further updates.

Webinars

You can create free live webinars to engage with your target audiences, build relationships and educate them about your brand, product or service.Ask interested participants to sign up to attend. You will get their email contacts and you can continue engaging them before and after a webinar. 

Lead Magnets

Offer free valuable offers and other incentives in exchange for the contact information (email address) of your prospect. This strategy is one of the most effective list building strategies that can generate leads for your business

Send personalized emails

Sending personalized emails means sending emails that are relevant to the recipients. Those emails should directly address their interests, needs, and desires. Personalized emails use data insights to deliver targeted messages to recipients by incorporating their names, past interactions, and preferences. This creates a memorable experience for the recipient and fosters stronger connections and increased engagement.

Personalizing emails can achieve great results for your brand and the lack of it can mean lower engagement. According to Campaign Monitor, personalized emails achieved an open rate of 29% and click-through rate of 41%. ActiveTrail reported that when an email lacks personalization, 52% of customers are willing to seek alternative shopping destinations. 

Use email automation

Automate your email marketing with software like Mailchimp or Brevo. Such tools can be useful in list building, email automation, and campaign management. You can automate welcome and onboarding emails, transactional emails, and create new email campaigns. You can also set up specific activities that trigger the sending of specialized emails at each stage of the buyer journey. Automation relieves you of stress and helps you focus on delivering great results for your business. With an email marketing tool like Brevo, you can automate and send up to 300 free personalized emails daily. 

Use email marketing to keep up the relationship with your leads and customers. You can offer incentives and other customer loyalty programs to keep them connected to your brand. Send them regular updates and keep monitoring how they are interacting with your emails so you can further segment your email list and personalize the conversations. 

9. Leverage Free PR Opportunities for Small Businesses

Take advantage of free online listings and directories for small businesses. Create a business on such platforms or submit your business for listing there. 

Google Business Profile

With GBP, your business can be found through Google Search and maps and you can build a robust profile with photos, offers, posts, and great customer reviews at no cost. Listing your business on Google Business Profile is like creating more real estate for your business profile and website in Google Search and Maps.

Facebook Business Pages

As part of your social media strategy, create a Facebook page for your business and you will have access to a wide range of business tools in the Meta Business Suite including ads and audience targeting tools. You can provide detailed description about your brand, products or services on your Facebook page and include links to your website. 

Bing Places for Business

Bing Places for business is Bing’s version of Google Business Profile. As we’ve previously advised you to submit your website on Bing, we are also recommending that you list your business on Bing Places for Business. According to G2, there are 1.6 billion Windows users in the world, and these come with installed Microsoft Edge default browsers. What this implies is that, one way or the other, Bing searches might be more popular than you think.

Yelp

Yelp is a local platform where consumers get to discover, connect and transact with local businesses of all sizes. Customers can request a quote, join a waitlist, book an appointment, make a reservation, or purchase an item. Customers also trust businesses with great customer reviews on Yelp so this is a great place to build your brand image. 

Other local business directories

Search for local business directories and local chamber of commerce listings and get your business listed there. Some of them offer free listings while some are subscription-based. You can get some SEO juice to your website by listing on as many of these sites as possible.  

Online networking communities

Look out for pockets of online networking communities in your industry or niche. These can be some Facebook or LinkedIn groups where you can be allowed to post about your business, contribute your ideas and be a part of the community.

Listing on multiple online business directories can give your business more exposure. It is a cheap way of getting your business discovered by people who are already searching for something similar to what you are offering. 

10. Explore Opportunities for Collaborations and Partnerships

Sometimes you may need to partner with other people or businesses to promote your business and there are different things you can explore in this regard. Some ideas are highlighted below. 

Explore local partnerships 

You can collaborate with a number of other local businesses having shared audience interests to co-host webinars or live events. Promote such events on social media and tag the other businesses as they also tag you. You can also cross-promote each other’s products and services on your platforms. 

Leverage influencer marketing

Use influencers to promote your products and services. Find influencers with a dedicated following and whose values align with your brand. As a business owner with a limited budget, start reaching out to micro-influencers like local bloggers and vloggers. Some of these influencers have structured services while some can negotiate with you based on what you can offer. 

Explore referral marketing

Referral marketing is a strategy that focuses on offering rewards or perks to your existing customers to recommend your products or services to others. It’s based on incentives, word-of-mouth and enhances customer loyalty. You can establish a referral program with specific incentives and guidelines. Tell customers about the program, through your website, email communication or via social media. You can choose to reward both your existing customer and new customer who signs up through a referral link. It’s important to track referrals and analyze the results to improve your strategy.

There are other forms of partnerships you can explore to promote your business, attract new customers and boost sales. You can try as many as you come across, just ensuring you are tracking the results and refining your strategy. 

11. Use Paid Marketing To Accelerate Results

At some point in your business, especially at the beginning, you may need to explore paid strategies. It may be for brand awareness, lead generation, promotion or other forms of demand generation. Therefore you need to understand how to run cost effective ads. 

Here are different types of ads you may want to explore:

• Paid Search (or Search Engine Marketing):- to make your ad show up in search engine results. E.g Google Ads and Bing Ads
• Display Ads:- to display your ad on third party platforms through Google Display Network and other platforms
• Social Media Ads:- to display your ad in feeds, reels, inboxes, DMs, InMessage, or on the content of social media users. Examples are Facebook Ads, YouTube Ads, Instagram Ads, Twitter Ads, LinkedIn Ads and more. 

Different factors can influence what type of ad you can run and which platform you should choose to run your ads. Let’s take a look at some of these factors. 

Ad placement

The first thing about which platform to place your ad is to be sure where your target audience are mostly active. Established companies often use a multiplatform, multichannel approach but a small business needs to focus on just one or two platforms at a time to get tangible results. 

Focus on targeted advertising

Audience targeting is one of the most crucial aspects of advertising. When you get your audience right, the job is almost half done. A great piece of ad copy and excellent landing pages will yield low results when the audience is a mismatch. Target specific audiences based on demographics, interests, behaviour and location. You can create custom audiences based on your current and past customers and also target lookalike audiences that match your best performing audiences. If you are just starting out, you may need to experiment and A/B test on different audience mixes and track the result to refine your strategy. 

Use remarketing and retargeting ads

People who have previously interacted with your website or business are a warm audience that you should be remarketing and retargeting. Remarketing involves re-engaging with these audiences through email marketing and channels you own while retargeting is about leveraging ad platforms to reach users who have previously interacted with your brand without taking action. 

Nurture existing relationships by communicating directly with your customers and put up ads reminding potential customers of your brand and encourage them to revisit your site and complete their transactions.

Take advantage of free ad credits

As a new advertiser, some platforms like Google and Bing offer free ad credits when you spend a certain threshold on their platform. Take advantage of those bonuses to experiment more with your ads without burning your cash. 

Running ads can be part of your winning strategy if you know how to do it well. While no business can survive running only on ads, it can give you an edge in reaching out to your audiences that matter most really quickly. 

12. Be Strategic On Performance Tracking and Results Analytics

Without adequate performance tracking and analytics, digital marketing efforts will be like trying to navigate and fix things in a completely dark room. You will surely get some things done, but when the lights are turned on, you will see that most things would be off the target. Performance tracking turns the light on user activities on your website and online platforms, and ensures every important interaction is recorded. Analytics reviews these records to uncover insights about user interactions which can be used to improve the marketing strategy. 

Planning and modelling data collection

Performance tracking starts with planning and modelling the collection of important data for your business. This data will be determined by your offerings, products or services, what data is important to capture in your customer journey, and how you will like to capture and store them. 

For example, if you sell luxury perfumes, you may want to know how many people visited your website, a product page, what items pages are mostly visited and how many sales you made. If you’re offering a service, you may want to know how many people visited your website and filled your quote form. Then when it comes to collection and storing of data, you are looking at using services like Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, or other platforms.

Events data collection

What specific events do you want to track? Page visits, items viewed, forms submissions, add to cart, checkout, purchase, signups? There are standard events and custom events. Most analytics platforms capture standard events but you can be more specific about the events that are of interest to you, and implement data collection for such events.

Data analytics

When you have implemented data collection successfully, the next thing is to begin to monitor and analyze your data. You will need to pay attention to the following

Traffic Volume

What is the amount of traffic you are getting and where is the traffic coming from in terms of channel, source and medium. This is where you pay attention to your organic traffic, paid traffic, and traffic from emails and specific campaigns. You will also need to take note of the pages or items that are getting the most traffic.

Traffic Relevance

When you check the demographics and behaviours of the people visiting your site, do they match the audience you want to target? What of the devices and tech they are using to connect to your site, do they reflect the kind of people  you want to target?

Traffic Engagement

Now when it comes to the specific actions you want users to take on your site, are those events being fired? Are users following specific paths on your website to the conversion page?

Traffic Sustainability

How many of your website visitors come back? You can check this over a period of time. Customer retention is key for sustaining your business. It takes lesser efforts and resources to remarket existing customers than to reach and convince new ones. 

Traffic Meaningfulness

At the end of the day, the purpose of your business is to generate revenue. Are those traffic resulting in lead capture or sales conversion? This is where metrics like return on investment (ROI), return on ads spend (ROAS), customer lifetime value (LTV), etc come into play.

Adjust your strategies

Your analysis will show you insights on opportunities for improvement and what you should be doing to rejig your strategy for optimal results. You should always have your eyes on the metrics to see how your strategy is playing out. Once you sense something is not working out as it should, you can tweak one or two things in your strategy and observe the changes.

Through performance tracking and analytics, you can be a silent observer of all the activities going on on your website and use the data to gain meaningful insights about your site visitors, and understand their preferences so you can provide personalized experiences and services to them. 

13. Final Thoughts on DIY Digital Marketing for Small Business Owners 

As a small business owner with a limited budget, there are many things you can do on your own to promote your business, and most of these have been discussed above. However, as closing thoughts, the following are additional things you should consider to be successful in your outreaches. 

Identify and master your main marketing arsenal

You don’t have to do everything highlighted above to be successful, you just need to try some out and figure out which ones are the most convenient in terms of skills and resources, and most especially which ones yield the best results. For some, it might be email marketing + Facebook ads or Google ads + SEO or referral marketing + event marketing. It might be a combination of entirely different things, just ensure you identify them and master them to produce maximum ROI.

Prioritize your activities

Have an action plan and focus on doing one thing well per time. Consider your resources and available time and plan out what you should be doing in a week, month or throughout the year. You can move from one strategy to the other in the order of their priorities while you keep monitoring your results. One good thing about being a small business owner is that you can make adjustments quickly for better outcomes. 

Set a budget

DIY marketing does not imply you won’t spend money at all, but you can keep costs down by doing things on your own. Set a budget for the things you will have to do so you don’t run out of funds. Keep track of your spending and measure ROI.

Engage and build relationships

Make it your goal to build a warm relationship with your audience and customers. Business is not just about transactions, numbers and metrics, it’s about building lasting relationships with people. Selling will not be a problem when good relationships have been established. Build relationships with customers through comments, email, direct messages and by providing value-added services. 

Upskill or get help

Digital marketing entails a lot and specific skills are required to get certain things done. Therefore, you will need to upskill regularly to be able to provide the needed marketing support for your business. Also, you can’t shy away from getting help if and when you discover you need one. You can get budget digital marketing packages for your small business from online marketing firms for small businesses. You can also ask for a one-off consultation to get clarity in an area or request for a special one-off service to solve a problem. 

If you require clarity in any area of marketing for your small business, you can contact us and we’ll be happy to provide a free first time consultation. You can also join our mailing list to be the first to know when we post an important update or content that you will always find helpful.