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    How to allocate your digital marketing budget

    While there is no universal strategy for small business budget allocation, successful e-commerce companies will invest in a mix of both paid and organic initiatives. With a wide abundance of marketing channels available in various sectors of online advertising, it’s important to know where your money can be wisely spent to yield a higher return on investment (ROI) and which activities will strategically reach your target audience. In this blog, we will walk you through some steps that you should take when appropriating your marketing budget and offer tips on how to better budget yourself in the future. 

    Making the most of your digital marketing budget

    Whether this is the first digital marketing budget you’ve ever built or you’re looking to give your process a little refresher.

    Here are some steps that can help you to determine where the money should go:

    • Use a budget tracker: All businesses need to track their expenses and analyze where cuts can be made to further the profit. Likewise, your first step to allocating a budget for digital marketing for a small business is to prepare data into a report that shows proposed spend, actual spend, and the results of your spend for future planning.
    • Review goals: Your organization’s top priorities and initiatives are things to consider when budgeting for the next quarter. However, when reviewing these goals, you also need to factor in new product launches, deals, promotions, and event signups.  
    • Select the right sales channels: What works for one business or industry may not work for another, which is why outreach, demographics, behaviours, and intent are elements to consider when choosing the right sales channels. This will not only help you to avoid wasting money but also build up your buyer persona. 
    • Paid search: Online ad campaigns like Google Ads may use up much of your budget because of the cost-per-click but if you secure the right visitors to your website, the investment is well worth it.  
    • Paid social: Popular choices include Facebook ads, Instagram ads, and LinkedIn ads, which show up for potential customers on their social feeds. Depending on the dollar amount you spend, your chances of acquiring new customers can become heightened. 
    • Content marketing: Content is king and since it can typically be put online for little to no charge, the only cost associated with the content is the time that it takes to write. If you can do that yourself, great! But if you’re one of the many who need to rely on freelance writers to produce awesome business content, be sure to budget what you can afford and post as much as you can. 

    If you allocate your budget based on data, you’re setting yourself up to be successful. Since Trek Marketing works with digital marketing for small business, we have all the services and expertise you need for allocating your budget. 

    What other strategies do you consider when depending on your business budget? Drop a comment below to share.

    Want to set digital marketing goals for your business?

    Do you need help setting actionable goals related to digital marketing for your small business? There’s a range of measures that can assist in the control of performance across all your digital efforts, growing your sales and engaging with your audience are essential elements of a dynamic online business, and they’re easier to implement when you know how to do so. 

    Grow your sales

    While revenue is an obvious goal among all e-commerce businesses, your online transactions must lead to profits. Fortunately, there are many ways that you can strategize digital marketing techniques to sell physical goods and services, increasing your online sales performance quicker. 

    Below are some ways that you can use digital marketing to grow your sales for your small business: 

    • Ensure that your content is written using SEO-friendly tactics and that it’s honest, straightforward, and approachable to build a foundation of trust with the consumer. 
    • Invest in click ads to assist with your click-through rates.
    • Create a sense of urgency such as a time-sensitive offer or access to a limited-edition product. Target consumers respond well to positive incentives, especially if they feel pressure to commit to purchasing. 
    • Appearance is important, which is why investing in high-quality product images over simple thumbnails helps people to envision their need for the product before buying. 

    Engage more with your audience

    Brick and mortar stores achieve face-to-face interactions with their clientele daily, whereas e-commerce businesses must utilize online communication channels to engage with their audience. If your digital marketing goal is to better engage with shoppers, you can build your brand and influence sales through an assortment of online channels like Facebook, Instagram, and e-newsletters. While conversions are always at the forefront, communication with no-strings attached is more inviting and likable for customers, giving them the freedom to ask questions and make comments with an expectation to buy. This creates a trusting relationship between business and buyer. 

    Below are some ways that you can engage more with your audience:

    • Respond to queries on social media services.
    • Respond to comments on social media services.
    • Accept blogging comments and ensure that you thank visitors for leaving their input.
    • Check direct messaging on social media for questions, feedback, or comments.
    • Scan through emails to see if any are customer-related.

    What other goals have you set for 2022? Drop them below to share with our readers.

    4 Digital Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

    Whether you’re a new entrepreneur or a seasoned e-commerce business owner, there’s no denying that digital marketing is an important investment for anyone who runs a small business. Since digital approaches to reaching target customers aren’t going anywhere, you should know a lot about the tools at your disposal to ensure that you’re working towards building a strong strategy. Below we will share some digital tips on improving your search engine optimization (SEO), building an audience on social media (SMM), and some best practices for utilizing email. 

    Don’t put all your efforts into one area

    While there are many ways a company can market their potential offline—promotion through relevant events and conferences, business cards and/or flyers, or wrap your car with your business information—digital marketing is a more powerful way to promote a small business. Efforts like SEO, SMM, and email marketing are digital channels that allow you to connect and interact with your target audience with sales and conversions in mind. Since all of these digital marketing strategies provide something different for your small business, be sure to spread the budget around and slowly build up each online strategy over time.

    Be smart with data

    There are many insights that can be found within your business metrics if you know where to look. With everything from Facebook reach to website bounce rates and everything in between. That said, the best way to move forward is to focus on a particular metric and see how it has changed over time, then you can add it to your list of upcoming marketing efforts to get you closer to your overall goals. For example, if you’re trying to grow your audience using existing email subscribers, you might want to track the number of clicks a paid ad earns to attract brand-new customers outside your current audience. If you have three new subscribers, your data should let you know with confidence where those emails came from. 

    Interact with your audience in a meaningful way

    You don’t need to only focus on social media when looking to connect with your target audience. Other elements like creating new content pages or sending out polls by email are also great ways to directly access your customer base and train them to rely on your platforms for meaningful, engaging messages. 

    Heavily invest in your SEO strategy

    Copywriting takes new heights when it’s sprinkled with snazzy, industry-relevant keywords that are highly sought after on search engines. While it’s important to retain information to ensure your copy speaks to customers in a language that they understand, possessing the right keywords will ensure your digital marketing efforts for your small business don’t go unnoticed, as search engines will point visitors towards your site. Aside from content curation, savvy SEO services should include time spent on securing backlinks, reorganizing page layouts, and ensuring best practices for headers, URLs, and meta tags to keep up your presence in ongoing searches.

    Keep Track Of Your Competitors

    Whether you own a large or small business, keeping track of your competitor’s marketing efforts should be automatic as it is one of the best ways to gauge how you are doing in the market. This is also your chance to find your edge amongst other small businesses in your niche, therefore getting more pieces of the pie or market share. This strategy will save you tons of marketing budget and time as you can see what’s working and what’s not. Trial and error are expected, especially in digital marketing, but finding ways to gather data without taking risks efficiently is a huge plus.

    Keep Trying New Things

    What’s cool about digital marketing is the avenue and broad stream of opportunities to gather your online presence. Sure, you have to be consistent in your marketing campaigns, but you shouldn’t be afraid to do things differently from time to time. When the market is bombarded with the same marketing strategies all day long, trying to get the same attention, adding a slightly different touch to your marketing efforts makes all the difference. If you’ve been doing well in SMM for a while, try spending some time on Email Marketing and try your luck. You might be surprised by how many opportunities you leave on the table. 

    Know Your Audience

    Before you make any digital marketing efforts, it is crucial to find out who you are trying to target. As you dabble around market segmentation, you’ll find it easier to know where they are and what type of marketing strategies should be best to get their attention. This increases the accuracy of your marketing efforts, saves you tons of budgets, and allows you to spend your focus where it’s needed. Small Businesses will benefit from this strategy as they tend to have a more focused niche than larger companies. Use this advantage to penetrate those untapped markets.

    Add Visuals to Your Content

    Most of you might agree that content remains the king when marketing. However, the types of content today are pretty different compared to previous years. You may notice that a lot of visual content is the ones that are taking giant leaps, whether in video format or simply adding related images in blogs. Statistics show that including visuals in your content increases more than 80% of the engagement and 20% or more clicks. Creating content with images makes it more shareable than just plain texts. Think of images as icing on top after writing a very insightful and exciting copy.

    Be Consistent With Your Brand

    Being consistent with your brand and what you’re brand is standing for is an excellent way to gain and keep loyal customers. Flexibility is essential in Digital Marketing, but your small business’s mission and vision should remain consistent as it grows with your followers. Always look at the bigger picture and create marketing efforts that you think will last the test of time and stay relevant for years to come.

    Good Customer Feedback for Social Proof

    Have you ever bought a product before without even thinking twice just because your friend bought the same thing? Most of you can probably relate to this. This is the power of feedback. Say you successfully led your potential buyers to your landing page. One of the first things they’ll look for is the reviews. Making efforts to get as many good quality reviews as possible is one of the best ways to grow your business.

    Do you have any questions about our digital marketing tips for your small business? Drop a comment below for a prompt response.