Home to affordable office spaces, a rising talent pool, and fantastic infrastructure, it’s no wonder that Birmingham has become a hotspot for startups and burgeoning businesses.
In fact, according to the Office for National Statistics’ ‘UK Business: Activity, Size and Location 2023’ report, a massive 98 per cent of all Birmingham businesses are small businesses.
Providing a wide range of essential goods and services, these enterprises with fewer than 50 employees play a vital role in the daily life of city residents and visitors alike.
As a small business based in the second biggest city in the UK however, it’s easy to understand how you could feel dwarfed by the sheer number of other businesses also located in the city.
So, how can you stand out from competitors in a crowded field? One solution is the exciting and diverse world of digital marketing.
If you’re keen to ensure your new business continues to succeed, then understanding some of the challenges that small businesses in Birmingham commonly face and, crucially, learning how to overcome them, is essential.
Fortunately, the team of digital marketing professionals at Aqueous Digital has put together this comprehensive guide to help you recognise these challenges and respond to them by utilising digital marketing for your small business.
How to get started with digital marketing for the first time
Keen to scale your small Birmingham-based business, but unsure where to start?
Discover some of the key areas of digital marketing that you should consider investing in from our digital marketing experts.
To support you with making more informed business marketing decisions, we also explain the pros and cons of each digital marketing activity as well as how these activities can be used to help your business overcome both general and more Birmingham-specific challenges.
Website creation and design
Most businesses have a website, regardless of their UK location, size, or industry, so if you want to stop losing business to your competitors that do have a website, then you’ll need to create a dedicated site for your own company.
It’s no secret that a website provides the perfect platform for advertising your offerings, explaining why your potential customers you should be interested in your products or services, and what your business is all about.
However, a website is not just a useful platform for selling your brand, products, and services – it also plays an important role in building trust.
Trust is essential for ensuring your customers feel safe interacting with your company and are therefore more likely to buy, return time after time, and recommend your business to others.
Plus, a website allows you to compete with larger businesses by optimising your site for local searches. It’s important to bear in mind however, that website creation and design is not without its cons.
First and foremost, it can be expensive, especially if you hire a professional website developer.
Similarly, you’ll also have to cover the cost of maintaining and running the website which includes the price of hosting, domain name renewal, and the purchase of an SSL certificate.
Your website also needs to be kept up to date in terms of content, so you may need to consider hiring a content writer or seeking support from a freelance copywriter.
Birmingham especially is such a hub for events and culture that creating and publishing fresh content on your website is a great way to keep up with the ever-changing social scene.
For example, the city hosts its Birmingham Restaurant Festival in August each year, so if you’re involved in this industry, the creation of content that promotes or aligns with this event can be the perfect way to reach your target audience online.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Once you’ve built a website for your business, or during the website development process, it’s important to abide by SEO best practices.
SEO is the process of optimising your web pages and content for search engines, like Google, to help direct more organic (unpaid) traffic to your website.
For example, if you run a clothing alteration business in Bournville, Birmingham, you’ll want to appear as high as possible in the search engine results pages (SERPs) for terms like ‘Birmingham clothing alterations’ or ‘is altering clothes worth it’, as this will increase the likelihood of online users finding and navigating to your website.
The purpose of SEO is therefore to improve the online visibility of your website and boost your rankings for certain keywords related to your products or services.
As touched on above, websites can also be optimised for more specific local keyword searches, such as ‘tailor in Bournville’.
By optimising your site for the keyword phrases that feature the geographical word ‘Bournville’, you’re more likely to be found by residents and other businesses in this particular area of Birmingham.
Despite being a small business located in the outskirts of Birmingham, this kind of SEO can help you to be found by a much larger audience in your area.
It’s important to bear in mind, however, that SEO is a long-term digital marketing strategy.
It takes at least a few months for technical SEO changes and SEO-optimised content to have an impact on your SERP rankings – even if you use a professional digital marketing agency like Aqueous Digital.
Not to mention, just like websites, your SEO efforts must also be consistently maintained if you want to continue to reap the rewards of higher rankings and more organic traffic.
You may also face significant penalties from search engines if you engage in poor SEO practices, like keyword stuffing – the practice of overfilling web pages with certain keywords to manipulate SERP rankings.
Paid search
In contrast to SEO, paid search is a type of advertising that allows businesses to pay search engines to promote their web pages higher in the SERPs for certain keywords and phrases that are relevant to their business.
However, the desired result of paid search is the same as SEO – to generate more traffic.
Some of the biggest advantages of using this type of digital marketing for your small business include the tracking capabilities, flexibility to tailor your advertisements, and fast results.
You can monitor your performance in real-time, gather information about the users who click on your ads, and track the success of your campaigns with ease.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is one of the most common and popular types of paid search. Each time an online user clicks your advertisement, you’ll be charged a set fee.
Creating a PPC strategy can offer small businesses in Birmingham the opportunity to compete with larger enterprises in the city.
However, when you’re considering your digital marketing options, you should also take into account that paid search, like PPC, can be more costly than SEO because you’re paying for every click.
This is particularly true for small businesses that operate within competitive industries or target competitive keywords.
Similarly, if you’re not confident with implementing PPC campaigns then you may also need to hire a PPC management expert to manage and maintain your campaigns.
It can also be time-consuming as these campaigns must be closely monitored and continually optimised to ensure you’re generating the best results for your money and efforts.
As a result, PPC may not be appropriate for every small business, but if you want to scale and grow, then using a PPC management company is often the first step as they’ll ensure you get a better return on your advertising spend.
Social media marketing
Following the massive increase in the popularity of social media, it would be unwise of any business not to capitalise on this lucrative type of digital marketing.
Platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly known as Twitter), and TikTok can all be fantastic digital marketing tools for both B2B and B2C small businesses in Birmingham.
This form of digital marketing can be effective for businesses that publish a lot of images or videos.
Instagram and TikTok, for example, are ideal social media platforms for publishing visually appealing content that can help to attract your target market and boost engagement.
Social media marketing can therefore be useful for growing your small business by engaging your audience, increasing brand awareness, boosting your website traffic, and even generating new leads.
Birmingham-based small businesses should also try to embrace their location as part of their social media marketing strategy.
Birmingham, like London, Manchester, and other bustling UK cities, is bursting with movement, vibrancy, and energy.
These businesses based in the city should therefore capitalise on this, using Birmingham’s ever-evolving culture, landscape, and events to create engaging social media content that supports their company goals.
Some of the key advantages of social media marketing include that it’s typically one of the most affordable digital marketing avenues, it can also be used to help you access global audiences, has the potential to make your content go viral, and allows your results to be easily measured.
However, you may need to invest in the necessary photographic or video recording equipment if you want to produce high-quality content yourself.
It can also be rather time-consuming as your business must be frequently active and engaged on whichever social media platforms you decide to utilise.
Email marketing
Keen to scale the digital marketing for your small business? Don’t forget about email marketing.
This effective digital marketing activity allows you to directly message both existing and potential customers via email. You can even focus on certain demographics with targeted email campaigns.
This form of digital marketing can be used to promote your products or services, offer incentives (like free consultations or discounts), or inform your audience by directing them to your latest blogs, guides, or other forms of helpful content.
In terms of specifically growing your small business, email marketing can also help you to build and maintain a strong relationship with your customers, effectively fending off competition.
With regular email communication and incentives, you’ll encourage your existing customers to remain loyal and repeatedly purchase your products or services.
Involved in the manufacturing industry?
This approach can be crucial for helping your company to overcome one of the main challenges that Birmingham’s manufacturing businesses face – the significant decline of the city’s large manufacturing sector due to competition from abroad.
One of the main issues with email marketing, however, is that you need to give potential customers a good enough reason to provide you with their details – something that is becoming increasingly difficult.
Offering incentives can be costly to small businesses, but may be worth it if they generate leads and increase conversions.
How to know if your current digital marketing efforts are impactful
Now you have a clearer of idea of some of the various digital marketing avenues available to you, the next step to growing your small business in Birmingham is determining how successful your efforts have been.
Cue, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
While the performance indicators you should track will vary depending on which marketing activities you utilise, they can help you to judge the effectiveness of your marketing strategy to then optimise and improve your results.
Common marketing KPIs include ROI (Return on Investment), CTR (Click-Through Rate), and CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), for example. While there are many other digital marketing metrics, each one can help you to analyse and optimise the digital marketing for your small business.
How to tackle the issue of having a 'lack of time' to invest into marketing
As a small business, you may wear many hats and therefore struggle to give your marketing activities the time they require.
If this is the case however, you shouldn’t neglect them entirely.
Instead, you’ll often benefit from better results and value for money by reaching out to experienced, digital marketing professionals – like the friendly and expert team at Aqueous Digital.
Contact the digital marketing experts
If you’re a small business in Birmingham that’s struggling to grow, please don’t hesitate to reach out to the team of digital marketing professionals at Aqueous Digital.
Our award-winning team has worked with businesses of all shapes and sizes, helping them to achieve their digital marketing goals, whatever they may be.
Regardless of whether you want to boost your organic traffic or increase your brand awareness, we provide a wide range of digital marketing services, including paid media and online search services.
If you’d like to learn more about our digital marketing services, have a related query or would like to request a free initial consultation, why not give our friendly team a call today on 0121 673 2285?
We also welcome email enquiries sent to hello@aqueous-digital.co.uk as well as any enquiries submitted using our convenient online contact form.
We look forward to learning more about your approach to digital marketing for your small business soon!
