Digital Marketing & Social Media
Digital marketing for your small business includes any form of promotion or advertising you do online. This can be in the form of a website, online listings or social media profiles. The Hunter Region Business Hub have a team of knowledgeable Digital Business Advisors that are constantly learning about new trends and have experience in running small businesses to offer that fresh pair of eyes to analyse your current marketing activities to make sure you are moving your business forward and not in an infinite cycle of funding someone else’s business without getting the benefits you deserve.
The concept of marketing is presenting your product or service as a need in front of your customer to create the desire for them to engage or buy. A marketing plan can help you stay focused on what you want to achieve within your business, identifying clear goals for your marketing activities will allow you to create content for your ideal customer and quantify results to evaluate the value of your efforts.
Target Market
As a small business owner have you taken the time to identify your ideal target market, your client avatar, your perfect customer? When you take the time to analyse your current customer base and give them a name you maybe talking to a range of different types of customers at different stages of the buying cycle.
When profiling customers you need to think about their demographics and psychographics, once you know who your talking to it’s easy to think of them as a real person and create content specifically for them. The way you brand your business is important, it is the science of influencing perception and positions your brand within the market based on your values, standards and quality.
The Advisors at the Hunter Region Business Hub have a background in marketing that makes defining your target market for your business easy and clear. If you don’t know who your “talking” to in your marketing you might be not getting the results your hoping for.
Copywriting
Content is what you say and copywriting is how you say it. Meaningful content is saying the right things to the right people. There are a magnitude of tools and channels to publish your content including social media, websites, email marketing, blogging etc.
Making sure you curate your message to customers at every stage of the buying cycle is important to make the commitment to purchasing your product or service easy and positive to turn that client into an advocate for your business who then becomes a walking talking billboard for your business.
The Hunter Region Business Hub have expert staff who understand the concepts of copywriting and can assist you with theming your businesses offerings to make sure you are communicating all facets of your business to increase your brand value to your customer.
Google My Business (GMB)
Google My Business is the starting point of digital marketing. It is the first step you need to get right and everything else will follow. Google as we know is a search engine. Its goal in life is to serve customers, it does this by retrieving relevant search results that satisfies the customers needs. Need a light fixed, search “Electrician Near Me”, leaky tap, “Plumber Newcastle”.
We used to look up the yellow pages, but this is outdated, you can see this by the reduction in size over the years as the popularity of the internet has risen. Google will return search results with ads at the top (they are a business after all), Google My Business listings that are relevant to the search second and then organic search results below (Search Engine Optimised websites).
If you aren’t seeing a rise in your Google My Business statistics, you may not have enough information on your listing or using the right terminology to filter the traffic to your listing.
The Hunter Region Business Hub’s Digital Business Advisors can help optimise your listing and translating your goods and services online so customers can find you easily. This is the single most powerful free listing you will ever manage, make sure you are updating it regularly and encouraging your customers to review your listing.
Facebook is a very powerful social media platform for small business. If you are not sure if Facebook is right for your business, you need to think of your ideal customer or audience you want to talk to when producing marketing material and whether they use the platform… this will answer the question.
Facebook’s advantages include business pages, groups, recommendations and events. There are multiple ways to market your business on Facebook including publishing posts on your own business page, in local community groups and creating events. Your customers can also be advocates for your business including writing reviews and recommending your business through their own profile and groups.
Think of Facebook as the family barbeque where you not only get to see your friends and family but you can ask for opinions and recommendations for anything from buying a fridge, holiday destination or the best local tradie.
The Hunter Region Business Hub have Digital Business Advisors with extensive experience not only in creating social media content but also reviewing profiles and activities to get the most out of this complex platform.
Instagram is a very visual social media platform, it is a huge encyclopedia of images and videos indexed with hashtags and locations.
Traditionally the demographic of Instagram is a younger audience and with the integration of shopping and product tagging, its like a shopping mall where viewers can checkout and buy items within the photo online. Small businesses need to understand how to find and engage with their ideal client through the platform. Posts, stories, reels and videos need to be visually appealing and informative as well as indexed with hashtags for discovery and always encourage viewers to take action by learning more or engaging with your business.
Posting to Instagram can be simplified with a social media cheat code where you identify the different types of products or service you offer within your business and communicating this to your customer.
The Hunter Region Business Hub have tools and templates to get you started and advisors who can assist you 1:1 to start or improve your Instagram account to increase customer loyalty.
YouTube
YouTube is the fastest growing social media channel with more than 80% of the population relying on it as a tool for everyday life. YouTube is a video based channel that holds that is both educational and entertaining the catalogue of content is immense.
YouTube is today’s television, no longer do you have to wait for your favourite show you can just search it on demand. YouTube is also a great way to engage with your audience, increase your visibility on Google as titles and descriptions are indexed as well as build your profile with videos that you can plug into your website to save storage and fasten your website load speed.
The Hunter Region Business Hub have Digital Business Advisors that are youtube publishers and can provide insight into producing your own video content including tools, applications and keywording content to get noticed.
LinkedIn is the professionals social network.
It is a great way to connect with past colleagues and interact like-minded individuals in industry groups and events. LinkedIn is the perfect platform to gain industry authority and communicate services that satisfy the business to business market. LinkedIn is similar to Facebook with personal and business profiles, it promotes through hashtags and mention tagging.
The Hunter Region Business Hub have expert advisors that you can connect with as well as engage to optimise your profile and step you through the platform to understand how to use it to make it part of your small businesses marketing strategy.
Pinterest is a collection based research platform where users can organise and pin images and posts to themed boards and follow different accounts. Users plan life’s milestones, diy projects, recipes, styles, anything of interest… pin their interests… Pinterest – makes sense.
Pinterest is more beneficial to certain business types including products, destinations and styling. Pinterest is a tool that can create website traffic for your website especially for e-commerce businesses which can turn your local market to a global offering.
The Hunter Region Business Hub have Digital Business Advisors that can help you identify the if Pinterest is an ideal platform for your business and how to use the platform to channel customers direct to your website.
Digital Advertising
Pay Per Click, directory listings, Ad words, the list goes on and on. How much are you paying as a small business per year on advertising and what is your return on each investment?
If you don’t know and keep renewing just for the sake of not saying no or afraid of loosing market share you need to knuckle down and analyse the stats. The Hunter Region Business Hub’s Digital Advisors have worked with small businesses analysing their digital marketing spend to save small businesses thousands of dollars on wasted marketing dollars and funnel your budget to achieve business goals.
With a little bit of guidance and know how you will be able to know what the best fit is for your marketing dollars for your small business.
Digital Solutions™ VIP Support
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