How to Market Your Business Online – Marketing is an important part of your business. You can do marketing manually or online using effective strategies to promote this business. Strategies are the best ways to improve the sale of your products and services.
Marketing online can be effective, if you know what you’re doing. The internet offers small business owners chances to market their business at almost no cost, as well as less pushback from the mainstream media.
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Capture email data
Ensure that you have a method of capturing email data from website visitors. Integrate an email sign-up option onto your site and begin building a database of customer data.
You can then use this data for a range of marketing incentives, such as email marketing or creating custom audiences on Facebook for targeted advertising. (Just make sure you’re GDPR compliant…)
Post to Facebook
It goes without saying that social media is one of the most valuable marketing tools out there. And it’s free. FREE. It’s best not to go signing up for every social media platform under the sun, just focus on those most suitable to your business.
Facebook is a viable option for almost all businesses. Unfortunately, the latest algorithm updates have made it harder than ever for businesses to gain visibility in the news feed without paying. But, you’ve got nothing to lose. Post regular updates – be engaging and exciting, don’t be too promotional, and be genuinely interesting.
Use Email Marketing
It isn’t enough to just send out emails. You will want to consider various email lists that cater to the specific needs of each individual and can present a personalized approach to your campaigns. Take a hard and clear look at the purchasing habits of your customers and use that information to develop your strategy.
Get Into Articles or News Stories
Work with a public relations professional to get your business into articles and news stories on topics related to what you do. It will not only help establish you as a trusted expert, but it will introduce your business to an even broader base of people. You can also sign up for free services that connect you with writers looking for sources, such as Help a Reporter Out.
Create a blog and post high-quality content regularly.
Clearly, the most important way you can market your business online is to build a blog where you can post and share high-quality content that adds an exceeding high amount of value on a regular basis. This is definitely a very long-term strategy, and it won’t pay off overnight, but every entrepreneur needs to understand the importance of embracing this online marketing method.
Not only does building a noteworthy blog in any industry or niche help to drive traffic by peaking the interest of Google, but it also leads to creating authority. If you can become an authority in your industry, you’ll garner the attention of consumers, the media and business owners alike. That, in turn, will snowball, build more authority, and eventually, enormous amounts of visibility and sales.
Market your content on Medium and Quora.
If you’re looking to get some early traffic, and you have a fairly new domain — less than 2 years old with little authority built up — you should work on marketing your content on sites like Medium and Quora. How does it work? Write one high-quality piece of content on your website. Make sure it’s keyword-centric, insightful, unique and adds a lot of value. Ensure that whatever you’re talking about helps people in some way, shape or form.
Emphasize your value proposition.
If there’s no difference between you and your competition, there’s no reason why a buyer would be compelled to work with you. Your value proposition is what will differentiate you from others in your space and make up your prospects’ minds that you’re the provider to go with. What do you do better than anyone in the industry? Conveying this makes a compelling argument.
Capitalize on short-term plays.
Start scrappy. As you scale, it’s critical to see ROI sooner. This will give you the momentum and cash flow to put toward larger projects, long-term plays, and more sustainable growth models.
Tactics that take time to build (such as SEO) are poor fits for your primary initiatives because you won’t see a return soon enough for your liking. If you have enough resources to start there, great, but don’t put all your eggs in that basket.
If you have evidence that people are taking to Google with purchasing intent for your particular solution, you may find that paid ads will give you that short-term ROI.
Put up multimedia on YouTube and Flickr
YouTube provides a free way to distribute creative promotional videos, but in order to succeed you must put up content that people want to view and are relevant to your business—a simple ad will not work. A Flickr profile can also help by giving you one place to compile all the photos for your business, and allows you to link back to your website.
Have Conversations with People
Interaction is the name of the game. You need to be able to address people’s needs or frustrations about your business or your field.
In fact, according to HubSpot, 85% of jobs are filled by networking. Sadly, however, one in four people don’t even try to network. Imagine how much potential for new clients and customers you are ignoring by talking with people.
This is where the above tip comes into play – social media platforms are excellent places to have conversations, from Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to Quora, Yelp and Reddit.
Above all, have conversations, not sales pitches. Don’t try to sell – just talk to people. If they are curious enough, they can click through your profile and learn more about you.
Interact with industry experts on Twitter
Twitter isn’t for everyone, but it does carry a whole array of benefits. It’s a great platform for engaging with industry experts and customers, as it’s a place where anyone can talk to anyone.
Respond to customer feedback, retweet the best user-generated content, and offer genuine input to industry discussions.
Generate website traffic with Pinterest
Pinterest isn’t suitable for a lot of businesses, but can work really well for some. The platform has one of the highest conversion rates in terms of converting browsers into buyers.
You can also generate significant website traffic and find out more about what your target users love.
Publish to Google Plus – yes, really!
Google Plus, that strange little platform that never quite hit the big time. Yet it’s still plodding along hoping that one day, something, anything will happen that propels it into social media stardom (not likely).
Still, despite the failings of Google Plus, it is still worth getting into the habit of pushing out any new content via Google Plus. After all, it’s a product of Google and if you want to climb those rankings, we suggest keeping Google sweet.
Encourage UGC
User-generated content (UGC) is content that has been created and published by unpaid fans of your business. It’s when someone loves your product or service so much that they take it upon themselves to share their experience with friends and family, usually via social media.
UGC typically occurs naturally, but there is no harm in encouraging it – if you don’t ask you don’t get! You can highlight the best posts every week on your social media channels, and even offer prizes to customers who get featured.
And speaking of prizes…
Running social media giveaways is a sure-fire way of increasing engagement and generating new followers. Not only can it be a nice way of saying thank you to existing customers and fans, it’s also a handy way of reaching potential new customers.
Okay, so it’s not entirely cost free, as you’ll need to give away a product, but there’s no need to spend any money on top of that. Just be sure to follow all the best practices of running a giveaway.
Ask your customers for testimonials
On the topic of reviews, be sure to generate as many testimonials and (positive) reviews as possible.
Whether it’s via Google, TrustPilot or for a dedicated testimonials section on your website, people trust other people. You’ll have to ask your customers for these, as people don’t very often give them naturally. Just a gentle prompt will do the trick.
Conclusion
Marketing your business is the easy part, but the tough part is selecting a marketing strategy that will attract more customers, and create 10 times more buzz than what you expected
There’s definitely enough information here to keep you occupied for quite some time. It always helps to have a marketing budget, but these free steps are the best place to start. Good luck!