Small business owners understand their customers are searching online for products and services. Many, however, don’t understand how to leverage all those searches to help their business grow.

Here are 4 common-sense digital marketing strategies to do just that:

1. Begin by setting a goal. it’s not enough to want your business to grow—if you want more customers, how many more. If you want to outpace the competition, in what ways and in what time frame. Establishing a digital marketing strategy requires time, effort and precision. Having a clear and precise goal for your business will help you configure that strategy and increase the likelihood you’ll achieve your goal.
2. Hammer out your marketing funnel. think of your marketing funnel as taking prospective customers from point A to point B. Your marketing funnel consists of four phases along that continuum:
3. Building awareness—you can’t sell your products or services if customers aren't aware of them. During the awareness phase, you show customers you have what they’re looking for. This is the stage when you provide customers with something of value (your so-called “lead magnet”) in exchange for their contact information—for example, you might ask them to fill out an online form to receive a valuable monthly newsletter. Once you’ve built awareness, you have to convert it into… 
4. Interest—you can build interest by further segmenting your market based on the demographic data you collected during the awareness stage, then providing customers with more specific information tailored to what it is they want. In this way, you show customers you cared enough to get to know who they are and what they need. ‍
5. Desire—here you take prospects from being interested in your products or services to actively wanting them. You can do this by further tightening your relationship with them, asking them to schedule a visit your business for a consultation (or providing one at their home), for example, through effective email marketing.‍
6. Action—this is where you turn prospects into leads. This is the stage in which you get down to the nitty-gritty of price and payment, for example.
7. Hone your call-to-action—this is exactly what it sounds like. you’re calling upon prospective customers to take some action which leads to a sale. Creating desire for your product, then not following through with a call-to-action is like making a great impression at the local bar, then not handing over your phone number. An effective call-to-action could be requesting a newsletter, white paper, eBook, webinar or product demo. Your call-to-action needs to be strategic, taking customers to a landing page which is aligned with the call (if you’ve ever clicked on an online ad promising a two-for-one suit deal and landed on a page which has nothing to do with the sale, you understand the frustration non-strategic calls can create). Your call to action needs to be engaging, get customers’ attention, and push them further through the funnel.
8. Increase traffic to your website—you can’t create awareness, interest or desire if no one’s visiting your site. There are many ways to drive traffic—the most common are:

• having good, informative and relevant content (everything from blog posts to videos)
• using effective keyword strategy, and
• implementing a sound SEO strategy (making sure you’re site has been optimized)

One of the most common mistakes which small businesses make is thinking they’re not big enough or important enough to need a smart digital strategy. No matter what size your business, a smart digital strategy will help you grow and increase your sales.For more information about create a digital strategy for your small business contact Red Shark Digital today or click below for a free digital strategy session!