Small businesses often lament the fact that they're at a disadvantage against bigger brands, which not only have larger marketing budgets, but can afford to offer much lower prices. But local businesses still have their own attractions, including a focus on quality and a commitment to their communities.

Small Business Saturday has emerged as a smart means of raising awareness about the value of shopping local, as noted by Marketing Land. The event, which comes on the heels of Black Friday, encourages consumers to spend their money wisely with businesses that reinvest that money in their local communities. This national retail day depends on the entire small business industry to promote it for their mutual benefit. Local businesses need the support of their communities, and an annual day dedicated to this relationship can give businesses a big boost. Here are some effective digital strategies for raising awareness of the event and driving traffic to your stores on Small Business Saturday.

It's that time again - time to gear up for back-to-school advertising! In a 2014 survey conducted by Accenture, 67 percent of respondents said that they planned to spend somewhere between $100 and $500 on back-to-school shopping, while 41 percent said they planned to spend at least $500. If you want your retail company to reap the potential rewards of this shopping season, you need to reengage with your existing customers and move new customers through the purchase journey quickly. Just remember the ABCs of back-to-school digital marketing: advertise, bargain and convert.

Are you trying to attract attention to your business? Though you might not immediately think that radio can augment a digital display-focused campaign, nothing could be further from the truth. You can bring your display and video marketing campaigns to the next level by using radio ads to create urgency and demand attention from consumers.

The "Window Shopping" Problem

Imagine that you own a car dealership. You promote your dealership through various active digital advertising campaigns that showcases new and used vehicles for sale. Your Web statistics look quite healthy, but your sales are not backing up your marketing efforts. How is this possible?

Millennials only care about their smartphones, boomers prefer to shop in store, and seniors are helplessly behind the technological times, right? You probably understand that things aren't really as black and white as that. The world is changing, and people — all people — are changing along with it, just in different ways. There are just as many ways for you to reach your customers, which is why an integrated marketing strategy is critical for your business.

Do Your Homework

Every business wants to reach as many potential customers as possible, but marketers can maximize efficiency by identifying just one or two demographics to focus on. Once you identify this sector, it is vital that you learn all you can about it. Although it might be tempting to generalize certain audiences (millennials only look at ads online, only those over 40 consume traditional media, etc.), it's important to perform some deeper research about the people you are trying to influence, as data can often subvert your expectations.

It can be an exhilarating experience to get that first real breakthrough on a marketing campaign. Whether a piece of content goes viral or a social networking channel passes a certain milestone, it feels great when you can demonstrate a proven success and count it as a reliable stream of revenue. However, just because you've found one marketing strategy that works, you shouldn't put all of your eggs in one basket.

Integrated marketing campaigns can help you grow your brand's presence even further. Though it can be tempting to devote all of your energy to a singular effort that has brought your business demonstrated success, investing your time to create an integrated plan will ultimately set the stage for long-term growth. Here are three key characteristics of any strong integrated marketing campaign.

If you want to deliver messages to the right audience at the right place and time, geo-precise targeting is the way to go. This marketing tactic helps you determine where your ideal customer is and deliver content to them based on that location. The increase in mobile users has made this hyperlocal strategy more relevant to a user's intent. Now you can serve up campaigns to people searching or viewing your products or services in a particular location, rather than where that user lives.

With geo-targeting, you leverage precise locations to increase your relevance to the user, as Google explains. This is ideal for targeting mobile users because you can set geographic boundaries (called geo-fencing) and deliver ads to mobile users when they enter this area.

Click-through rates have long been the standard measurement of banner ad success. The logic is simple: Low banner ad click-through rates mean that too few consumers are taking action as the direct result of exposure to your ad. Without these actions, the ad fails to deliver and advertisers have to eat the cost.

Click-through rates can be a good metric for assessing ad value, to be sure, and for some companies, the need to generate clicks remains an important component. It's misguided, however, to think that a banner ad's only form of success derives from driving a click on the ad. The more we learn about the function of banner advertising, along with the ways it can affect consumers and plant seeds for action later, the more we realize that banner ad click-through rates are not the be-all and end-all for this form of display advertising.

Beginning a display advertising campaign can feel like a daunting task. Though there is some data that suggests that a phenomenon known as "banner blindness" means most users scroll past ads instinctively, in the hands of a savvy marketer, display ads can be quite effective. In fact, the Wall Street Journal reports that the market for display ads is projected to double in the next five years, thanks to new innovations in the display advertising industry. So what separates ads that users scroll right past from ads that are engaging and highly clickable? It turns out that the best display ads have these three things in common.

 Every year, marketers must tweak their overall approach to respond not only to their brands' changing needs, but also to the industrywide trends that alter online marketing's best practices.

The target for these practices is constantly in motion, so the risk of making digital marketing mistakes is even greater. Brands must react on the fly and adjust quickly to keep their strategies firing on all cylinders, but businesses are leery of making impulsive decisions. And when the prevailing ideology behind best practices isn't understood, it's even easier to misinterpret how a brand should act and react.

Some of the worst mistakes will come when brands fail to trust the established practices that cover today's world of online marketing. It's critical to know how to react in moments when a clear, comprehensive read on the information isn't always possible. Here are three simple mistakes to avoid throughout the year.

Few marketing landscapes have as much influence on website visitor behavior as mobile. Here, spontaneous and immediate demands for information are driving website design, marketing strategies, brand awareness and user engagement.

Nielsen reports that 71 percent of Americans own a smartphone; this increases to 85 percent for millennials. Thus, it's no surprise Search Engine Watch reported that Google's mobile visitors surpassed desktop visitors for the first time in late 2014. This means that if you want to extend your audience reach, understanding the differences between user engagement on websites accessed via mobile versus those accessed via desktop is key.

Engagement

Search Engine Watch reports that desktop visits last three times longer on average than mobile visits, with more pages viewed and half the bounce rate. This is website mobile visitors want a rapid and smooth experience. When mobile users land on a page, they don't want to pinch and resize so they can read the content and find what they're looking for. Instead, they leave the site and head somewhere else with a better mobile experience.