Online Marketing Strategies for Small Business – Top 10
What can businesses do to promote themselves online? Well there’s probably a hundred or more ways to promote a business online. But I’ve got it down to my top 10 online marketing strategies to businesses can use to convert leads to sales.
1. Online marketing plan: The first thing a business must do before they start mucking around with keywords and social media is to plan. Every business that either has or wants an online presence must start with a comprehensive online marketing strategy.
2. SEO: Search engine optimisation is a natural follow on from your online marketing plan. From your plan you should have worked out who your target audience is. This will then determine your keywords which you can analyse further to identify the most profitable keywords for your website.
3. Social media: If you have a small business website but you’re not using social media strategies then you only doing a half job for your marketing. Facebook and Twitter are a great way to promote and market your business. Thousands of businesses have worked out the marketing power of Facebook but only a handful are using Twitter. My advice is to learn the marketing power of Twitter and co-ordinate it with your Facebook strategy. it’s not hard.
4. Images: Google has a specific search function for images. These images come from somewhere ie websites. If you sell a tangible product then you it is definitely worth putting images on your website and using image descriptions to describe these with relevant keywords. You may end up being on the top row of images. Images can boost website traffic very well, if used sparingly.
5. Online articles: pretty much what I’m doing now. Small businesses can write a handful of online articles that link back to their website.
6. Trust marketing: This is an online marketing philosophy rather than a strategy. Trust marketing is all about building relationships not flogging a product.
7. Social bookmarking: These are share sites I suppose you could say. Submit your website or online articles to social bookmarking sites such as Digg & Reddit and build a following.
8. Online forums: Research online forums relevant to your industry and post quality submissions.
9. Pay-per-click advertising: PPC as it is known can be highly effective in your overall online marketing strategy. Google AdWords and Facebook have very well known PPC platforms that can do great things for small business.
10. Video for SEO: You don’t have to be George Clooney or Meryl Streep. Using video to promote your business can do wonders for your SEO. Submit videos to YouTube, don’t do the hard sell, rather discuss your services or industry, make it entertaining and include relevant tags.
These are just some online marketing tips for small business to boost their online presence. I’ll end where I started. There are hundreds of ways businesses can promote themselves on the net. Pick the ones that you feel you are most comfortable with in terms of your knowledge and your time.
Online Marketing Techniques That Web Promotions Experts Use
So, you have a business with great products that you would like to sell online. Just having good products will not help your business to flourish. You need to know the core of the online selling methods to make your business popular. There are online marketing strategies that are going to help you make your product sell and earn you profits. As web promotion experts would advise, the two main marketing heads are a well-designed website and a killer marketing campaign.
1. Website designing
The website that you have developed to sell your products should be specifically designed to target your audience. Your aim is to make visitors land on your website and take action regarding the purchase. According to web promotion experts, the choice of carefully worded content is absolutely necessary to make your website a good one. By using specific keywords you need to ensure that your website link shows up in search engines when potential buyers search for an item that they wish to buy. Gripping content that the visitor sees on the search engine page makes him or her click on your website link. Besides being among the top listed ones, your website link should also be powerful enough to make the visitor choose to click on it to know more about your company. Once there, you need a carefully planned navigation system that the visitor finds convenient to use. Make sure that the products are easy to find using drop down menus or scroll buttons.
A good privacy policy and certification builds website reliability. This is very important to create trust in your company. Also include a good ‘About Us’ page and a ‘Contact Page’ with information about your company’s address and phone number to make the potential visitor trust you more. Payment method that is encrypted and make the transaction safe, is exactly what could trigger the sale.
2. Marketing strategies
Now that your website is ready and satisfies all marketing needs, you need other marketing strategies to increase the sales substantially. After all, making good profits is your aim and this can be achieved only when more people visit your website and buy products. As web promotion experts will advise you need both short term and long term strategies to be successful. The short term strategies are advertisements, forums and impressing search engines. You can buy links to advertise about your company. Link building strategies help to boost website traffic tremendously. Carefully worded links using AdWords can really help to increase your business. Even participation in forums can help. There are many ways in which you can please search engines by following the right organic SEO methods.
Long term strategies ensure that the traffic remains steady even after sometime. These will work better in ensuring repeat sales. The long term strategies used by web promotion experts are blogging, article marketing, social networking, newsletters, e mails, press releases and so on. Even these require careful planning to be implemented with success.