Are you wondering how to do marketing for your small business?
Marketing for business is by far an essential part of any business, whether in-house or online, small or wide. People believe that 80-90% of your time should be spent on the promotion and marketing of the business.
Covid-19 has caused a sudden shift in the business industry. Most of the businesses had to transition online in record time.
According to a Deloitte and Facebook report:
- 78% of the small and medium-sized businesses started using digital tools to market their business during the pandemic.
- They were likely to target new customers and increase their revenue generation by 3.08 times by just shifting online.
Thousands of businesses are going on in the industry providing the same services as you are. The only way to stand out from the crowd is if you do something out of the box, whether it’s your product/service or marketing. People will not find out about your business unless you make efforts to promote it.
However, marketing a business can be a bit hard for a few reasons:
- Cutthroat competition in business
- Multiple methods of promotion
- Tough to choose the best marketing technique
- Deciding a feasible budget for marketing
- Lack of time
Nevertheless, marketing is necessary to gain a reputation in your respective industry to regulate the flow of organic leads on websites for your business.
The more time and effort you put into marketing, the more effective it can become for your business.
Marketing would benefit your online business in multiple ways:
- It will provide worldwide exposure.
- It is Affordable and cost-friendly.
- It will help your websites reach an audience in a reasonable time and manner.
- It will help your business gain brand value and trust.
- Establish authority in the industry.
- Improved search engine rankings.
There are numerous ways you can find, but we have listed a few most powerful methods of marketing that work out with every online business.
Following are the 5 most powerful marketing methods to promote your business online.
1. SEO Marketing for your business
Search engine optimization is a process of upgrading your website as a means to help it rank higher on search engines. The higher the rankings are, the higher the chances of attracting and engaging potential customers to your business.
Google, Yahoo and Bing and other search engines use multiple factors to rank your pages for search results.
Some of them are:
- Page speed: A page speed, also described as “page load time”, measures how much time content on any specific page takes to load. Google insights say that an ideal page takes no more than 2 seconds to load a page. Don’t forget that speed optimization is as important as your content is.
- Domain authority: A domain authority (DA) is a scale that measures search engine rankings of your website and predicts how well your website performs on search engines. Technical, on-page and off-page SEO, speed optimization as well as mobile-friendliness helps significantly in increasing the DA of the website.
- Website security: Website security, in general, is an essential measure taken to protect your website against any malicious damage from malware, etc. Security is also a necessary factor in ranking, as Google considers it a ranking factor.
- Mobile-friendliness: Stats say that 70% of website traffic generates from mobile phones. So this reason must be enough to consider mobile-friendliness. Mobile-friendliness shows that your site is easy to use and is momentarily responsive to visitors on their mobile phones.
- User experience: Customer satisfaction is a prime motive of any business, so user experience (UX) refers to the overall experience of the user while navigating a website. It involves all the elements it takes to frame this experience, such as usability, interaction, design and content, etc.
- On-page SEO: On-page SEO is a strategy that involves individual page optimization on your website for better search engine rankings. This also includes internal linking of pages to each other on the same domain.
SEO benefits your business in the following ways:
- It helps you get better search engine rankings (SERPs).
- Get organic traffic and leads.
- Strengthen communication with potential customers.
With the help of SEO, you can improve your website’s overall reach and rankings and boost your business in your industry.
2. Email marketing for your business
According to research, there are still 4 billion email users who prefer emails for connecting and outreach, making email marketing the most powerful way of engaging new and potential customers to your business.
Best way to use email marketing for your business
For Email marketing, you use personalized emails to convince your potential customers to take actions such as purchasing products or availing of services.
When customers visit your site, you ask them to sign up with their emails in exchange for something valuable like free tips, PDF, discount code etc. This way, you can keep them updated on brand new offers and products or deliver useful information, etc.
Email marketing offers you benefits such as:
- Helps you build an email list for outreach.
- Amazing way to strengthen your relationship with potential customers.
- Affordable and generates higher ROI than other channels of promotion.
Even so, the aim of these email newsletters must not solely be based on business promotions but also contribute to providing value to the customers.
Marketing through emails in business can be the most powerful way of promotion because people who sign up for the newsletter will most likely be the ones who will be genuinely interested in your services. It would be time-saving to reach out to 10 interested candidates rather than wasting time on 100 of those who might not be interested in your services/ products.
To connect with new customers, your newsletters need to be simple and to the point yet appealing. Use catchy headlines, an engaging body, courteous ending, and you are good to go.
You must keep it in mind not to spam your subscriber’s inbox with useless content and information. You can make a schedule and decide whether you want to send newsletters once a day, a week, biweekly or monthly. However, it should not be more than once a day.
3. Social media marketing for your business
According to a global overview report, 58.4% of the world is using social media, which makes it more than half of the world. Today, social media is as valuable as search engine rankings because of the massive use of social networking sites every day.
For social media business marketing, the following platforms give the best outcomes:
Most of these social media platforms work the same way, but one thing you must be aware of while promoting a business on social media is targeting the right audience.
Facebook, for instance, is the most powerful social media platform for reaching out to a massive audience. Facebook insights claim that there are 2.93 billion monthly active users, which makes it the most significant social networking site globally.
It would not be wise to ignore Facebook for marketing purposes where all potential audience is available in one forum.
We all are familiar with Facebook ads. They are cost-friendly and effective in terms of promoting business. You need to target the right audience and link your Facebook with the website because you need to drive the traffic back to your website.
According to Facebook, paid targeted advertising is 89% effective in business marketing. Facebook allows you to choose the audience of your preference with respect to location, interest, demography and behaviors.
Best time to post on the social media platform
Timing on social media platforms has a ton of impact on metrics. The peak times of posting content are set on social media specific to regions, time zones and audiences in order to get better engagements keeping in mind that off-time posting can harm your social media as well as website performance.
According to Sproutsocial insights, the following are the best days and times to post content on overall social media:
- Best days: Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday
- Best time: 9 am – 10 am
- The worst day to post: Sunday
These specific timings will help you create schedules for regular posting and engaging potential audiences. They are considered best for almost all social media platforms but can vary according to the audience and industry.
Using these promotional strategies and tips on all social media platforms such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, you can do wonders in your business.
4. Blogging for your business
Blogging is a perfect strategy for paying back to the community. Blogging is a powerful medium for gaining customers’ trust and increasing brand value along with establishing your brand respect, authority and credibility.
Through a simple blogging plan and strategy, you can grow your business, and in the meantime, you can give back resources, tools, tips and tricks free of cost benefits to the community.
Knowing that you are giving back to the community apart from gaining, people will naturally support your business. Blogging has that attribute to it as well.
If you choose to blog for the promotion of your business, you can effectively use it by publishing informative articles, and sharing videos and informational podcasts.
Furthermore, setting up a blog subscription for the readers would be a hit for you to reach customers, drive website traffic and build email lists.
Blogging gives you other significant benefits as well, such as:
- Organic and high quality leads.
- Rise in brand awareness.
- Improved search engine rankings (SERPs).
- Elevated user experience.
- Link building.
- Help you create email lists.
- Authority establishment in your field.
- Fresh content creation for social media posting.
- Increased sales of products/ services.
- EstablishCredibilityy in the industry.
Consistency is one of the common traits of successful bloggers. It is powerful enough to make you the most successful businessman among others. For better promotion, you require consistency, and It is up to you whether you choose to blog daily, weekly or monthly as per your schedule and the resources available.
Blogs can also help send newsletter to your email list, so that is a plus point.
Blogging has become very competitive in the online industry, so starting a blog can sometimes be tricky. If you want to start blogging to market your business, hiring a blogging consultant is recommended to help you get a better start.
5. Business Collaborations
Business collaboration is a powerful tool for making internal and external connections. It helps you create purposeful links within your business industry and outside the box.
LinkedIn can be a great start for developing a network with like-minded people or potential customers.
You can initiate joint ventures with other businesses through online forums as well.
For example, suppose you are a health counsellor and collaborate with healthcare providers who deal with dietary and nutrition. In that case, you will get organic leads of people suffering from health issues on your website in a short time span.
Collaborations will help you get exposure worldwide so start communicating and building links with the outside world.
Conclusion
Marketing for online business is not as complicated as it seems.
There are many ways of promoting an online business, but it is impossible to implement all of them at once. It is possible that one might work for us and might not work for you or may not be related to your business.
To help you find the best of the best, we have shortlisted the 5 most powerful marketing methods that have worked the best for us after a tireless struggle.
We suggest you take some time to try these methods out and find out which works best for you. Stick to the method you found best and work on that while trying out the other ones as well.
While you struggle with your marketing efforts, please remember that it is not a sprint, but a marathon and success will not come overnight.
Please share with us which marketing method you find helpful and powerful?
Source: https://wpsupportdesk.com/blog/marketing-for-small-business/
