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Small businesses should ensure they invest enough time and effort into their online marketing activities in order to convert visitors into customers.

Stefan Drew, who is known as the Marketing Magician, noted that online marketing is the best way to ensure campaigns are effective.

Content marketing by means of a website or blog can be highly effective, whereas email newsletters should also be included in a small business online marketing strategy.

Mr Drew said: "Email is one of the most forgotten forms of marketing there is. Everyone thinks about junk emails, but in actual fact, good email campaigns are fantastic."

The key thing to remember is to have an integrated marketing strategy – or as Mr Drew puts it: "I would suggest that [small businesses] don't put all their eggs in one basket and just rely on one form of advertising or promotion."

Free online marketing channels

Free PR and marketing channels should also be exploited, according to the Marketing Magician, and where money is spent on advertising and other forms of publicity, returns should be measured.

Unless small businesses test and measure the responses they get to their marketing, they will not know whether it was a cost-effective option.

"Anything they do, they need to test and measure, just to confirm the number of responses they get back and whether they convert that into customers," Mr Drew concluded.

In order to effectively measure and analyse the results of an online marketing campaign, companies should have clear goals in mind when they determine their strategy.

For example, if they want to see an improved performance in search engine results pages, they may want to focus their content marketing efforts on industry news articles initially. If the key focus is building engagement, blog posts may be a better option.

Regardless of the content types they choose, the content strategy needs to be flexible, so that it can be adapted in line with the results that are measured after a few months.