There are many hacks and other innovative techniques that can help you succeed online. While the fundamentals of digital marketing are the same, reaching the right audience has become more complicated and channels are expanding.

Marketing efforts are a priority for companies. It is important to prioritize your marketing efforts, especially if you have only one person working on it.

This article will discuss the five key things every SMB must do in its early years if it wants to continue growing in the future.

1. Set a budget and set goals

Although this tip may seem obvious to you, we are constantly amazed at the number of businesses that don’t have a marketing budget or clearly defined goals. According to Outbound Engine, 50% of medium and small-sized businesses didn’t have a marketing plan in place for 2019.

Budgeting The rule of thumb is that the marketing budget should not exceed 5% to 10% of targeted revenues. This includes the cost of human resources including the salaries and human costs incurred by the marketing team. Although this may seem like a high figure, it is five times more than what the marketing budget generates in return for investment.

You should consider your conversion rates to set your goals. How many contacts are necessary to sign up a customer? How many contacts are needed to sign five additional customers in a year?

2. Profit from your website and your contacts

Imagine that you spend time and money on LinkedIn to build subscribers. You also publish frequently. LinkedIn suddenly changes its algorithm. You have to pay to reach 10% of these subscribers because your organic publications are at the bottom of your audience’s feed.

Fiction? This is exactly how it works on any social network or search engine: You don’t make the rules.

Facebook pages reached more than 15% of their target audience via their organic publications in 2012. This figure was just 2% in 2016. In January 2019, the price of an advertisement per 1,000 impressions was lower than $3.60 in 2016, compared to $2.5 two years later.

A business must know two things from the beginning: its website with its domain and its contact base.

It’s an investment. Instead of renting on platforms that you don’t own, you are investing in things that you control.

3. Find out how people find you

First, how did they find your site? We rely heavily on Google Analytics to determine how many people visit our website, how long they stay, and which pages they view. But we are missing an important piece of information: Why did they come to your site?

The majority of site traffic to small businesses comes from keywords that are related to their brand or products. These people are familiar with your brand. This site serves as a showcase for them and is useful for people who are interested in learning more about brands they already know. However, the site doesn’t allow them to make an actual purchase.

This can be avoided by understanding how people arrive at our site and what they are searching for.

Before we can take action, it is important to measure. Google Search Console can be a useful tool to see the context of your traffic. This tool is not easy for non-SEO executives or marketers to access to obtain actionable information. You can also use Plezi One to store and interpret this data to identify opportunities more quickly.

4. Optimize existing pages 

How many times have you found yourself stuck at the bottom of a website page and not knowing where to go? How many times have sites only allowed you to send a request for information?

Combining these poor practices can guarantee that 98% of your visitors will leave you immediately.

This is the time to make good resolutions. Here’s how you can optimize your website.

Consider the top 10 pages that receive the most traffic to a website.

• What brought the visitor to this page?
• What are their next steps?

If it is a page about your product/service then the next step would be to request a quote, download a brochure, or file a case. You can also offer a checklist, white paper, or other format for downloading the blog post.

Talking about your product in blog posts or giving demos after reading a news article is too direct and can be dangerous. Always think about the simplest way to add value to your visitor.

• Example from the Happy Team website
  1. A marketing manager wrote an article on managing conflict at work
  2. Later, he detected traffic to this article via searches that were made using their Plezi One dashboard.
  3. The article was then saved as a PDF to be posted after the article.

Results: Happy Team received email addresses from people who are interested in their services, and 5% of readers downloaded the PDF.

5. Putting premium content online

A simple PDF, even with little content, can increase the number of contacts your site generates, as we have seen.

There are many options for premium content. These are just a few examples.

Your product pages or services pages should include:

• Presentation of SaaS Software = Download the price list, and details of the offers, or request a demo

• Submission of an offer by sector = Download a methodology devoted to that sector

• Presentation of a Service = Download of a Customer Case

• Presentation of customer support = Evaluation form of visitor’s maturity about your problem

On your blog posts:

• The blog post about Inbound Marketing = Guide: “How do you set up your inbound market strategy?”

• Article listing best practices = You can publish the best practices individually and refer to the pdf guide which gathers them all

• Article about how to create a budget. Download and customize a budget template.

• Dense article =Summary in PDF:

• Short article = Give a link to a denser content

• Tutorial article = A list that summarizes the steps to be followed

Digital marketing isn’t as complicated as it seems. It can be easy to generate business opportunities. It all comes down to building on the basics, identifying early successes, and focusing your efforts on what is working.