With the onset of social media marketing and PPC campaigns with promised wider audiences and greater organic traffic, email marketing has begun to take a hit.
Forbes, in this article, makes an apt analogy: they compare email marketing to a goose that gives golden eggs. Like that one in the story, remember - the one that gave golden eggs every day? The moral is more or less the same: don’t kill the goose that gives golden eggs.
Social media marketing, likewise, has become a thing of the decade, and for good reason. With almost 3 billion people around the world using social media, there’s a large audience glued to their screens 24/7 - and the clever business only has to target the right people in the right way to make an impact.
When it comes to small businesses, choosing between email and social media marketing is out of the question. While it’s a good thing that you are investing in SEO services for small businesses, you can’t ignore email and social media marketing from SEO strategies.
Because when it comes to small businesses, you need to go all out in order to establish your place in a rapidly growing market. The SEO strategy for your small business, therefore, should include both: email and social media marketing.
Now, more than at any other time, it’s as if businesses have suddenly woken up to the importance of email marketing. With physical businesses shut and marketing strategists scrambling for ideas, many have turned to reviving email marketing. The truth is, though, that you aren’t the only one doing it. Almost all small businesses have resorted to this technique, and your email might just get lost among the barrage of emails the customer is getting.
On the other hand, had you been doing email marketing consistently - had you already been sending emails to your prospective customers, they would have been used to receiving emails from you. In other words, they would have been more receptive to actually opening and reading your emails.
However, this should not discourage you from sending out emails to your prospective customers during the pandemic. We call it crisis email marketing, and it ensures one thing above all: that your customers don’t forget you. When physical visibility becomes out of the question, you must resort to digital visibility. As a small business, you need to solidify your digital presence in order to make yourself stand out from the crowd.
As a small business, you are no doubt intent on both: exposure and expansion of your target audience, and monetary progress. According to the book Email Marketing: An Hour a Day, the most probable outcome of email marketing is that you can expect high readership - but not necessarily monetary gains or conversions. This is because there are 2 kinds of people reading your emails, them being:
The first kind of people are called “lurkers,” who bring no revenue to your company. Is this to say that you should exclude lurkers from your email marketing campaign entirely?
Not at all. There’s always a chance - however small - that one of them might finally make a conversion.
What you really need is a transformational email marketing strategy: one that is combined with other marketing techniques and tools. Combining email marketing with SEO strategies and social media marketing is one of the surest ways of ensuring that you’re getting everything right: organic traffic, engagement, conversions, and sales. It’s time, as Forbes puts it, to rethink your email marketing plan. Modern email marketing is a major part of small business SEO these days.
It goes without saying that email marketing is not dying anytime soon. It might not rope in immediate results, but email marketing is essential if you want to keep your loyal list of customers coming back to you. Customer retention, therefore, is something you can achieve through email marketing.
In addition to your conventional email marketing campaigns, you should be running an aggressive social media marketing campaign on the side. Creating pages on social media outlets is only the first step - there are more. The end goals are mostly:
Your social persona and engagement become a major part of your brand reputation. How you behave on social media, what you say, whether or not you respond to customer queries and concerns, whether or not you engage with your audiences - all of this affects your repute as a small business.
For small businesses, building a digital presence and an acceptable reputation is important in terms of attracting more people to your venture. It goes a long way in helping you grow your business, especially since it can convince your visitors to make conversions.
Your SEO strategy as a small business is doubtless, going to be multifold. Depending on whether or not you are also investing in link building and PPC campaigns, the amount of traffic you get on your website may vary. Incorporating social media marketing and email marketing into the equation, additionally, can rope in greater results.
We have mentioned somewhere above that small business need a transformational campaign in order to make their business run. This starts with performing an SEO audit to determine what areas you lack in - where you need improving. Once you have identified these departments, you’ll probably be hiring professional SEO services to help bring you to the top of Google ranks, and so on.
The transformational campaign should also go back to your mailing list and social media clout: you need to separate the lurkers from the genuine monetary investors. Don’t ignore the lurkers altogether - but do start working towards more personalized campaigns targeted at the right audience. Remember that it’s the repeat customers who not only bring sure revenue but can also help introduce your business to friends and family. Showing them that you care - via emails or social media engagement - is a plus that will go a long way in strengthening your SEO strategy.
Moreover, publishing authoritative content on social media, optimized with the right keywords at the right places, is also a major part of SEO strategies. For small businesses, in particular, content (both text and video) can accede to you the authoritative voice you need in order to establish yourself as an industry leader.
