A guide to digital marketing for SMBs

By Danielle Senekal, senior digital campaign lead at new-age solutions and systems integrator, +OneX

When you board a plane, you trust the crew to follow a set of behind-the-scene checks that will ensure a safe journey. You generally don’t need to think too much about how the air traffic controller is guiding your flight or how the pilot will safely navigate such a massive machine to your destination. You can generally be confident that your plane will take you where you want to go.

Imagine if marketing for a small or medium business (SMB) could be as smooth and seamless. We might not be there quite yet, but advances in digital marketing are bringing us closer to a world where SMB owners can set their destination and trust in the process. More than a mere alternative to offline marketing like billboards or flyers, digital platforms offer cost-effective and automated ways to scale your business and engage with your customers.

Businesses today can leverage advanced programmatic advertising, artificial intelligence (AI)-driven targeting, and retargeting strategies to boost visibility and drive specific traffic effectively. As such, paid advertising has evolved into a powerful set of tools and solutions that make it relatively simple for SMBs to implement complex, multi-channel campaigns.

We are still seeing digital marketing continue to evolve through:

• Technological advances: AI and machine learning already enable us to personalise and automate marketing efforts. Fast-evolving AR (Augmented Reality) and VR (Virtual Reality) technologies will enable SMBs to create new, immersive brand experiences.
• Changing consumer behaviours: Customer behaviour has changed dramatically over the past decade or so, with the emergence of voice search, new social channels like TikTok, mobile-first shopping and search, and growing consumption of video. These shifts significantly impact how paid media campaigns are designed and executed, ensuring they remain relevant and effective in reaching target audiences.
• Algorithm updates: Changes in social media algorithms affect the reach and engagement of paid media campaigns, requiring adjustments to maintain effectiveness.

Just as pilots monitor and adapt for safe travel when weather conditions are changing, SMBs need to remain flexible as the digital marketing environment shifts. In doing so, you can steer your campaigns towards success in the competitive digital landscape, achieving goals and maintaining market relevance by reaching customers with personalised messaging.

The good news is that you don’t need to be a data and algorithms expert to reach your marketing goals. Implementing tags on your website is like putting the plane on autopilot once you’ve reached a certain altitude, automating processes to efficiently target the right audience with tailored messages. When executed effectively, digital marketing proves highly measurable and remarkably effective.

Most small businesses struggle to take these initial steps.

That’s why we’ve developed a new approach: partnering with startups and small businesses to guide them onto the right platforms and empower them to pilot their own campaigns. This strategy minimises initial hurdles that have often discouraged smaller companies from embracing digital marketing, granting access to tools and capabilities typically exclusive to larger competitors.

Here are steps to kickstart an SMB digital marketing strategy:

• Manage tracking tags efficiently with Google Tag Manager (GTM): GTM simplifies the deployment and upkeep of all tracking tags on your website from a single platform.
• Track user behaviour with GA4 (Google Analytics): GA4 provides insights into how users interact with your site and the performance of your paid media campaigns.
• Link Google AdWords to Google Analytics: Connecting AdWords with Analytics ensures you can track important metrics like conversions across your campaigns. This integration ensures that you can measure the performance of your campaigns accurately and make data-driven decisions to optimise them.
• Install Pixels for Meta, X, and TikTok: These pixels track user actions on your website, helping you optimise your paid media campaigns and analyse performance on each platform.
• Verify Pixel installations with helper extensions: Tools like Meta Pixel Helper ensure your pixels are set up correctly for accurate data collection and effective campaign optimisation.
• Align campaign setups with GTM and GA4: Set up campaigns to trigger specific tags or events in GTM and GA4, ensuring consistent tracking and data collection across all platforms.

• Use UTM parameters for campaign tracking: Implement UTM tags in your URLs to monitor which paid media campaigns are driving traffic and conversions. These parameters help you track the performance of different campaigns in Google Analytics, providing valuable insights into which strategies are most effective.
• Optimise campaigns based on specific goals: This is crucial for maximising the effectiveness of your paid media strategies. By aligning your campaigns with specific business objectives—whether it’s increasing sales, driving website traffic, or enhancing brand visibility—you create a focused and purpose-driven approach. This ensures that every rand you spend on paid media contributes directly to your business objectives.
• Create custom audiences and lookalike audiences: Use customer data, website visitors, or third-party data to create custom audiences. Also, create lookalike audiences resembling your best customers to broaden your reach effectively. Segment your audiences to include your target customers and exclude irrelevant groups, like recent purchasers, to ensure your ads are more relevant and effective.

• Platform-specific conversion volume thresholds: Keep in mind that each platform may have different optimisation guidelines and recommendations based on their algorithms and ad delivery systems. For Meta, the platform generally recommends having at least 50 conversions per ad set per week for the algorithm to optimise effectively. Typically, Google Ads recommends aiming for at least 15-30 conversions per month per campaign for effective optimisation.
• Optimising for low sales volumes: If sales are low, it may be more efficient to optimise your campaigns for earlier stages of the customer journey, such as add-to-cart or sign-up, when more data is available. This ensures that campaigns remain effective with limited conversion data. Once conversion volumes increase and reach the recommended thresholds, you can switch to optimising for the conversion goal, such as final sales.

SMBs have the opportunity to harness powerful digital marketing tools and strategies that were once the exclusive domain of larger enterprises. Just as a well-trained pilot ensures a safe and smooth flight, a well-implemented digital marketing strategy can drive business growth, customer engagement, and market relevance. With the right guidance and tools, SMBs can take their marketing success to new heights.