3 Small Business Marketing Ideas That Boost Organic Ranking and Help Create Loyal Customers
As 2023 ends, naturally, you’re already projecting your business’s end-of-year numbers and forecasting what Q1 will bring. With inflation remaining a top-of-mind issue among consumers, it’s important to secure the biggest slice of market share possible for the sake of hitting your 2024 revenue goals.
So, what does that mean for your small business marketing strategy?
First, it means learning from past mistakes. Whatever your small business marketing ideas were in 2023 must be examined to determine how effective they were. It’s not enough to know that a specific part of the marketing strategy didn’t work; you should also know why it fell short.
Second, small business owners should take the new year as an opportunity to implement fresh ideas. Or, better yet, you can use 2024 as a reason to make some resolutions as they pertain to your marketing efforts. Consider these top tactics when developing your digital marketing plan.
Resolve to Optimize Your Website
The face of your business isn’t your brick-and-mortar storefront; it’s your website. In fact, most consumers are introduced to brands online rather than in person. If you’re the type to analyze your website data, you likely keep an eye on metrics like new users, session time, and bounce rate.
One big problem that many small businesses have is that users visit their website, but they don’t necessarily stay for a long time. When users jump in and out of a website, it’s usually an indicator that something is wrong with the website itself. Of course, what turns a user off to a website can be anything from how it’s designed, how quickly it loads, or how it looks on a mobile device.
Whatever the case may be, your small business marketing plans won’t amount to much if you don’t have a decent website to serve as the face of your organization. Don’t take our word for it. The following statistics offer some compelling evidence about the important role websites play in terms of customer engagement and retention.
- It takes approximately 0.05 seconds for a user to determine whether they like your website.
- There’s a 57% chance that a user won’t recommend your business if your website is poorly designed.
- 38% of users will bounce out of a website if the layout or content don’t appeal to them.
- 88% of users won’t return to a website if they had a bad experience with it.
- 47% of users feel the maximum allowable load time for a website is two seconds.
- 75% of users feel that a company’s credibility is directly tied to their website design.
- Website design influences 94% of first impressions.
- Websites that load too slowly cost retail businesses $2.6 billion in annual sales.
Because your website is the primary tool used to generate traffic and boost brand awareness, it’s critical to optimize it as much as possible. Some basic checklist items to consider include:
- Applying user experience (UX) best practices to facilitate the customer journey and keep them engaged.
- Frequently posting relevant and useful content.
- Improving your website’s architecture so that search engines have an easier time indexing it.
- Confirming your website follows web accessibility compliance regulations. Being out of compliance may result in costly fines or legal issues.
- Optimizing to improve your page-load speed time to two seconds or less.
- Ensuring that your website is mobile friendly for Apple and Android devices.
- Using relevant titles and alt tags to appeal to search engines.
- Securing your website.
When you resolve to optimize your website, it will improve your profile among search engines and give users a positive first impression of your business, encouraging further engagement.
Resolve to Commit to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
A significant portion of any small business marketing strategy is bridging the divide between brands and their customers. For example, a person searching “men’s running shoes in Kansas City” expects relevant search results to their query. If you are an athletic apparel store operating in the KC area, naturally, you would want your business to appear alongside Foot Locker and Dick’s Sporting Goods in the search engine results page (SERP).
So, how do you get your website to appear for relevant search queries without spending an arm and a leg on paid search ads?
Focus on your organic presence. If there’s one small business marketing idea that’s worth the long-term investment, it’s SEO. When companies finally achieve high organic ranking with the search engines, it means they’ve effectively demonstrated to Google and Bing that they are a reputable business that publishes high-quality content that’s valuable to users.
Of course, improving a site’s SEO is easier said than done. It typically takes around six months of publishing relevant, authoritative, and keyword-rich content before the needle starts to move. Additionally, business owners must follow SEO best practices to ensure their content is deemed more valuable and trustworthy to search engines than their competitors.
Those who keep an eye on SEO best practices and digital marketing for small businesses already know that things are always in flux. Today’s SEO best practices aren’t what they were six months ago, and the ones from six months ago aren’t what they were last year.
Business owners who are finally ready to commit to SEO should:
- Perform keyword research and develop a strategy around the most relevant keywords and search queries that relate to your business.
- Develop a content calendar that supports the keyword strategy.
- Regularly publish content that demonstrates experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
- Write title metadata, description metadata, and keyword metadata following the most current best practices.
- Always include alt text to describe videos and images.
- Publish content so good that other people link to it.
Resolve to Make Data-Driven Decisions
One big mistake some organizations make is failing to use the resources that they have at their disposal. Specifically, they ignore their data. The beauty of data is that – when properly leveraged – you can use it to identify areas of opportunity, solve business problems, and turn casual website visitors into loyal customers. Data removes the guesswork from important business decisions. When you have reliable, actionable data at your disposal, you’re better equipped to make projections and sound business decisions.
Those who are ready to resolve to prioritize data in their small business marketing strategy should:
- Have a platform that enables them to collect and analyze data.
- Decide which data points are most meaningful to the business. These are known as key performance indicators (KPIs).
- Have human resources in place that know how to organize data, perform data analysis, and extract meaningful insights. This can be in the form of a digital marketing agency you partner with, like iFocus Marketing in Kansas City.
- Use data to draw statistically driven conclusions, create projections, and make decisions about the business.
By leveraging data in your small business marketing, you can better understand your audience, drive conversions, boost sales, and accurately forecast your revenue stream. Data isn’t a magic crystal ball capable of predicting the future, but it’s the next best thing if you know how to use it.
Partner With a Team That Can Turn Your Small Business Marketing Ideas into Reality
The final two months of the year are pivotal in terms of digital marketing for small businesses. If you follow the data like we do, then you already know that November and December sales can make or break a company’s end-of-year revenue goals. Additionally, it’s important for small and medium businesses to fine-tune their strategy for the new year so they can hit the ground running in Q1.
If you’re finally ready to see some of your best ideas get put into practice, iFocus Marketing has a deep background in business marketing in Kansas City and with both local and nationwide clients. As an award-winning, full-service digital marketing agency, we can optimize your website to deliver a captivating user experience, boost your organic ranking, and leverage data to help you achieve your business goals.
The best way to get started is to request a discovery call. During this free consultation with our business development experts, we’ll show you how iFocus will address your most pressing business concerns using proven digital marketing solutions.
Ready to see how we’ll elevate your business to the next level? Get in touch with us today to kick off the conversation.
Brandon Tietz is a senior digital copywriter at iFocus Marketing with close to a decade of marketing experience. He has written for clients in retail, real estate, automotive, education, manufacturing, healthcare, consumer goods, and several other spaces. In addition to copywriting, he has authored books, published short stories, written for several online and print publications, and was named “Best Local Writer” by The Pitch for his debut novel. He’s currently living the dream in the ‘burbs with his wonderful wife and their two dogs, Dr. Croutons and Professor Pickles.
