If you are a small business, you may not have the luxury of a big advertising budget. That means the channels you can use are limited. That applies to both traditional and digital advertising. Fortunately, with digital marketing, you have some leeway because you don't need a big budget to advertise. 

However, small businesses using digital marketing face many challenges. There is still much to learn, from competition from big brands to social media's regularly changing algorithm. However, it is not all doom and gloom. You can create an outstanding digital marketing campaign with creativity to take your brand to the next level. This article will provide a detailed guide to improving your digital marketing strategy as a small business.

Creative Digital Marketing Ideas For Small Business

To enable you to succeed, we have created the top 20 digital marketing ideas for you. These are:

Use Quirky Product Descriptions

Customers who visit your website will wonder whether that product is the right one for them. Your product descriptions are your best opportunity to convince them. Therefore, make good use of this space by writing quirky product descriptions. A good product description should not bore your customers with much information. It should highlight the benefits rather than the features. 

Ensure that all superlatives are supported with facts. Use sensory language that tells your product's story. Feed your customer's imagination and include social proof. With these tips, you will easily convert the visitors.

Optimize for Voice Search

We are in an era when more and more people use their voices to do Google research. This is mainly driven by searches on the go and search engines adding voice search features. Besides, more people are now buying voice-activated speakers and smartphones. 

To benefit from voice traffic, you should optimize your existing content and create new content for voice search. By doing so, your site can quickly appear on Google position zero or the featured snippet.

The reason is that voice assistant tools like Siri and Amazon Echo respond to voice searches using the featured snippet. Therefore, when a user asks a question, these tools will respond with the featured snippet. When optimizing for voice search, it is essential to note that there is a difference between text and voice searches. Therefore, it's critical to optimize for voice searches.

Optimizing for voice searches is particularly important for local businesses. This is because many people use voice search to find salons, restaurants, chemists, and other stores in their locality. Therefore, optimizing for voice search is one of the little-known digital marketing ideas.

Create Fun Social Media Contest Promotions

We all love winning awards, so social media contests are a great digital marketing idea. Offering your social media audience a chance to win something will spike their interest, resulting in more engagement on your posts and account. The good thing about social media contests is that they can take different forms. 

You can create a raffle where people will fill out a content form to enter their details. It could also be a drawing contest where you ask your followers to create a unique version of your logo. The possibilities are endless, but the results will be great. You can use contests and promotions to bring sales and marketing opportunities through social media followers, email sign-ups, likes, and shares. Therefore, let your followers win, as their win will also be yours.

Leverage on Reviews

Unless you are selling a shitty product (which we believe you aren't), you will have people saying great things about your product or business. In most cases, users will trust the words of fellow buyers more than you. Therefore, you want to get the most out of positive reviews by sharing them with your social media followers. You can even reach out to old and new customers, requesting them for testimonials. When customers buy from you, encourage them to leave a review.

However, even as you receive customer feedback, you will also receive negative testimonials. Others will also leave those reviews on independent sites such as Trust Pilot. You need to, therefore, keep a close eye on what they are saying concerning your brand. If they leave positive reviews, remember to thank them. If they leave negative reviews, take action that can help to reduce their pain. When you thoughtfully address customers’ complaints, you will turn them into long-term customers and show how good your customer service is.

Enter Awards to Win Credibility

In the online world, one of the things that brands struggle with is trust. Unless you are a well-known brand or a big ecommerce site like Amazon, the question of how genuine your site or product is will always arise in digital marketing. One way to cool your prospective clients' worries is by entering industry awards. If you are voted the best brand in your industry, you will build credibility and quickly get noticed.

Awards will give your brand more authority, contributing to your successful marketing. No matter your niche, you can enter competitions to win awards. Do some research to find out what competition is happening in your industry. If you put enough effort into winning the prize, remember that you want to use it for publicity and credibility. Therefore, display it on your website, social media pages, and other platforms.

Leverage Content Creation Partnerships

One cost-effective small business idea is collaborating with other small businesses in your niche that aren't direct competitors. For instance, if you have a small business selling flowers, you can partner with another business selling handmade vases. You can then leverage each other’s audiences to reach their market while they reach your audience.

 Here are several marketing ideas you can collaborate on:

• Co-hosting of webinars.
• Giving social media shoutouts to one another.
• Attending each other's podcasts.
• Collaborating on creating pop-up shops while sharing the costs.

Co-marketing allows small businesses to market their products to each other. Therefore, you tap into each other’s audiences free of charge.

Sell Mystery Boxes

Human beings love surprises; therefore, this is an element of marketing you can use.  If you have some slow-moving products, you can offer discounts on them in mystery boxes. That way, you promote them as mystery stock at an affordable price. There are several reasons why mystery boxes are a genius marketing idea for small businesses. They are:

• Creates a fear of missing out (FOMO). Studies indicate that 60% of people buy products or services due to FOMO.
• Clearing slow-moving stock is an excellent strategy for selling items whose expiry date is approaching. It creates space for new and fast-moving products.

Optimize Your Site for the Buying Intent

Optimizing your site for SEO is among the most popular digital marketing methods. When you find keywords that people in your niche use, you should group them according to the search intent. These are:

• Education intent. People using these keywords search for general information. These keywords consist of words and phrases such as how-to or tutorials. 
• Navigational intent. People use these keywords to find websites or stores. The keywords are usually branded with prefixes such as “where is” or “find.” These can be great keywords to target on your homepage or landing pages.
• Transactional intent. When people search for these keywords, they want to buy an item or take a commercial action. The keywords are usually very specific, such as iPhone 15 Pro Max or Buy iPhone 15 Pro Max. Someone searching for such a keyword knows precisely what they want and is ready to buy.

Give Product Samples to Several Micro-influencers

Influencer marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies for reaching a new audience. However, if you are a small business, you might not have the budget to pay for a mega or macro influencer. However, that doesn't mean you can not benefit from these forms of marketing.

A good and cost-effective strategy is to work with several nano and micro-influencers with a following of less than 100K. These influencers will likely be open about working and giving your products a shout-out in exchange for free samples. While it's not a guarantee that the items you send to them will be mentioned, the only cost will be the cost of manufacturing the product and the shipping fee. This can be a small price for an influencer promoting your product or service.

Provide Incentives for Email Sign-ups

You understand that email marketing is a crucial part of digital marketing. However, with so many businesses using the same strategy, you need to be more creative about how you do it if you will get the desired result. One of the best strategies to make people sign up for your email list is offering discounts and incentives.

According to one study, 58% of respondents sign up for an email list because of discounts and coupon codes. Another study indicates that shoppers who buy using a discount code spend more than other shoppers by 24%. Therefore, you can leverage this idea by creating a popup ad offering discounts to people who sign up for your email list. You can then follow up with the subscribers by email, listing your best offers.

Leverage on User-generated Content

Social media users are no longer interested in traditional ads listing the benefits of your products, urging them to buy. Remember that they have many content options, from YouTube to TikTok and short videos on Instagram. That means you will not draw attention to your brand if you only create videos promoting your products and services.

One of the ways that brands are overcoming this challenge is by encouraging user-generated content. This is an excellent way of turning your followers and subscribers into paying customers. You can ask your followers to create videos when using your products or unboxing them. To encourage participation, you can have a prize for the best videos.

Unboxing videos are particularly effective for user-generated content as they draw a lot of interest. In fact, 165,000 people search for the keyword “unboxing videos” every month. One channel specializing in unboxing videos has amassed a massive 24.3 million subscribers, which is a clear indication that they are very popular.

Your goal should be creating a library of high-quality UGC content to convince undecided followers to buy the product since they will share their videos on their profiles while tagging your brand. This will provide your brand with more prominent exposure. It will also help you build a bigger connection with your customers.

Get Feedback from Current Customers

Your previous customers have a better picture of your brand. They saw your last digital marketing message and were convinced to buy your products and services. When developing your digital marketing ideas, they should be your starting point. Therefore, conduct surveys to ask questions such as:

• What they like about your product.
• How they discovered the products.
• Areas that can be improved.

With these insights, you can create better campaigns on your social media, websites, and landing pages. For instance, you can optimize your customer description or include customer reviews on these platforms. That way, you can convince the unconvinced to trust your product.

Publish Your Original Research

You have probably done a study in your niche and uncovered exciting data. If you think others can find it helpful, share it with them. In return, you will not only build credibility but also earn backlinks. To find a research topic, you should ask yourself a question related to your topic.

For instance, if you are a brand that sells bedding, your research could be on how often people change bedding, whether people buy bedsheets for aesthetics or comfort, or the number of pillows people use on their beds.

After collecting the data, you can group it into different segments, such as age or gender. You can then select the most surprising data points likely to draw interest. For instance, sharing that 60% of people use two pillows might not draw as much interest as another study showing that 30% change their bedsheets weekly.

Once you have a good study, you can publish the most exciting data on your site. Since you are the owner of the data, any site that mentions the data in its articles will have to mention your site as the source. They will also link the data to your site. This will provide you with much exposure and backlinks at the same time.

Create a Press Release

A press release is a great tool brands leverage to share their exciting stories, company announcements, and product launches. When you send a press release to online publishers and journalists, they will use it to share stories with their leaders, giving you even more exposure.

When creating press releases, the most important thing is to share exciting information that publications will find worthy of sharing. If you share a story about opening a new store, they might not find it worth sharing. Instead, you need to find a more exciting angle, like the number of jobs you have created for the local people. This is an angle readers want to hear about, increasing the chances of your story's publication.

Post YouTube Videos

With over 4.95 billion monthly users, YouTube is one of the biggest sites. Besides, it also offers you an opportunity to market your product on the platform for free. You should leverage it to connect with your audience for free. You can start a YouTube channel for your business and customize it to your brand’s needs.

If you are unsure of the type of content to create, keyword research can help you find the kind of content people in your niche are searching for. If you created a blog that was quite popular, you can repurpose the content to make a script. To promote the video, you can then embed it on your website.

You should remember that YouTube is a search engine when creating YouTube videos. Therefore, just like Google, you need to optimize your videos for SEO. While this is a deep topic, the basics of YouTube SEO require including the target keywords in the video title, description, and thumbnail to increase the chances of people finding them on social media.  Connecting your store to YouTube is also advisable to increase the chances of people buying products from your videos.

Do Guest Posting

We all know that content creation is another digital marketing strategy. However, many content creators believe they should create content for their sites. This is true, although guest posting is also a creative idea for small business marketing. You should submit your blog post to a popular industry publication to leverage this marketing method.

There are many websites out there that will accept blog posts. To find them, you can do a Google search with the item (Industry) plus guest post. For instance, if you do a home makeover, you will search for “home makeover guest post.” You can link to your sites for more value for the guest posts. This will bring traffic to your site and help boost your site’s ranking on Google.

Do Social Media Geotagging

Nowadays, people use social media sites like Instagram to find something to do in a city. IG allows local businesses to geotag their location in an Instagram story or grid post. The good news is that you can still geotag even if you don’t have a physical store in the area.

Geotagging enables brands to provide a value-based service depending on the user's location. It involves adding geographical identification data to media such as videos or photographs. This helps customize the user experience and enables them to quickly locate your brand’s products or services in their area.

Use Local Hashtags

Hashtags will undoubtedly help your brand’s discoverability with TikTok and Instagram marketing. However, if you are a small business, you need to take this to the next level by using local hashtags, specifically the city where your store is located. This way, you can easily reach people looking for things to do in the city.

This is a good strategy if you are selling a product that offers an in-store experience to customers or if you have something worth seeing. Using a hashtag like# thingstodoinbali will provide you with much-needed exposure.

Create Your Podcast

In most of the ideas we have shared, you will connect to your respective customers through text or videos. However, your strategy should also include a plan for audio listeners to ensure you have a greater reach. The best method for reaching this group is through podcasts.

You can create audio ranging from a few minutes to several hours. You can either be the host or invite guests. Like other social media content strategies, the most important thing when starting a podcast is understanding your audience and sharing a topic that appeals to your guests. For instance, if you sell treadmills, you can share simple workout tips with your audience.

Create a Weekly Newsletter

Newsletters are very popular with e-commerce stores, as they promote new products and retarget new shoppers who haven't bought anything recently. You can also learn from them as small businesses start sharing newsletters with their customers' and prospects' inboxes.

Remember that customers are likely to buy from the brands they know and trust. Besides promoting products to your customers, you can share product stories about how your brand started and the challenges you faced as a small business. This will likely create an emotional connection, and they might soon start trusting you. With time, when they receive your sales emails, they will be ready to buy.

Host a Live Stream

A common digital marketing trend in TikTok marketing is live shopping. In this form of content, users host a live stream where they sell their products or services. The good thing about this marketing method is that it is entirely free. However, you must ensure your live streams are engaging enough to capture people’s attention for the best results.

You can even combine this strategy with another digital marketing idea by hosting a live stream in collaboration with an influencer. For instance, if you are a salon, you can run a live stream with a beauty influencer. You can share beauty tips or provide quick tutorials.

Conclusion

With the high competition from bigger brands and the ever-changing social media and search engine algorithms, small businesses need to be creative when conducting digital marketing. Relying on the same old strategies, like social media ads, may cost much more or not bear the desired results. Fortunately, with some creativity, it is possible to do digital marketing effectively and affordably. With our shared creative and little-known digital marketing, you can easily take your brand to the next level.