That said, I’ve also learned that many of these larger, enterprise-caliber brands have learned to leverage certain online marketing techniques quite well. I’m convinced that one of the main reasons small businesses don’t leverage these techniques is simple lack of awareness, so I figured I would share my own personal list of highly effective enterprise techniques that a small business can use:

While search engine optimization still relies heavily on human elbow grease, there are plenty of elements that can be automated to help speed up implementation and improve return on investment. For example, there are a variety of tools that can automate the identification of link building targets. One of my favorites is the Clique Hunter tool offered by Majestic SEO, which allows you to identify the links that your competitors have in common (which typically means that they are links you should be able to acquire as well) but there are many others.

In addition, depending on the kind of site and content management system you have in place, there are certain techniques that can automate the process of optimizing on-page elements for your entire site. For example, if your site’s pages are database-driven (this is common for e-commerce sites) you can leverage said database to introduce relevant keywords into the title tag and other meta elements of each individual page at once. This approach to optimizing on-page factors isn’t quite as effective as manual page-by-page keyword research and construction, but it can be a very valuable approach that drives immediate return on investment for sites with a high number of pages.

Lastly, there are some amazing tools out there that can automate the project management elements of SEO. My personal favorite is Raven Tools, which is a fairly comprehensive tool that I use mainly for link building project management as well as to automatically track link building targets and determine whether the link is active or not (as opposed to trying to manually check that kind of thing).

Social media monitoring

Some of the more popular social media monitoring tools out there cost a pretty penny, but the good news is that there are plenty of high-quality options that are either free or extremely cost effective. In fact, simply setting up some well-configured Google Alerts can often do the trick. Remember that in addition to tracking your own brand name, you should also track competitor brands, product terms and general industry terms.  If you’re a local/regional business, then adding local/regional modifiers also makes a lot of sense. Also, remember to track specific questions that suggest a user that is in buying mode (e.g “where can I buy…”)

One technique that will help you weed out a lot of the noise from your monitoring data is the use of quotations or other handy search operators to capture exact-match phrases. So for example, if you sell blue widgets in Miami, Florida, it’s a good idea to use the command “Miami blue widgets” (as well as phrases like “blue widgets in Miami”) as opposed to simply typing in Miami blue widgets.

Email marketing

Simply put, email marketing is almost always the most lucrative and cost effective of all enterprise-caliber marketing techniques. It’s also the one that’s the least understood and most underutilized by smaller businesses. The key is relevance and consistency. Oh, and you have to actually ask folks to subscribe to your email list. That means including prominent “subscribe to email” calls to action within your site as well as within any conversion vehicles within the site (purchase process, membership sign-up, etc).  If you have a brick-and-mortar business, make sure to setup a system for collecting email addresses at the point of purchase.

Now back to that “relevancy” thing.  Sending relevant email messaging requires that you collect as much information about your users as possible up front, so that you can then segment your email subscribers into relevant groupings.

• Are they male or female?
• How old are they?
• Do they have kids?
• Where do they live?
• What kind of phone do they have and is it a smartphone?
• What kind of social networks do they frequent, if any?

These and other key questions can be leveraged to ensure that the marketing emails said user receives reflects their specific demographic and psychographic profile. The more relevant, the more likely said user is going to open your emails and continue to be actively subscribed for future messaging.

And as for consistency, it’s ok to email users more than once a year or once a quarter or even once a month. As long as the message is relevant and provides some sort of value, users are typically more than happy to receive emails on a weekly (or in some cases, daily) basis.

Measuring all the way through to sales and revenue

This is a technique that even many large companies struggle with, particularly if the sale and revenue isn’t immediate (e.g. an e-commerce transaction) but that doesn’t mean that it’s impossible – or even all that difficult – for a small business to implement. It simply requires that you create a system for tracking a web-based lead all the way through to a real-life transaction. That requires the implementation of a sales lead and customer-relationship-management (e.g. CRM) platform like Sales Force. It also often requires the implementation of things like call tracking, which allow you to trace how an online visit turns into a phone consultation. Bridging the gap between web visit and real-life sales cycle will help you identify your most profitable marketing channels, which in turn, will let you devote more resources into those specific channels.