3 Winning Online Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses

Whether you are just starting out with online marketing for your small business or are looking for fresh ideas, I probably don’t have to tell you that there’s no shortage of strategies and tactics to get familiar with. In fact there are so many hints, tips, methods and models to be followed that it can be difficult to know which ones are most effective.

The Best of the Best Small Business Online Marketing Ideas

I thought I’d put together a quick overview of what I believe to be three small business online marketing ideas that, when you work on them with your local St Charles or St Louis SEO company, will really help to drive traffic to your website, pull in new leads, or generate more sales to your existing customers.


1. Attract New Business with Lead Magnets
Assuming you have a business website (if not, getting one built by a St Charles website design firm will be the best online marketing idea of all), developing lead magnets is a great way to engage with your market and turn visitors into sales leads.

A lead magnet basically comprises some very specific, valuable information that your prospective customers can actually use to solve a problem or derive some other benefit from. However, you have to make sure that you get something in return for providing that information.

In short, you provide the information in return for contact details and permission to begin marketing directly to those who sign up for the lead magnet. Digital Marketer CEO, Ryan Deiss provides a very full explanation of lead magnets and how to use them in his DM Blog post called 9 Lead Magnet Ideas and Examples, in which he offers insightful tips such as the importance of making lead magnets that prospects can gain immediate value from.
A four-month course of training by email for instance, is not a good lead magnet example, but a single-page checklist of tips for solving a specific problem could be ideal.


2. Throw out Some Link Bait
While it’s a horrible sounding term, link bait is another method of pulling visitors to your website and getting your products or services under their noses.

Link bait can be any form of online content that you create, such as a blog post, an infographic, a quiz, or even just a photograph if it’s interesting enough. However, as Google’s Matt Cutts points out in a post on his personal blog (the post is called SEO Advice: linkbait and linkbaiting), link bait trumps everyday content by being especially attention-grabbing, therefore seducing lots of other marketers and content-creators to link to it. In order to make your content link-worthy, you need to make it a little bit special. You might do this in one of the following ways:

• Providing information or data that is not available elsewhere online (true originality)
• Producing content that’s especially insightful
• Publishing data in the form of infographics
• Creating evergreen content that stays relevant for a long period of time
• Creating some thought-provoking content that goes against popular opinion (creating controversy)

If you can get the formula right, these extra-special pieces of online content will attract lots more inbound links than run-of-the-mill articles and blog posts, thereby exposing your products or services to a wider audience of potential prospects, leads, and hopefully, customers.


3. Share Past Successes with Case Studies
To make a change from telling your audience what you can do for them, tell them about what you’ve done for existing customers. Have your St Charles web design provider create a section on your website in which you can create a portfolio of case studies, detailing the ways in which you’ve helped existing customers solve their problems or met their objectives.

As leading web influencer Neil Patel explains in his QuickSprout article 21 Big Marketing Ideas for Small Marketing Budgets, you can get your satisfied customers to contribute to case studies by using their own words to explain how your business helped them.

Prospective customers always like to see tangible evidence of a provider’s expertise. Case studies are a great way to get that evidence out there.


Give Your Small Business a Big Marketing Impact
The beauty of the three online marketing ideas I’ve outlined here is that they don’t require a big budget to pull off successfully. All it takes is some time and effort to create the necessary content. If you struggle to find the time for these marketing activities, the content creation can easily be outsourced to a managed marketing solutions provider or digital marketing agency.

Ken Tucker, owner of Changescape Web, is a Small Business Online Marketing Expert in St. Charles.  Changescape Web is a provider of web design and search engine optimization in St Charles, MO. We also offer fully managed marketing solutions. To find out more about our managed marketing packages, just fill out our online marketing inquiry form or give us a call at 636.947.6200.