3 Ways To Advertise A Small Business in the Digital World

If you’re looking for ways on how to advertise a small business like yours, then you’re in luck. 

we’re going to share with you some tips on how to advertise a small business in the digital world.

3 Ways To Advertise A Small Business in the digital world.

You probably won’t be surprised by any of these: 

1. Search Engine 
2. Social Media
3. Direct Marketing 

Should small businesses pay for ads or focus on organic growth?

That’s a great question. You need to do both, and you’re already doing at least one. 

Even if you’re not running paid ads, you’re advertising your business in some way.

You need a combination of organic (unpaid) and paid advertising to help your business grow best.

Stick around for our example of how to take up a ton of real estate on a Google search result (so only your business is seen on screen).

There are three main ways to advertise a small business online, so let’s discuss each one of them.

1. Search Engines

You may be surprised (or not if you hang out with us often) that Google is not the only search engine.

Yes, that’s right.

And if you’re thinking, “Hey that’s obvious, we know about Jeeves and Bing and DuckDuckGo.”

But that’s not what we’re referring to.

Yes, those are all search engines, but so are YouTube and Pinterest.

And actually, a lot of the top ranking social media platforms are working to increase their searchability.

So, pretty much all advertising will have some search component fairly soon. 

Now if you’ve been on any search network, you’ve probably noticed that when you search something, you see a combination of results.

Some say “ad”, “promoted”, or some variation of that. And the rest will be organic (unpaid) results.

Search engines drive valuable traffic. Why? Search intent.

Search intent is a term used to describe why someone searched for what they did.

Marketers also refer to this as “audience intent” and “user intent” interchangeably.

This refers to customers seeking out your product, experience, or solution. 

You can play around with search intent in your advertising by changing the keywords or phrases you use.

When you run paid ads on Google, you have to search like your customer, not like your business.

Your customer doesn’t always know what they’re looking for.

So, you have to think about search terms from an outsider’s perspective (as well as an insider’s perspective, because you want those folks too). 

What should you focus on first? Organic or paid?

The days of doing one or the other are long gone.

When you advertise a small business, you have to tackle both organic and paid simultaneously because each helps the other.

In fact, your work off of Google can help you improve your performance in search.

Plus, you’ll be able to take up more space on a Google result if you have paid and organic results showing.

2. Social Media

We’re not going to get into network specifics in this post…

…but instead, we’re going to cover some basics that apply to social media marketing for small business in general. 

What is social media advertising? 

Social media advertising is just what it sounds like: advertising your business on social media.

What advertising strategies should you use on social media? 

You’ll use a combination of strategies (much like we did in search) to reach new, existing, and potential audiences.

And similar to search, you have organic and paid options. 

Organic social media advertising looks like this: 

• Posts about your product
• Tagging your product in images/video
• Sharing links to your store
• Answering customer comments and replying to DM’s
• Content creation and consistent publishing

Paid social media advertising looks like this: 

• Paid ads (promote your page, your product, your video, your website, etc.) 
• Single images, carousel (up to 10) images/videos, videos

3. Direct Marketing 

Direct marketing is exactly what it sounds like; marketing directly to the consumer.

Here’s a definition we liked: 

“Direct marketing consists of any marketing that relies on direct communication or distribution to individual consumers, rather than through a third party such as mass media.”

Direct marketing includes: 

• Email
• Text message/phone call
• Mail
• Social media

Of those listed above, we recommend email and social media as first options, with text message and mail coming in 3rd and 4th, respectively.

Text messaging and mail are more expensive forms of direct marketing, but they can be effective if you have a larger marketing budget. 

Our personal small business advertising hierarchy is this:

1. Work to establish a good search engine presence.

• Improve on-site SEO and create an action plan for putting out more SEO-friendly content
• Improve off-site SEO (like on social networks, other websites, and other search engines like YouTube)
• Run paid search and video ads
• Drive traffic to your website and email list

2. Establish a social media presence on your top 2 or 3 networks.

• Post consistently
• Post quality content – use lots of videos
• Run page like campaigns
• Run shopping ads
• Drive traffic to your website and email list

3. Implement direct marketing (email list) strategy

• Send emails regularly (but not too often)
• Balance explicit selling, entertainment, news, and connection in the content
• Use automated sequences (like welcome emails and abandoned cart reminders) to get or keep customers engaged and increase conversions
• Drive traffic to your website

Ultimately, you want your customers off of every other platform and spending time on your website.

Once you get their attention and earn that click, you have to make sure your website and checkout process aren’t driving customers away.

Good small business owners (successful ones anyway) know when to outsource and when to take on roles for themselves. 

We recommend you hire a marketer (in-house or freelance) or use a digital marketing agency like Digilab Marketing Agency.

We will help you create quality content and properly set up, monitor, and optimize your ads.

Contact us to talk to our Business Development team to learn more. 

We hope this helped you understand small business advertising and gave you some ideas and direction.