With holiday shoppers accounting for as much as 20% of a small business’s annual sales income, you need to get your business read for success by planning in advance.

Getting sales during the festive season from Digital Marketing is crucial for a small business however, do you truly understand what Digital Marketing is, and how you can utilise it?

With only 35% of businesses saying that they have integrated a Digital Marketing plan into their marketing mix, Iit is crucial for you to understand the importance of Digital Marketing.

Digital Marketing allows you to stay laser-focused on your target audience, share your brand’s story, give you the chance to compete with your competitors that have a bigger marketing spend than you do. Here are 5 key parts of your Digital Marketing Strategy.

Content Marketing

Content marketing through social media is vital to online success and I thought I would share some unique ways you can use content marketing to share your business with your target audience.

Successful content marketing can be achieved through;

• Incentives: Give your customers an incentive for purchasing by a certain time/date.
• Contests/Giveaways: Great for lead generation – offer something free in return for a name and email address.
• Email Marketing: Share your content with your email marketing audience.
• Infographics: Share data in an effective way that will connect with your audience.

Social Media

Did you know that 67% of your customers think you should be using Social Media as a customer service tool. With this in mind, Social Media will play a huge role in getting more sales during the festive season.

To make social media and content marketing a success for your business around the festive season, you need to humanise your brand, tap into emotions and use the above content marketing ideas to connect with your audience. Give your online community an insight into your brand, and the people behind it. Share images and video’s of the day-to-day workings of your business. This will only help your community understand your business better, and connect with it on a more deeper level.

Email Marketing

Email marketing has been extremely important to my overall marketing strategy, and I have personally reaped the benefits of great email marketing. According to Econsultancy, 78% of their study believe that all email communication will be personalised in the next 5 years.

Email should not be discounted. It is 40x more effective at acquiring a new customer than Facebook or Twitter. Looking at personalisation; emails are 26% more likely to be opened if they have a customised email subject line.

Here is how I use email marketing to get sales;

Step 1: Set up a landing page such as my Simple and Effective Social Media Guide

Step 2: As soon as someone signs up to my guide, they then go into a list inside of my email marketing provider where they receive a series of emails.

Step 3: The end goal of these emails, is to upsell a product/service of mine. I will always make sure to keep adding value to my leads by giving them access to free content such as my blogs, webinars or other downloads.

Search Engine Optimisation

I have seen a lot of small businesses look at SEO and go “I’ll just leave it” or “It’s ok, I don’t know what I’m doing but I’m sure it will work anyway”. Thinking like this will have a massive affect how successful you are online.

SEO will not make a business, but having a good, solid SEO strategy in place will definitely work with the other Digital Marketing components and give you a great overall chance of succeeding online. This SEO strategy should include the following;

• Target Market Research: Finding your niche market (you cannot market to every single online shopper)
• Mobile Friendliness: Make sure your website can do everything on mobile that it does on desktop.
• Keyword Marketing: Use Google’s Keyword Planner to find a variation of keywords to use in your meta data, and for on-page copy.
• Link Building: Helps you build trust online.

Pay Per Click

If you decide that you want to spend money on native advertising, you can do so through PPC which means you will pay for every designated click you receive to your website. This can be done by using Google Adwords, or through the paid advertisement options for search social network. Good Adverts will allow you to measure how effective your campaigns are, whilst also staying engaged with your audience. According to Moz, 80% of search results now contain AdWord ad placements.

Facebook believe in building momentum in the months leading up to the holiday shopping season and I have to agree. Raising awareness before you start marketing is a great way to get your business in front of your target customer. If it takes a potential customer on average 7 “touches” of your business before they buy, you need to use this first step to get as many “touches” as possible.

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