For small businesses, online marketing is a must. This means that most companies, including your competition, are likely to make efforts in an online marketing strategy, such as social media.
In fact, according to Keap’s 2024 State of Business Growth report, 54% of the participants in the study claim to use social media as their primary channel for generating leads.
But starting your online marketing efforts can seem overwhelming. After all, there are many components to an online marketing strategy—not to mention that platforms and tools are changing all the time.
How do you know which online marketing channels to use? More importantly, how do you know if your strategies are working?
This tutorial will guide you through the process of choosing your strategies, setting your first online marketing goals, and analyzing your results. Let’s get started.
What is online marketing?
Before picking the internet marketing strategies for your small business, let’s get familiar with the concept. Basically, online marketing just means using the web for your marketing methods, whether it’s for advertising, sales, or branding. For that reason, it’s sometimes called internet marketing.
For your small business, you could also use a variety of web-based methods like social media, websites, email, or an online store. Here are some benefits of marketing online:
- More cost-efficient. Online marketing offers many opportunities to reach an audience for little or no money. It scales easily, and you can access your target market through existing platforms. You’re also not limited by physical resources such as paper, since online marketing materials like videos or graphics can be seen by thousands of users with little or no change in cost.
- Measurable results. There are many tools you can use to find out which marketing channels bring in leads and sales. With offline marketing, on the other hand, it’s difficult to track success.
- Broad reach. An online marketing strategy allows you to break geographical barriers. You can target a global audience or at least a broader audience than you typically would with offline marketing.
- Targeted marketing and advertising. Online marketing for small businesses is a hack to reach a broader market. However, such market can be very specific too. Online ads can be targeted exclusively to certain demographics, unlike traditional ads which could reach audiences that aren’t your target market.
So online marketing can give you the above benefits. However, it also comes with disadvantages:
- It can be highly technical. Since the web is your medium, many of the tools and methods can be technical. Maybe you’re not very tech savvy or are unsure about where to start. You might need to learn how to do online marketing for your small business or hire experienced people.
- The rules change rapidly. The rules and trends that govern online marketing change rapidly. This is why when big platforms like Google or Facebook announce a change in their algorithm, marketers scramble to stay updated.
- Less personal contact. Making sales in-store means you can have one-on-one contact with your potential customers. This allows you to easily form closer relationships with them. For online marketing, emails, social media, and other forms of web-based communication are the norm.
Now that you’re familiar with both the advantages and disadvantages of online marketing, it’s time to start thinking about the strategies that can work for your business.
Online marketing strategies for your small business
Ready to start working on online marketing strategies for your small business? Here are five that may work for you:
1. Content marketing
As the name implies, content marketing is about using content such as videos, blog posts, images, and other materials to market your brand to an audience. Everything from the planning to the creation and distribution of this content is part of a content marketing strategy.
One example of content marketing is “The Output,” the official blog of Peloton, a fitness company that provides workout equipment, classes, and apps. The blog offers interesting articles about the importance of exercising, interesting fitness-related information, and how-to guides. These help people understand how to use Peloton’s products and why they would want to do it.
A content marketing strategy is mostly about creating content that gets the attention of your audience. So, it works best when it’s less about making the sale and more about branding and relationship building. When you’re doing content marketing, you can conduct an audit and set goals such as:
- Increasing the reach of your content. You can determine success by figuring out if your content is reaching more people. This means more people are learning about your brand. It can be measured by the number of new visitors to your website over time.
- Converting more viewers into leads. Use content to deepen your relationship with potential customers. You can convert viewers into leads by offering something in exchange for their email address, like a free eBook. Track the success of this strategy by measuring the number of email addresses collected.
- Relationship building. Engaging content can build relationships with customers and leads and remind them of your business, encouraging them to purchase from you when they need to. Track website visitor returns, return frequency, and return visitor purchases to measure this.
To learn more about content marketing strategies and how to implement them, take a look at the following guides:
2. Social media marketing
Social media marketing is used when you try to reach potential customers through social media sites like Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, etc. Typically, businesses have a profile on these sites and also buy ads on them to make sure their posts or profiles are seen by more people.
ID.EIGHT, a brand of ethically produced sneakers made from fruit waste, has around 50,000 followers on Instagram. Not only does it post creative photos and Reels of its products, but it also shows the process behind them, which gives the brand credibility.
Social media marketing is great for the following goals:
- Increasing the reach of your messaging. For most social media platforms, you can get numbers on user engagement: follows, comments, shares, likes, or bookmarks. This data tells you how many people your messages reach and, in some cases, what their demographics are.
- Relationship building. Social media marketing allows you to keep in touch with your existing and target customers. They see your posts on their timelines, mixed in with updates from their friends. Find out if social media is building relationships for you by measuring if the follower-to-lead/customer ratio increases over time.
If you want to get started marketing your business on social media, check out the following tutorials:
3. Email marketing
Email is another important channel for online marketing. In general, any email you send to an existing or potential customer can be considered email marketing. However, when marketers refer to email marketing, they usually mean creating a mailing list and sending marketing emails to that list.
The Female Startup Club, an online community for women entrepreneurs, has an email newsletter that sends industry updates, resources, job opportunities, and more. A strong email marketing campaign is just as varied, mixing promotional, entertainment, and educational content.
Here are the goals that email marketing can help you with:
- Relationship building. Email is useful for relationship building since it’s delivered to your audience personally. There are many different ways to measure these relationships, including how many of your subscribers open their emails. You can also measure how many of those who open the emails end up clicking the links in them, forwarding the email, or making a purchase.
- Converting leads into customers. Email marketing is a great way to collect leads (subscribers to your email updates). And it can show you how many of them end up as paying customers. You can measure this by seeing how many sales you get whenever you send out a promotional email.
To learn more about how to gather your own mailing list and send high-converting emails, check out the following tutorials:
4. Pay-per-click ads
Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) is an online advertising model that allows you to buy ads that you pay for every time a user clicks one of them. Most search engines have their own PPC ad network, such as Google Ads or Microsoft Advertising.
Below is an example of what a PPC ad might look like. If a user wanted to buy stamps online and used a search engine to look for where they might be able to buy them, the first results from Google are PPC ads.
Since PPC ads cost money, they’re best used when your goals are directly related to bringing in returns, such as:
- Increase in new sales or new customers. You can make your PPC ads lead directly to individual product pages or product category pages. Then, measure how many users who click on your ads end up making a purchase.
- Increase in leads. You can also use PPC ads to bring new leads into your sales funnel. An ad can bring them directly to a page with a lead capture form. You can then measure how many of the people who clicked on the ads ended up filling out and submitting the form.
5. Search engine optimization
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process where you optimize your site to make sure that it appears in search engine results when people search with a keyword relevant to your business.
Here’s how it works: Let’s say a user is in need of a specific product or service, such as landscaping. They might go on Google to search “landscaping,” add their location in the search terms, and a list of results will come out. SEO is basically a business’s efforts to ensure that they’ll come out as high up as possible on the search results.
In the example above, the results include links from Google Maps, Yelp, Facebook, and the websites of the businesses. Because it’s based on traffic from search engines, SEO works best for the following goals:
- Getting traffic into your funnel. Are you looking to fill your sales funnel with leads? SEO can drive potential customers to your business. Measure this by tracking the number of visitors you get from search engines, the keywords they use, and what they do on your site once they’re there.
- Increase in new sales or customers. You can do SEO on your product or service pages by focusing on keywords with high purchase intent. In the landscaping example, instead of doing SEO on generic keywords like “landscaper in [your location],” add buying intent to these keywords such as “hire a landscaper in [your location]”. Track sales that originate from search engine traffic to measure the effectiveness of your SEO efforts.
Learn how to optimize your website by blending SEO with UX design.
Measuring the success of your online marketing campaigns
One of the benefits of online marketing for small businesses is the ability to track the results of your campaigns. However, many emerging companies still struggle in this area. Avoid being one of them by following these rules:
- Track data that directly relates to your goals. How you measure ROI for each marketing strategy depends on your plan and goals. For example, if you’re measuring if your online marketing strategies are generating leads, focus on key indicators that show lead status and sources. In email marketing, this can be the number of subscribers. For social media marketing, maybe the number of followers on your Facebook account.
- Track the changes in your data over time. You can’t just look up the numbers you track whenever you feel like it. You need to do it periodically: every week, month, quarter, or year. Knowing today that you’ve got 100 email subscribers doesn’t tell you much. But if you know that in the past three months you only gained five new subscribers, then you may need to change your strategy.
- Not all data is useful. For every channel you choose, there will be dozens of metrics for you to track. Focus on the one to three metrics that matter and forget the rest for now. If you want to know if your SEO strategy is bringing new visitors to your website, look at the number of new unique visitors from search engines. There’s no need to obsess about how much time they’re staying on your website or which devices they use.
If you want to know more about how you can measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, the following guides can show you:
Go further with online marketing
Now that you’ve got an online marketing definition, you’re ready to start using it for your small business. Online marketing might seem overwhelming, especially if you’re new to it. But if you’re firm on your goals, measure your success, and take it one marketing channel at a time, you’ll soon find your business thriving online.
Keep exploring how to do online marketing for your small business:
- Try our vertical video guide. Vertical video is an essential component of contemporary content marketing strategies.
- Learn more about tools that can optimize your business’s SEO journey in our SEO Content Writing AI article.