10 Creative Digital Marketing Ideas for Small Business

It seems that the representatives of a small business can hardly be impressed with new marketing ideas. Small business owners have already experimented with different marketing ideas. As a result, they have sifted the ideas through and chosen the best ones to implement in their business. 

However, digital marketing ideas are a whole new ball game. These ideas sprout like mushrooms. 

But it is quite difficult to choose the most promising and actionable ones. 

In this post, you will get familiar with 10 digital marketing ideas that are worth your attention.

Let’s start. 

1. Produce Content That Ranks High and Converts Potential Leads

Respona blog drives about 7.3K monthly organic visits that help boost toolkit visibility and attract new potential customers.

The secret behind such a success is the way Respona’s content marketing team covers topics that people are searching for in Google. Since, content creators understand the issues a target audience has, they try to help solve them with the tools Respona suggests. 

Consequently, content marketing strategy aims to help potential customers solve their issues by suggesting the best tools through content. 

You can do this for your business as well. 

How? 

You must understand your target audience and know what people are searching for in Google. On the one hand, you can guess but this tactic is not a hundred percent resultative. 

On the other hand, you can delegate this task to Keyword Generator tool from Ahrefs (as an example.) 

How does it work?

Put a niche-related keyword to the tool and explore the keyword ideas suggested. Let’s say, your small business operates in the field of eCommerce and your online store sells music equipment. The queries you might want to explore would be “guitar”, “bass guitar”, etc. And click on the “Phrase match” report:

The results are impressive. But it doesn’t mean that you will have to review each of them. Keep in mind that the higher the search volume a keyword has, the more organic traffic you will get. Hence, filter down the results and choose those keyword ideas that are good for your content marketing strategy.

The next step is sorting each topic per its “business value” – how it would be appropriate to pitch your product via content. 

2. Get Your Product Listed on ‘Best X n Y’ Lists

One more awesome digital marketing idea for your small business is getting included in “lists” articles. 

What does it mean?

Let’s say your small business is located in Melbourne. You own a music store. If you go to Google and type a query “best music store in Melbourne”, you will see the articles that list all the music stores in this area.

Your goal is to make sure your online music store is added to these lists as well. Otherwise, you miss the opportunity to get traffic to your website, boost brand awareness, and attract potential customers. 

Explore the results for your small business on Google and reach out to see if your business can be featured there. 

3. Build Brand Awareness by Participating on Podcasts

If you analyze modern-day ways to build brand awareness, you will see that podcasts are quite popular today. Especially, during a COVID-19 pandemic when people have to spend their time at home being locked down. 

There are dozens of different niche-related podcasts that are looking for guests. You should be one of these guests as well. 

How to find podcasts where it would be nice to get interviewed?

Go to Google and type the following command “best {your industry} podcasts“:

Another trick on how to find niche-related podcasts is by exploring where a certain influencer or expert has been as a guest. Type on Google a query “{name of the influencer} + podcasts”:

When you have a list of podcasts, you should find the contact email of the hosts and reach out to them. Introduce yourself and the topic you would like to cover. 

If you happened to host your own podcast, you might need to find podcast hosting sites where you could store and manage your podcast audio files. 

4. Explore Unlinked Brand Mentions and Turn Them Into Backlinks

Obviously, you have stumbled upon the brand mentions of your company or service that don’t include a link back to your website. 

You should turn the tables on this situation and make these unlinked mentions into backlinks. 

Why is it so important?

Because backlinks correlate with organic traffic your website gets. And you need to increase the number of backlinks to power up a website backlink profile. 

The question is how to find brand unlinked mentions?

To speed up the process of searching you can use Content Explorer tool from Ahrefs. Type the name of your product of the brand, filter down the results with the “One page per domain.” Plus, don’t forget to highlight your unlinked domain:

By having a list of the pages that don’t link back to your domain, you will be able to reach out to the website owners and ask to add a link to the source. 

5. Content Repurposing 

First of all, let’s admit that the process of creating written posts is way time-consuming. You must brainstorm a topic to cover. Make sure it meets the business value of your product or service. You must write a post and promote it. 

Tons of work. 

And it would be quite counter-productive to leave this blog post topic without any further manipulations with it. 

How to expand the topic? 

You can repurpose it into other types of content. And one of the most common ways of content repurposing is video. You can do this with the help of video editing services.

For instance, you can find a series of posts on link-building from Moz.

To give this topic a second breath, the team of Moz repurposed it into a video on YouTube:

Other than that, you can transform written blog posts into infographics, flowcharts, and other forms of visual content. It requires using additional tools as well. Let’s say you wrote a blog post that covers the question “how good is remarketing for search?” and you can turn it into the flowchart with the help of a free flowchart maker tool:

6. Don’t Shy Away From Comparing Your Brand With the Competitors 

This digital marketing small business idea might confuse you at first. Yes, it seems ridiculous to compare your service or product with the main competitors. Especially, when you write this comparison analysis on your website or blog. 

However, if you want to follow each stage of the marketing funnel properly, you should remember one nuance about a “consideration” stage of the funnel. Your potential customers review the alternatives to choose from at this stage. 

Thus, you should show them why your service or product stands out by comparing it to the competitors in the market. 

Keep in mind that this comparison analysis should be fair and objective. 

7. Work on Capturing Featured Snippets

For your information, featured snippets are pieces of text that you can see at the top of Google’s first page. The goal of these pieces of information is to provide people with relevant content from top-ranking pages per search queries. 

For example, you are interested in getting a quick explanation of the term “collaborative learning“:

Google suggests a snippet taken from the most relevant blog post on the web. 

Why should you optimize your content for featured snippets?

Featured snippets catch more eye-balls and it leads to more organic traffic going to your site. 

What do you need about featured snippets?

Featured snippets are divided into five forms:

• Paragraph 
• Numbered list
• Bullet list
• Table
• Video (YouTube)

To rank for featured snippets, you will have to leverage content that you already have and rank for it. Plus, when you create a new piece of content, you should remember about a chance of getting it featured as a snippet. For this, you should optimize your content for the keywords that follow search intent. 

8. Get More Views on Quora by Using Smart Targeting 

Everyone has ever visited Quora trying to find answers to the questions that even Google can’t help with. Quora is a Q&A website where people discuss different topics asking the questions and getting the answers. 

How can you use this online platform for your small business?

By answering the questions of people who are related to your business. It will help you raise brand awareness and generate traffic to your website. 

The best thing about Quora that you can place links that other websites forbid you to do. Especially, if your business is related to gambling. But in the case of Quora, you are free to link back to various gambling websites:

As you can see, the author of this post placed a link to Solitaire without any limitation. 

Despite this, it is not as easy peasy as it might seem. 

So, how to get most of Quora for your small business website?

Research the questions that are worth your attention

Due to the fact that Quora is a user-generated online platform, there are thousands of people who answer questions. While you must find only those questions that will help you drive more traffic to your website. 

Apparently, you won’t be able to find the “traffic-targeted” questions manually. You will need the help of some SEO tools. For example, Site Explorer tool can provide you with all necessary information in a few clicks.

Just enter Quora’s website domain and review the “Top pages” report. Add to the “Include” box a business-related query and review the questions that drive more traffic:

What’s more important, if you set up an Ads account, select a “Questions Targeting” option and do the same – put a relevant query and Quora will show you the number of views per each question weekly. 

Make sure you answer questions properly

When you answer the questions, you should write a brief copy of the blog post. The more your answer comprehensive, the more chances to get upvotes and shares. 

You must capture the attention of people who are reading your answer. Include different facts, examples and try to tie the information to your product or service. Plus, don’t forget to add a call-to-action. 

Follow these tips and you will see that this digital marketing idea will help your small business website level up the number of traffic. 

9. Publish Content on Medium

Right before you start creating content, you should recollect one rule “Cover topics with business and search traffic potentials!”, and never step away from it. 

However, you realize that there are great topics that have a low level of search potential. In other words, these topics don’t bring any traffic to your website. It leads to a so-called “flatline of nope” when traffic fades away.

On one hand, you understand that these topics make no sense for your website and it would be far better to remove the content. On the other hand, you realize that these topics are quite useful and niche-related. 

What to do then?

Go to Medium. 

Medium is the place where people publish awesome content. The best part of this web-resource is its recommendation engine. This engine takes into account user’s reading habits and suggests blog posts accordingly.

Thanks to Medium’s algorithm, your topics with no search potential can be found by readers easily. And it will drive traffic to your website. 

This digital marketing idea is working and you can start to implement it right off the bat. 

10. Don’t Forget to Translate Your Website Into Other Languages 

English language became an international language historically. You make a business prioritizing English language. But have you ever thought about how many people could find out more about your product if it was represented in other languages?

By following this simple logic, you should translate your website into more languages. 

For example, a well-known SEO expert Neil Patel has translated his website into four other languages apart from English – German, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. 

To do this massive work with the translation you will need extra help. You can hire a freelancer who would be a professional translator. Or you can ask your target audience for help. In this case, you can offer a reward for the work being done. It could be free access to your service or product. 

When the entire content on your website will be translated, you can do the same with video material on your YouTube channel. 

Conclusion

Small business lacks fresh ideas. Especially digital marketing ideas. The ideas that would help your business get more traffic and conversions.

With the help of these ten digital marketing ideas, you will have an opportunity to improve your small business performance drastically. 

Don’t hesitate to use them for practical purposes and you’ll succeed.