Smart Digital Marketing Services for Small Businesses | Wellington
At Aztera Marketing in Wellington we support a wide range of small and larger sized businesses with their digital marketing requirements. With many smaller sized businesses operating on a tighter budget, the main focus is to maximise the performance of your free organic search results and run smart, targeted paid ads, if these are being used. This means in essence having a good landing page and / or website, to maximise all new customer enquiries, and to assist them to progress to being a paying customer. In marketing speak, we’re trying to increase your leads and maximise your conversions.
Please see below a list of key questions that outline how we can support your smaller sized business using digital marketing and/or paid ads.
What does digital marketing cover?
Digital marketing quite broadly covers a wide range of marketing activities that occur online. Specifically for most smaller sized businesses this focuses mainly on your website, social media, and implementing paid ad campaigns either using Google Ads or Facebook Ads. It can extend into other specific online ad placement activities, using very specific online platforms, but that is not commonly used for smaller sized businesses.
Also, and more recently, is the importance of maximising Ai by having your business referenced in the Ai Overview and Ai Search results.
One thing that I think also should be included in this list of digital marketing activities, is the good use of content marketing and Blog post marketing. By developing good, informative online articles that your prospective customers read and get a good understanding of your expertise and service offering, it can have a significant impact on generating initial enquiries.
From my experience the areas that I firstly focus on with smaller sized businesses include: a well performing website that clearly communicates your products and services, adding SEO (search engine optimisation) in part or full, optimising your Google Maps listing, and then progressing to use paid ads to support this strong initial base platform.
What is the primary purpose of all digital marketing?
For many smaller sized businesses, the main focus and requirement is to help generate leads and get new customer enquiries. This is generally achieved through implementing digital marketing tactics, that drive people to your website. Once they are on your website, they then ideally proceed with a call to action that involves either a phone call, completing an online enquiry form, or requesting a quote.
It really is that simple. Use digital marketing to drive visitors to your website, and from that (and that is why the performance of your website is critical), the new visitor will make contact with your business.
How does Google Ads specifically work?
From my experience, I have a number of clients that have moved into stage one of active digital marketing, and this in most instances involves using Google Ads. The strength of using Google Ads includes the following:
- You set up tight and targeted marketing campaigns specifically on the products and services you most want to sell.
- You can then set a daily budget which can be as small as $10 per day (but we often encourage a bit more).
- You get clear performance statistics from your Google Ads, so you can see what is working well and what is not.
- With Google Ads and the ads being placed at the top of the standard Google Search results, this is one of its core strengths. By being placed at the top of the page in the search results, it significantly increases the likelihood of a customer visiting your website.
Why are you more specifically mentioning Google Ads as part of the digital marketing mix?
From our experience we have found that Google Ads performs well for many smaller sized businesses, who are wanting to maximise the opportunity of getting customers who are looking for their services, at that specific point in time. These customers are often searching with a high ‘intent’ and are actively in the decision-making process.
Social media advertising, e.g. Facebook advertising, differs from this, as the ad is displayed in someone’s personalised news feed, in essence interrupting the reader’s experience of the social media platform, and this often results in lower performance of an ad campaign. Google ads is more ‘intent’ based advertising, where social media is more of an ‘interrupted’ advertising approach.
Is digital marketing good for trades business?
Yes, it is. For many trades businesses they are wanting to get customer enquiries on a regular basis, that relate to the specific products and services they provide. For certain trades, e.g. plumbers, electricians, they have 2 core aspects of the business. Clients inquiring for a break/fix solution if something has broken within their house or business, and also new installations and new setups. When doing any digital marketing activities, we firstly recognise the focus and approach for these 2 core aspects of a trades business.
At Aztera Marketing, we have helped a wide range of trades businesses implement tight and targeted digital marketing activities, where we have reviewed their website, paid ads campaigns, and we have implemented strong call to actions within the website design.
Read our more specific post on Digital Marketing for the Trades.
How is Ai influencing digital marketing?
With the new emergence of Ai, when we do Google searches and use key Ai platforms like Chat GPT , Claude, Gemini, you will more than likely be seeing an ‘Ai Overview’ snippet near the top of the page; the Ai snippet is providing a full summary answer to the person making the search enquiry. With having well developed website content that clearly communicates your products and services, it improves the likelihood that your business will get listed in the respective Ai Overview. This is where the statement you’ve heard of “content is king” truly holds in the modern era with Ai. So digital marketing now does extend into developing a website in a manner that is attractive and relevant for the online Ai platforms to recommend and reference your business in their Ai Overviews results.
How does Aztera Marketing work and support your Ai performance?
With the growing emergence of Ai, we help small and medium-sized businesses to improve their website, which includes tight business related content, service focused messaging, and other Ai friendly tools like Schema markup code. We also look at your other digital accounts, like social media accounts, to check they are all conveying the same positioning and messaging. This also supports your ai performance. Learn more about out Ai Search Marketing Service.
What is Your Recommended Approach?
For most small businesses in Wellington (and NZ wide) we typically recommend starting with reviewing your existing website to ensure it is well set up for enticing good leads and conversions. That is always our recommended starting point.
With the website reviewed and discussed with you, with many of our clients we progress into either improving your organic search engine optimisation ranking, along with including some paid ads campaign. Moving to paid ads is an extra step and progression in the level of active marketing, and we can happily talk to you further about this and how it could work best for your business.
Some common mistakes we observe
- A common mistake we do observe with some new enquiring clients is that they are keen to get into a higher level of paid ads campaigns without having their website at the level of delivering a good level of conversions.
- Not having clear headlines and on-page structure within their website, making it harder from the user experience point of view, to find the information they want.
- Having too many mixed ‘call to actions’ poorly placed throughout the website, so the customer isn’t given clear guidance of how best to contact you.
Our Small Business Digital Marketing Service
Click to learn more about our customised small business digital marketing service, and our Google Ads service.
If you are a new emerging small business and need a website to more effectively promote your products and services, read our post on Small Business Webites.
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At Aztera Marketing in Wellington we provide digital marketing services for a range of businesses. We are based in Wellington and support businesses NZ wide.
