A Quick Guide To Getting it Right, and Getting Results.
Marketing online for most small businesses can be a daunting thought, it is like a weird alien land to most business owners, and not only do they have no idea where to go or what to do online to market their business, but they get frustrated when the few things they do try don’t get them any results.
So is the online world really worth it? Or are you better just doing business purely offline? In this quick guide to getting it right starting out, I will cover the good and bad of having a website for your business, and some great ways to market your business online for better results.
Pros and Cons of Establishing Your Own Website:
Your website is a MASSIVE leveraging tool for your business. It never closes, so you can market your business around the clock, and if your business is not limited to local customers, you can do business easily around the world. Getting your business online is the fastest way to grow a business by far.
There are also so many tools to help you market and systemise your business online, which will help you to get more customers, and grow your business while working less.
Going online can be expensive though, and it can take a lot of time and work to get a site up and running that is going to get your business real results. Unfortunately most website designers have no clue about marketing and sales online and so they will build you a nice looking website that does not get you any results. Businesses need to make sure that they do their research and find a good web designer that not only has the technical knowledge but also has a good understanding of sales and marketing online.
I am constantly getting business owners coming to me that are frustrated that they have spent all this money and time on building a site and 6 months or a year down the track it is getting little or no results. I then build them a site and within the first two months they have massively increased their results from their old site.
There is also a lot of information out there about marketing your business online, some is great but most of the information is completely wrong, and so business owners are lost and frustrated about how to get real results online.
How to ensure the right Customers are Finding You:
The key to targeting the right customers is lots of research. It may sound boring, but some good solid research done upfront gives businesses massive reward later.
Researching your ideal customer, finding out where they are ‘hanging’ out online, and working out how to target them is a KEY element to successfully marketing a business online.
SEO and getting ranked highly in the search engines can be a slow process with a lot of work put in, but put simply it is about researching and targeting great keywords, that not only have good search volumes, but also has a low-moderate level of competition (because you don’t want to try to compete with highly competitive ones), and the keywords need to be able to have a monetary value – meaning that the people that search for a particular keyword is an actual potential client and not just looking for say a definition of a word.
Once you have the keywords you want to target, then you need to do a number of things on your site to get your site highly optimized for the search engines and then there is a number of things off your site that you need to do as well – like getting good quality backlinks. Something that most business owners don’t know is that the quality of backlinks is very important, you are better getting fewer higher quality backlinks than getting more lower quality ones.
Using Social Media:
So many businesses are wasting their time and money on social media. Is that because it doesn’t work? No! Social Media is such a powerful tool that most (not all) businesses can use to gain new leads and new customers for their business, but again there is so much misinformation out there that is mean businesses are wasting time and money in social media and not getting any results.
Social media really helps your business spread its message and your promotions go viral. Look at most of the big businesses around the world and so many of them are doing business on social media – because it works.
Create your presence on social media, build a following, give your fans/followers/friends valuable content and information that is useful to them, build relationships with your followers and move them into a marketing and sales funnel.
Businesses doing their own PR:
It is the easiest time possible for businesses to do their PR as the internet has made journalists and the media so much more accessible.
Find publications and media sources that are relevant to your business: if you are in the health and fitness industry then send your press releases to health and fitness magazines and publishers, you will get better results targeting media that is relevant to your business rather than the newspapers or tv channels that is targeted at the masses.
Do press releases when your business has something that is “newsworthy”, don’t just make it about blatantly self promoting yourself.
Most media companies will now accept online press releases so it is even easier than it used to be.
It is good to do press releases on a regular basis, and for the minor press releases businesses can use the free press release distribution sites like: prlog.org or pr.com. But if a business has major news and want to do an important press release then they can use one of the many paid services to distribute the release like PRWeb.com or PRNewswire.com.
So yes, the online world can be daunting and overwhelming to small businesses, it is easy to get lost in the flood of information or led down the wrong track, but with the right information and team behind you, you can massively grow your business online. In fact, businesses that are online, consistently see better revenue growth and more business, than those that are not, so now is the time to get online and get your business moving forward.
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