Utilizing digital tools to enhance the power of your business is something that every company, not just the behemoths, could stand to benefit from. However, if you are a smaller business, your approach toward web marketing and the development of your digital presence will have to be different.

With that in mind, this article aims to highlight some of the most important points that smaller businesses, freelancers, and sole traders should keep in mind as they engage with digital enhancements to their business practices.

Similarities of Small Businesses, Freelancers, and Sole Traders

While there are undeniably important distinctions between each of these business types, there are also plenty of similarities that can be useful to consider; in particular when it comes to engaging with a digital presence.

By definition, each of these business types will be dealing with smaller audiences and will often have lower costs as a result. However, your business will also be more vulnerable to disruptions in your revenue streams, as you will be working with a smaller audience base and will be more dependent upon the forms of revenue that you have developed. This means you are going to need more security in the forms of revenue that you pursue.

Additionally, each of these business types is likely to have less potential budget to work with for your business expenses, which means you are going to be better rewarded by engaging with lower-risk investments – both in terms of finances and effort.

All of this information can be incredibly useful to understanding how your business can best engage with and utilize the opportunities available to you. So, how can you apply this information to considerations of your digital presence?

Collecting Clients

First and foremost, it is vital that you remember the primary goal of developing your web presence is to draw in additional clients for your business. This objective should be at the core of any and all decisions you make in reference to your web development and presence and is particularly important to keep in mind for a small business like yours because you are likely to have a lower potential range of clients you could attract.

This means you want to engage with avenues of digital marketing and web development that are more likely to drive higher conversion rates rather than those that are likely to reach a wider range of potential customers. Your lower potential customer pool will render the latter less effective and, therefore, less beneficial to your business.

As a result, you will want to engage with tools like PPC marketing that drive a high return on investment. For example, if you want to advertise on Facebook, then PPC marketing services ensure that you will only be paying for successful clickthroughs on your adverts, which are far more likely to lead to conversions for your business.

Alternatively, you could also engage with low or zero-cost forms of digital marketing, such as developing a social media presence for your business endeavors. This could help you develop your web presence without having to spend anything. However, the trade-off is that you will have to spend time consistently monitoring and engaging with social media to manage and maintain the benefits you are likely to gain from that form of web presence development.

Driving Web Traffic

If you are running a business that provides digital products on a web store, you are going to massively benefit from anything you can do to draw in additional web traffic toward that web store. After all, customers cannot buy from your business if they do not ever find the storefront.

Fortunately, there are plenty of potential digital presence tools that can help to drive more focused traffic toward your website. SEO (search engine optimization) services, for example, can be highly effective tools to ensure that interested shoppers are more likely to find your store online. This is because SEO works to improve the placement of your web store on search engine results pages (sometimes called SERPs) that are searching terms related to your business.

Alternatively, if you are more interested in generating web traffic rather than directing it toward your business, you might want to engage with tools like content marketing, which can work to increase interest in the kinds of products that you provide online. This works to overall increase your potential patronage rather than sending already interested customers toward your services. Of course, it is important to remember that not every service will have a huge appeal to the public, so the efficacy of this particular strategy may depend on the kind of business you provide.

Improving Conversion Rates

Finally, you are going to want to consider how you can make potential customers more likely to patronize your business once they find it. After all, you can drive all of the web traffic in the world, but if you aren’t able to convert your potential customers into paying ones, there is going to be very little benefit to your business in doing so.

There are plenty of factors that could potentially impact your customer conversion rates, but one of the most underrated is the presentation of your storefront. In particular, if you are running a digital business, your store page has to be able to speak for itself. This means that anything and everything you can do to optimize the appearance and ease of use of your store page can help to improve the experience your customers are going to have online.

After all, nobody wants to navigate a confusing maze of unappealing pages to make a purchase online. If you aren’t making the process of buying products from your business as easy as you can, you run the risk of customers simply closing your page and trying to find a less irksome storefront to purchase their products from.

In fact, appearance and ease of use on your site can be even more important factors than a competitive price when it comes to determining whether or not a customer is likely to make a purchase from your business.