Gaining more visibility on the market should be every business owner’s number one priority; this is exactly what marketing is all about. A company that doesn’t invest in marketing is – in most cases – going to fail. If people don’t even know about the existence of your business, producing solid profits becomes almost impossible, especially if we’re talking about a small business. A good marketing campaign is crucial for increasing your chances of growing your business. But, of course, apart from promoting your brand, you also have to make sure that you can deliver what you promised. If you’re able to do so, you’ll manage to gather an ever-growing crowd of supportive customers around you. To stay competitive in today’s digital age, businesses need to adopt digital solutions that enable them to connect with customers and streamline their operations.
We know that in the physical world marketing manifests itself in the form of TV and magazine advertisements, radio, billboards, flyers, newspapers, etc. But when it comes to marketing on the Internet, or web marketing, the strategies to promote your business are vastly different. We’ll get to that in a minute. Now, the question you might ask yourself is: “Is web marketing better than traditional marketing?”. From an economical standpoint, yes, it is. Web marketing has significantly reduced costs compared to the traditional way: for small to medium-sized businesses, good digital marketing on average costs between $2500 to $12,000 a month, while traditional marketing can cost up to $8 million just to set up, due to the limited ad space offered by the mediums we mentioned earlier (source: WebFX).
With that being said, web marketing is not exactly all sunshine and rainbows. It is true that creating online ads is much cheaper than broadcasting them on national TV, but this makes it harder for small businesses to get noticed online. Millions of companies all around the world aim at establishing a solid online presence, and the lowered web marketing costs compared to traditional marketing represent one of the main incentives to do so: that’s why the competition online is fierce.
You’ve got to have the best marketing strategy if you want to win and emerge from this infinite sea of brands and businesses. If you’re not sure about what strategies we’re talking about, keep reading, because we’re going to list them right below:
– Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
– Pay-per-click marketing (PPC)
– Good web design
– Social media marketing
– Content marketing
– Email marketing
Being able to implement all or most of these web marketing strategies can give your business a considerable boost, which will result in increased online exposure and, consequently, profit.
1) SEO, or Search Engine Optimization
SEO can help your website pop up more in search results. It works by ranking a website higher on the search results list based primarily on keywords and key sentences contained in said website. In order to promote your site to a higher rank, you’ll have to make sure that you use and highlight important words and phrases that describe what your business is about and the content of your site. SEO consists in:
On-Page SEO – make your webpages SEO-friendly and your content easy to read by search engine crawlers
Off-Page SEO – promote your website for the purpose of getting high-quality links from other websites
Technical SEO – make sure that your website is free of crawl errors and other issues that might keep search engines from indexing your website properly (want to know more about indexing? We have an article about it here!)
SEO Content – write content that satisfies the user’s intent
Local SEO – optimize your website for location-aware searches and to get more clients to your physical store
Source: Reliablesoft
2) PPC, or pay-per-click advertising
Here’s how the PPC ad strategy works: you can bid for placement in a search engine’s sponsored links for specific keywords and phrases. In case your bid is among the highest for any given keyword, your ad will appear above organic search results when users enter that keyword into the search bar. PPC can be of the Paid Search type, or the Paid Social Marketing type. We described Paid Search above, while Paid Social Marketing refers to PPC ads that appear on social media platforms.
3) Good web design
Don’t underestimate the importance of a good-looking website. A cluttered, disorganized, unprofessional-looking site can easily turn your potential customers away. Begin by investing your time and money on the foundations of the site, such as website information architecture (IA), then you can focus on smaller things such as webpage design and layout, colors and fonts, image placement, etc.
To explore further possibilities and elevate your website’s aesthetics, be sure to know more on creative web design services available in the market.
4) Social media marketing
The importance of social media is undeniable, considering how billions of users visit their favorite social media platforms every month (Facebook has roughly 2.89 billion monthly active users!). Such numbers imply a valuable opportunity for marketers to promote any business through social networks. Take into account the idea of creating a profile for your business to increase its visibility, or start advertising your products/services on social media.
5) Marketing through content
Content such as blog articles, videos, infographics, ebooks, etc. can help generate new leads online: this strategy is called Content Marketing. Your target audience can get to know your brand thanks to the content you create about it, it’s a way of establishing a stronger business-customer relationship.
6) Email marketing
Keep your customers always informed about new products/services you have in store by asking them to join your website’s newsletter. You can cater to the specific needs of each individual, making it a more personalized approach: you’ll just need to take a look at the purchasing habits of your customers and send emails accordingly.