Online business advertising can be as unique as the business itself. Often, the venue you choose to promote your products or services reflects the nature of your business. But, you have to try new advertising methods, because the online world is changing pretty fast, and you have to discover new ways to promote your online business successfully.
Today’s youth is growing up with many new communication methods than that of older generations. Phone calls, hand-shakes, door-to-door sales, calls, and business cards aren’t all that they used to be. If you want to reach today’s tech-savvy consumer, you need to have a very strong online presence in all available resources.
A few small business advertising tips you need to know
1) An Effective Website
Some business owners think that they don’t necessarily need a website. This simply isn’t true. If you aren’t online, get there. If you already have a website, review it and make sure it is optimized for search engine optimization and that it is a great website that represents your business well.
2) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is an essential part of your website. Learn all you can about SEO and promoting your website. To reach today’s consumer, you need to get your website in front of them. This is done through the search engines. SEO is a necessity for all the businesses.
3) Article Writing.
This is an excellent resource for marketing yourself online. More consumers are turning to the web to get their questions answered about virtually anything. Be creative and share your knowledge. This can help your SEO with the proper links and keywords. The search engines love the high-quality content. This way you will achieve higher rankings and more traffic pretty fast.
4) Autoresponders and Email Marketing
Create an autoresponder email series. For example, let’s say you are an author trying to promote your book. You may want to offer a series of articles or self-help emails that lead up to purchasing your book. This helps establish you as an expert within your field and a trusted resource for those who sign up to receive your ‘newsletter’ series.
5) Local Online Listings.
Most consumers turn to the Internet to find a business name and phone number before they reach for the yellow pages. Try searching for your business and see what comes up. Can a prospective client find your business online? What about a phone number? Try looking into Google places and registering your business. Localized searches are very important for your business.
6) Social Media Marketing
Social media is a very effective tool to promote your business and grow your brand. With social media marketing, you can reach your target audience worldwide. Also, with an effective marketing plan, you can increase your traffic and sales.
Create a Marketing Plan for your Online Business
Every year businesses fail or lose revenue because they don’t have an effective marketing plan. The marketing plan for the online business is crucial in today’s competitive markets.
4 Tips on How to Create a Marketing Plan
- The Potential Client: It’s important to perform market research to decide who your perfect customer is. Think about their age, income, geographic region, and their needs.
Determining the type of customer you want to reach will help you assess the optimum and most efficient ways to market your business online to reach them.
- Promotion Ideas: Consider the ways that you could boost your online business simplifying it into short-term and long-term strategies. Those strategies can be further defined by your budget.
You can build traffic quickly with paid marketing methods or are you going to use slower low-cost marketing methods.
Short-Term – Facebook ads, search engine optimization, and marketing,
Long-Term – Social media, article and video marketing, list building, local search optimization
Paid Traffic – PPC, Facebook ads, offline print marketing
Free / Low Cost – Social media engagement, online classifieds, Forum engagement, blogging, local search optimization
- Branding: Marketing online is no longer about having a good-looking website, it’s about being consistent with your business personality.
It is worth investing time and resources to ensure that your identity is recognizable whether the customer is on your Facebook page, youtube channel, Twitter page, website or reading an article you have on ezines. Branding helps identify you as a consistent expert in your online business.
- Budget: To be consistent in creating and following a marketing plan for an online business it is important to set an annual and monthly budget. Research the costs involved in advertising and marketing your businesses in line with the promotion ideas you decided on.
The online world has many tools and services that you may feel you need but you can quickly spend your budget without results. First research and discover what your business marketing plan needs and then invest money. Attention! Not All Your Budget.
It is important to periodically look back and reassess your marketing efforts to ensure that the methods you are using are working to your best advantage. The technology is changing pretty fast.
Something that works before 3 months doesn’t work now! Also, search engines like Google very often are changing their algorithms.
You have to know the new techniques and tips to create an effective marketing plan for your online business.