To stay competitive in today’s marketplace online marketing is a necessity for nearly all businesses. The current business landscape nearly requires that you have an online presence. Some business owners find online marketing intimidating. Although there are many aspects to online marketing that need to be learned, it is a straight forward process. So, relax, sit back and learn some reasons why you don’t need to be intimidated with online marketing.
Search engine optimization helps website owners attract visitors based on Internet search results. SEO tactics usually include the creation of valuable and unique content that Google and other search engines consider relevant to particular searches. Although SEO increasingly depends on content quality, structural principles remain relevant.
If you don’t boost your brand online, it is hard to stay competitive in today’s online marketplace. In this blog we will discuss some of the risks of not boosting your brand online.
You know you need to market online. However, just because you market online, doesn’t mean you’re successful at it. Why do some businesses fail at online marketing? What can you do to make sure you don’t become one of those how not to stories? In this article, we’ll talk about some ways you can fail to market online.
Simply put, businesses fail at online marketing for a variety of reasons. Many business owners don’t know the right online marketing strategies to employ, other business owners have the right strategies but they poorly execute the strategies. Whatever the reason, here are six things that can get you in trouble when you market online.
- You let SEO overshadow your content. SEO is important. We don’t deny that. However, you should not let SEO make your content weak. Good content is important. SEO friendly content should still be high quality. You want to provide your readers with relevant web content that matches the expectations of your target market. It must be well written and make sense. Don’t make your content search engine friendly and consumer unfriendly. Make sure your website is interesting so users will come back regularly, easy to navigate, and useful so it gives people something back for spending their time on your site.
- You try to master all social channels. This can be a common mistake especially considering there are so many social networks out there. Each one caters to a different type of social need. You may feel that you have to put effort in each and every social network on the planet. Unfortunately, this can leave you spread too thin. Spreading yourself too thin will mean you do a mediocre job of it. Instead, focus on 2-3 channels and do a stellar job of promoting your brand on those channels. Make sure those channels are most relevant to your target market. You should also consider the function of each network when making your choice. For example, small retailers might want to use Twitter for customer service, Facebook for promotions and Pinterest for visual engagement.
- Your website doesn’t meet user expectations. You know that the ultimate goal of marketing online is to drive traffic to your website and to boost conversions, aka sales. If the user interface of your website isn’t well put together, this is not going to happen. You might generate the traffic from your online marketing efforts, but they probably won’t stay on your website or buy from you. So, you must focus on design and user experience. Invest some time and effort in testing on how users interact with your website. Finally, you might need to assess your product offerings and range. This could be the ultimate problem.
- Your engagement efforts lack consistency. Consistency is key when you market online. You need to establish regularity in your marketing efforts. If you fail to do this, this will turn potential customers away and fail to engage them over a longer period of time. The point of online marketing is to engage people regularly. You should avoid a strategy where you have a period of high activity, followed by nothing. If you can’t be consistent with your online marketing strategy, you will lose people’s attention and business. You should not lose your enthusiasm even if your fan base is not growing as fast as you’d like it to. You can test out different types of content at different times of the day or week and see what hits and when. You will eventually see patterns and then you can market online accordingly. Online marketing can be a goldmine. You just have to be a patient with it – and definitely consistent.
- Learn the difference between marketing and spam. Email marketing can really help with customer retention. However, you don’t want to overindulge in it. People will get sick of hearing from you. It’s better to make targeted emails a few times a month than to update folks weekly or daily on your goings on. You should not purchase lists. It’s better to let your email lists grow organically. You want your email contacts to have signed up to join your list. Maybe some of those emails could be shortened and put up on your social media accounts or lengthened into a blog post? Don’t make your communications all about you. Try to make it worth people’s while to sign up for your newsletter. Inform them, educate them and entertain them.
- Your budget doesn’t add up to your ideas. You may have huge ideas but a tiny budget. You need to be realistic about your budget and what you can achieve within that budget. If you have faith in your success, you may want to expand that budget, but be clear that you are taking a risk. Growth requires expenditure especially if you’re just starting to market online and are building brand awareness. Investment also includes time so even if you depend on word of mouth or buzz marketing, you will have to put the time and effort in.
Online marketing success does not happen overnight. It requires patience and skill. Businesses often fail to market online when they’re not patient enough of have unrealistic expectations. You should build a solid marketing strategy. You can start slow, but you must remain consistent to see results.
One thing to remember about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is that it is a long-term strategy. Good SEO strategies take time, but they are well worth the effort. One major way to keep track of how you’re doing with your SEO strategies is to check on your SEO metrics. In this article, we’ll give you four SEO metrics that are vitally important for you to know. SEO metrics will help tell you if your SEO strategy is working the way you planned.
You may not realize this, but you need to market your business on social media. Social media is now a popular medium for businesses to market in. More than a billion people are now on Facebook alone. Research shows that nearly 2 in 3 adults use social media. Without a targeted social media campaign, you could be losing out on a lot of potential leads and customers.
So, why do you need to market your business in social media?
- Social Media gives you wider reach. With social media at your fingertips, you can reach a much larger audience than you could without it. Social media also allows you to determine the kind of audience you want to reach.
- Using social media helps you boost your website’s SEO. Search engine crawlers know which pages are consistently earning traffic and which are floating out there in the internet void, forgotten and unvisited. A killer content strategy for SEO is the most important part of earning top spots in search engine rankings, which will ensure you will be found online. Driving traffic to your optimized pages via social media will cause them to climb much faster in the search engine results pages (SERPs). That’s true especially if you use Google Plus. Although Google Plus is not a very popular social media network, Google indexes Google Plus searches and gives them ranking credit. If you include your links in a Google Plus post, it’s like getting double the SEO juice.
- Social media marketing is easily sharable. When you post your advertisement or marketing to social media, a user can easily share it with others. This means that once you’ve prepared a post, people can drive it to your target market – their friends and family who need your products and/or services.
- Studies show that a strong social media presence builds brand loyalty. There was a report published by Texas Tech University a few years back that said that brands with active social media profiles have more loyal customers. That is no less true today. When you’re engaging on social media and interacting with your customers or clients, you become less like a corporation and more like what you truly are – a unified group of people who share a vision. After all, that’s what your business is. On social media, people can see you for what you are and they often respond positively to it.
- Social media lets you respond quickly to your customers. When you share content on social media, you can keep track of it easily. This includes customer responses and feedback. You can also respond to these comments and the feedback. When you do, people realize you are an involved and interested company, one that cares about its customers. This will help you engage with your audience better. They’ll keep coming back to your social media profile for more information.
- Social Media can be niche marketed. For example, if you market with Facebook, you can join groups related to your products, industry and customer base. By posting links in these groups, you’ll help influence customers to check out your website. You can also answer questions on Quora as well. You can become the industry expert people are looking for.
As you can see, social media marketing has many benefits for businesses of all sizes and experience levels. You need to market your business in social media to improve your bottom line. Social media is a vibrant, active and interactive location to market yourself. You’ll get feedback in real time and, as long as you are prepared to remain responsive, social media marketing can only be good for you.
Google announced Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) in October 2015. Google AMP is an accessible framework for creating fast-loading mobile pages. Google AMP is an open-source initiative that is designed to enable publishers to easily improve the speed and the user experience for their mobile users without sacrificing any ad revenue that they may rely upon.
Most business owners have marketing strategies, which is a good start to the whole digital marketing process. However, have you prioritized your marketing strategies? If not, you should. Every business owner should prioritize their marketing strategies. How you prioritize your marketing strategies will be unique to you and your business structure.
Building your brand identity
Your brand is your marketing life blood. It’s how people know and relate to you. You need to have a shareable and recognizable identity. Work on your logo, first. If it’s not good, redo it. Remember to be consistent in your branding. It is your identity as a business and an important marketing strategy in and of itself. A good logo:
Establishes and communicates your corporate identity. Your logo is all about you and your business. It conveys what you want to convey to the populace.
Creates a lasting association between the image and your product/service. A strong logo creates an association with something greater than your business.
Differentiates your brand from competitors. You don’t want your logo to be similar to a competitor. You want it to stand out so your business will stand out.
Keeps your brand visible even when there are downturns. A good logo will remain recognizable even if your company hits hard times. People will still associate it with you and will come back to you when they’re ready.
Evokes an emotional response in customers. A good logo will hit people emotionally. Good logo designers know how to manipulate colors and shapes to elicit the emotional response you want.
Provides you with merchandising opportunities to further your brand. Your business may not be in the position to earn money off of its branding; however, your logo should ensure that if the opportunity arises, your business is ready for it.
Create an effective, exciting website that follows SEO best practices
There are so many studies out there that prove that consumers use online information to make decisions about purchases. Your website needs to be found when people are searching for businesses like yours. You do this by optimizing your content, your navigation and your URLs. Use targeted keywords on each of your web pages. Ensure that your website is built solidly, loads quickly, and keeps people’s attention.
A good website is like a brochure for your business. It will provide people with enough information for them to make a decision as to whether they want to work with you. Your website is a portal to drive sales. SEO is the way you get people to find your website. An effective website needs to be part of any solid marketing strategy.
Establish a vibrant email list.
Yes, email marketing is still a good way to get your message out to people. Email marketing is an effective and low cost way to market to targeted groups. Good email marketing campaigns result in increased brand awareness and sales. Email marketing can also give you important information you can use in future marketing decisions. Use performance data such as open and click-through rates to track consumer interaction with your email campaigns.
Effective email marketing starts with a quality email list. There are many ways for you to build your list. Why not capture emails through your website by asking for customer emails when they make purchases or perform other actions? As your list grows, a good marketing strategy is to segment it to target relevant products or services to different groups. You should also automate welcome and follow-up emails to keep customers informed about special offers, new products or services and other company happenings. Email marketing is an effective marketing strategy that every business should focus on.
We hope that these marketing strategies every businessperson should prioritize have helped you to decide what you need to focus on from a marketing standpoint. In business, it can be difficult deciding where to spend your marketing time and effort. If you prioritize these marketing strategies, you should be well on your way to marketing success. Solo SEO’s toolbox can help you define and refine your SEO marketing strategies. This is an important aspect of digital marketing. Contact us today for more information on how we can help you with your marketing priorities. We’re always happy to help.
As a small business owner, should you consider having a digital marketing strategy? The answer, in a nutshell, is yes. You should not only consider having a digital marketing strategy, you should have a digital marketing strategy and make constant adjustments and improvements. In this day and age you need a digital marketing strategy or you will be at a significant competitive disadvantage. Your competitors have a digital marketing strategy. If you don’t want to lose business to them, you need to create one yourself.
Can you do digital marketing without a strategy?
Yes, you can do digital marketing without a strategy, however, chances are high that you won’t be as successful, particularly in the long term. Many businesses don’t have a clear cut digital marketing strategy. A digital marketing strategy tells everyone including yourself that you take digital marketing seriously and that you understand that it is an important part of today’s marketing landscape. Businesses need a good digital marketing strategy to succeed online.
Why you should consider having a digital marketing strategy?
There are many reasons why you should consider having a digital marketing strategy. We’ll focus on four here. First and foremost, you should align your digital marketing strategy with your larger business goals. What are your biggest business goals and how can digital marketing help you achieve them? Whether you’re focused on acquiring new customers, taking your products or services into new markets, or building brand awareness for your company, a solid digital marketing strategy can help. Your digital marketing goals will determine which tactics, channels, messages you need to focus on to generate real, measureable results.
Second, successful digital marketing strategies require the right resources. When you have a solid digital marketing strategy that includes resource expenditures, you’ll more fully understand the scope of what it will take to accomplish your goals.. You may need staff time, a bigger budget or even IT resources to accomplish your digital marketing goals. Without a clear digital marketing strategy, you won’t even begin to know what you need to accomplish your goals.
Three, with a solid digital marketing strategy, you can minimize duplication and waste. Digital marketing can assist with or even replace some other marketing strategies. You may be able to email brochures instead of sending them via snail mail. Perhaps you want to have one social media account per channel for your business and one person managing the entire operation for consistency of content and message. Companies that have clear digital marketing strategies know what to focus on and what parts fit where.
Finally, you’ll want to continually improve your performance. Digital marketing is easy to adjust based on analytics. At Solo SEO, we have the tools to help you see where you are and where you need to go. You will want to measure the ROI (return on investment) of your digital marketing strategy regularly. You’ll probably be surprised at how good it is. Digital marketing gets results. That’s one reason why it’s so important. Knowing what matters most to you will help you figure out what to do next. It will also help you find the right analytics to create smart, data-driven feedback loops.
You need a solid digital marketing strategy in this day and age to stay competitive. Digital marketing is very important for your bottom line. It brings in new customers and helps you retain and engage old customers. It’s really vital for doing business in the 21st century. If you have questions about how Solo SEO can help you with your digital marketing, please contact us.
When you write a post, you want it to be interesting enough to get people to share it with everyone they know. How do you create a share-worthy post? There are a few things that people respond to in the things they read. The best posts are ones that include either something people can relate to or useful information that they can’t get anywhere else.
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