Many small businesses turn to digital marketing as a quick fix or secret ingredient to turn their fortunes around. Yet, this really isn’t the case and most elements of digital marketing strategies take at least six months to show results. It is vital that you treat small business digital marketing as an investment rather than as an expense. Given the right amount of patience, you will see results.

Reaching The Tipping Point

When understanding why certain types of digital marketing campaigns may not work immediately, it’s vital to remember that most digital marketing techniques and tactics today work organically. In digital marketing, you will find that the greatest successes obtained are after you reach a certain “tipping point”. The campaign slowly builds and reaches a point where many touches start to gain traction and make a significant difference. The true test, particularly in small business digital marketing, is to be patient until you reach that tipping point.

The Customer Journey

Often the idea that small business digital marketing will yield immediate results. This may be due to a lack of understanding of the modern online customer journey. SEO, content marketing, and social media efforts all form a part of the customer purchasing journey. Think about the last time you bought something significant, did you decide in the store? Or did you research it online, by searching for it and its competitors? Did you see it on a social platform and decide to investigate further? Often, consumers of your products will spend large amounts of time making a purchasing decision. This includes consuming large amounts of your product information. Very few decisions made are not without the influence of online platforms.

These are all touch points with your customer that digital marketing serves. A customer may walk in and buy your product from you today. But your search results rankings are influential to their buying decision. An informative blog that spelt out the key benefits of the product may have swayed them. Perhaps a fun and relevant series of posts they saw on social media swayed them into purchasing. Note that it can take months or even years to convince some customers into a purchase. This is the perfect example of you can achieve a from sustained digital marketing efforts.

Your Competition

When you think of your competition, you most likely think of businesses that sell comparable products or offer similar services. When it comes to small business digital marketing the competition is so much wider than that. SEO keyword research may show that you are competing with businesses who aren’t necessarily a direct competitor but have a superior ranking on search terms related to your business. Similarly, the amount of content that you publish will have an influence on this. You may feel that posting a blog once a week is frequent, whilst your larger competitors could be doing substantially more. Thus, improving traffic to their site.

Research from marketing companies has found that companies with over 400 published blog posts get double the amount of traffic when compared to those with fewer than 400.

20 blogs per month and 400 articles total might seem like ridiculous figures if you’re running a small business. However, be mindful that many of your larger competitors may be blogging this much or even more. If you want to achieve success in search rankings, despite the incredible volume of content you’re up against, you’ll need to get creative with your blogging strategy and dedicate time to it.

The Nature of Search Engines and SEO

One of the key aspects of successful SEO is knowing what search engines look for; you need consistency and history before rewarding your site with higher rankings. Similarly, there are forces actively collaborating to keep your SEO campaign from growing too quickly. According to the Search Engine Journal, search engine algorithms often look for websites that are being aggressively optimized. Constant updates are vital to ensuring ongoing high rankings.

It is important to remember that a search engines’ very purpose is to match their user’s needs and interests with a suitable website. Another factor to consider is that outdated information that isn’t updated regularly. Therefore, Google rewards your site for the frequency and how recently your updates are being made.

Digital marketing moves exceptionally quickly, and performance metrics are more readily available than many traditional communication techniques. Immediate accessibility to performance metrics doesn’t necessarily translate to immediate results. The key to successful small business digital marketing is to constantly innovate and the sustained use of techniques to deliver the results that are best suited to your business.