Online is the way to go if you want to grow your business but don’t have an arsenal of unlimited resources to launch a global empire with physical locations around the world. The internet offers almost endless possibilities for entrepreneurs in any stage of their business to grow exponentially at speeds as fast as or as slow as they like. Digital marketing is so vast that there’s no way you will not find at least one powerful avenue to expand your business online.

Create relationships with content

Content is everything. Everything is content. It’s books, blogs, social media posts, emails, graphics, videos, podcasts, and everything in between. By creating content that your customers find relevant, helpful, and personal, you establish trust and build authority so that people keep coming back to your content to educate and entertain themselves.

Content marketing helps you grow because, if done right using the right tools, you will attract potential customers who are already interested in your offer. This is called having a highly targeted audience. You’re creating content for people who want to consume it. It’s a win-win situation for everyone.

The key to creating content that resonates with your customers and eventually leads them to buy is to understand what your customers want. This doesn’t only mean stepping into their shoes to experience what they experience. It also means speaking the language of your customers and speaking it all the time.

Consistency is key in all forms of content marketing. You need to identify your core message so that, whatever it is, it underlies every single piece of content that you publish on all platforms. Do this long enough and you will get to a point where, if someone hears your message, they immediately know it’s you.

For instance, Be found - Be connected through digital marketing with profit and purpose. While the company is relatively young, it’s making a name for itself among its target audience of millionaire businesses because of the reputation of its founder Rob Woj.

Scale with SEO

SEO is a powerful but low-cost strategy to massively scale your business. Optimizing your website for search engines allows you to increase visibility so that potential customers who are looking for your products or services can find you with a quick Google search.

This long-term strategy integrates very well with every other digital marketing strategy. SEO is almost always done with content marketing since blogging is one of the most effective ways to keep your website fresh and up-to-date all the time. It also works well with social media marketing, since Google uses social media presence as one of the hundreds of factors to determine your website’s ranking.

The challenge with SEO is keeping yourself updated about the changes that Google may be rolling out. Changes keep coming out every few months. But, in general, Google is always working on improving its algorithm so that it ranks websites created for humans, not for machines. Nobody knows exactly what that looks like, but we have a good guess about what it may be—websites with content that’s backed by experience, expertise, authority, and trust.

Building an SEO strategy on these four foundational factors will pay off in the long run. Set your SEO goals for the long haul because it can take a while before any changes you make to your website will lead to results unless you integrate SEO with a well-planned advertising strategy to attract new leads faster. 

Get personal on social media

Social media has changed business forever by making it personal. The ability to send messages in real-time via DMs, comments, and live videos has allowed customers to close the corporate gap that once kept them at a distance.

Customers now expect businesses to respond to their queries, questions, and complaints as soon as possible. More crucially, they also expect you to talk to them like a real, live human being. There’s no place for buzzwords or corporate lingo on social media. If you want to use it to grow your business, you have to become just like your customers.

How does this translate into what kind of content you share on social media? Authenticity is essential in social media marketing. People want to see you coming across as someone relatable. They don’t go on social media ready to buy. They go on social media to relax, unwind, and take their busy minds off whatever is happening in their lives.

Social media is not the place for you to keep talking about your products and services. You can't hard sell on these platforms because your message isn't going to be accepted with arms wide open. Social media is a place to be social, not salesy. Building relationships is the key here.

Yet, while social media gives you a huge potential to be personal, it also gives you the potential to go global. There is virtually no limit to growth except for the platform's population of users. There are also no limits to what platforms you can use. Data from your market research will help you make the best decision on what social media platforms you should be building a presence on.

Slide into their inbox

A few years ago, digital marketers announced that email was dead. Not anymore. Email has come back to life. Or perhaps it never died in the first place. Email has become a more robust venue for businesses to communicate with their prospects and customers because people are tending to their inboxes now more than ever.

The best thing about email is it gives you the ability to personalize your message. You can address people by their first names and you can group them into segments so you can send different email campaigns depending on the segment they belong to.

For example, you can put people who bought your flagship product into one segment. Then you can send them emails to upsell or cross-sell because these people who already bought from you are more likely to buy from you again. On the other hand, there will also be people who abandon their carts before checking out. You can put them in another segment and send them incentives to get them to check out.

The challenge with email marketing is writing and delivering emails worthy of your customer's inbox. Emails already take up too much of people's time. Is it valuable for them to spend an extra five to 10 minutes to open yours? If not, you need to take a second look at your email marketing strategy and find a new way to make it worth your customers' while.

Accelerate it all with advertising

It will take a while before your content, SEO, and social media marketing efforts show results. If you want to speed things up, you need to shore up your organic marketing with advertising. The internet offers many platforms for you to advertise, including on the first page of search engines and social media.

Unlike traditional advertising, which costs an arm and a leg to snag a good spot on TV or radio, digital advertising costs much less. Most ad platforms use a performance-based pricing model that requires you to pay only when someone engages with your ad.

And still unlike traditional advertising, which really looks like a spray-and-pray method of hoping to get impressions, digital advertising allows you to deliver highly targeted ads that, if done right, your perfect customer will be happy to see.

Expanding into limitless growth

Digital marketing allows you to reach audiences you would otherwise not be able to access if you kept your business in the physical world. It also gives you opportunities to build close, personal relationships with customers and partners that you wouldn't be able to communicate with if the internet wasn't invented. Opportunities abound on the internet, and they are ripe for the picking. Now is the perfect time to do business online.