The internet is a powerful tool with limitless opportunities. You can use the World Wide Web to globalize your business as opposed to olden times when you would be trapped within the boundaries of your Country or where your business originated. Creating a strong (and noticed) online presence has now become very simple and this has been proven to boost businesses as well as broaden clientele. It is up to you, however, to optimize this tool and make it work for you.
Much like pushing your business on the ground, you will also need to market your business on the Web, probably even more so. In online marketing you have to understand that there is far more competition on the internet, many more people from around the world doing exactly what you are trying to do, therefore, you have to stand out from the crowd! Most marketing ventures are trial and error but I am going to provide a few tips that should help you minimise the “error phase”.
Know Your Target Audience
If you “market” your business without a clearly defined target audience, you will be marketing aimlessly and will never get serious attention from potential clients. It is much easier to build a marketing strategy if you know exactly who your target market is. Who will your product or service interest? What age group? Their gender? Create a customer profile and know your customer.
Why? Put it this way, when you are calling a company for information and you don’t know exactly who to ask for, its highly likely that you’ll keep getting transferred from department to department and end up frustrated and giving up. You are then left angry and possibly with more questions than answers. On the contrary, if you know exactly who you should be talking to, you can call the company and ask for that person, get your answers and avoid being transferred aimlessly – Simple! If you know who to talk to, then you can determine a way to make contact with the correct person or department.
Make Your Presence Known
Having a website is one of the key factors in online marketing. It is how your customers connect with you, how you keep them updated on your products & services, how you can attract potential new business and how you can acquire feedback from existing customers. It is, on many occasions, their first impression of you and as they say “first impressions count”.
Your website should look professional and you should spend as much time as possible building this platform and be consistent with the content you post. If you are going to post blogs, then do so religiously, always be on time so your potential clients will see something new on a weekly or more frequent basis when they visit your site. This will ultimately translate into how serious you are about what you are doing and the business you are running.
While blogging, be sure to use bullet points, pictures, different font styles and highlights. All these little tricks have been proven to keep the reader’s attention longer, and enough time for them to get through your blog.
Keep your website content current and this may assist in generating additional traffic to your site. Make sure your site is structured well and user friendly so that visitors to your site can manoeuvre freely.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
When someone searches something even remotely similar to your business you want to be in the first set of results displayed when they hit “search” right? Of course you do! You do this by using keywords; spend time researching keywords that are commonly searched so you can include these in anything you post on your site or blog.
If you are blogging, you may have the option to use tags for each post. Tags are keywords for your blog post. For example, if you post about small businesses, one keyword might be “business” and if someone searches “business” then it is more likely that a link to you blog post will pop up, which will generate traffic to your site.
SEO can be a tedious process but it needs to be done, use terms that you know your target audience will be searching for. The more active your website, the higher you will appear on the search result pages.
Social Media
Almost everybody in the entire world uses social media. Most people use it to interact with friends or keep up with celebrities but what many do not know is the power that social media can bring to your business. Use social media sites to promote your blog posts and communicate with customers and clients.
When you create a company page on Facebook, it gives you the option to create an advertisement. It asks how many people you would like to reach out to and their age groups, you pay a small fee and they post your ad directly to potential customers’ home pages.
It is now up to you to keep that Facebook page active and current so that when people visit your page, they remain interested and want to keep following what you are posting and ultimately click that “like” button.
Create a twitter account, YouTube, Pinterest, Myspace and Instagram account, the list goes on; each of these websites also gives you the option to create Ads. Yes, Ads cost money, but it is a small price to pay for your success in the long run. Make your presence known. If you must, hire a Virtual Assistant to keep those pages up to date, this will, in many cases, be the avenue customers will take to contact you.
Analyze Often
Once you have created an online marketing strategy you are comfortable with, develop some positive habits. Read daily, there are always new ways to better yourself and improve your business. There are also new ideas you can incorporate on your website that will increase viewership. Look for areas of improvement and look for trends. Keep checking, monitoring and analysing your site and social media pages.
If you see that something is not going to plan, ask for expert help. And, most of all, be patient; empires were not built in a day.
