Tag Archives: Online Marketing

Internet Marketing Strategies That Will Always Be Relevant

When it comes to running small businesses, internet marketing can be an integral component of the overall marketing strategy. Every small company needs effective internet marketing strategies whether it is doing online business or not. However, it is imperative to note that strategies that were effective in the past may not work in the future. Every business owner has to be aware of how dynamic the online marketing environment is. Relying on out-of-date online marketing strategies is going to be costly and futile. Below is a rundown of proven digital marketing strategies that are not only highly effective but also timeless.

Relevant Internet Marketing Strategies

Email Marketing

Email marketing has been proven to be one of the strongest internet marketing strategies in today’s world. Powerful email messages could stir the hearts of customers into supporting business and make purchases for the benefit of your company. The primary purpose of email marketing is to develop brand awareness through transmission of advertisements or to solicit sales and get donations for business recommendations. This can be achieved by sending emails to selling lists or the existing customer base.

Email marketing can take two distinctive forms: direct email and transactional email. Direct email marketing has to do with sending emails intended for communication through promotional messages. An example of this approach is when a company sends a catalog of products or email information concerning a special offer. The email addresses may be known to the company or may even be rented from service companies. On the other hand, transactional email marketing strategy makes use of the messages produced through customer’s reaction to a company. In other words, this type of communication is to customers who have agreed to receive emails from your company. The message can be in the form of forgotten password resets, reorder emails, basket messages, and order confirmation emails among other forms.

Content Marketing

Content marketing has to do with providing valuable information to potential customers. The information can be about your product or general issues of interest. Your articles, website, videos, blog posts, photos, and other forms of communicating must deliver high-quality content material that is useful to your target audience. When you deliver excellent content, people will get to know, like, and even trust you. They will use it, share it, and eventually buy from you.

Social Media Marketing

Whether you like them or not, social media platforms cannot be ignored. Some of your customers are obviously using social media sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram among others. It is imperative that you integrate your business to social media sites and ensure that you post regularly. It is also important to engage your audience and ensure that the content you post is not only relevant but also great in quality. However, you have to analyze your audience to know the social media sites they are on to avoid wasting time on the sites they hardly visit.

Search Engine Marketing

People use search engines when they want to find something on the web. Hundreds of millions of searches are conducted every day on search engines such as yahoo.com, google.com, and msn.com among others. Some people will be looking for your website or for a product that you deal with. So, how can you capture the people that are searching what your business has to offer? This is achieved through a technique known as search engine marketing.

The idea is to make your company more visible when people search for products that you offer. The aim is to rank highest or make your website appear on the first pages of the main search engines when people search for products your company sells. To achieve this, you might need to seek assistance from experienced internet marketers offering search engine optimization (SEO) services.

Local Search Marketing

Although the internet allows us to interact with anyone anywhere in the world, we do not always need the worldwide part of the web. In fact, the number of local business searches done on the Google is on the rise as more and more people realize how adept the major search engine can be when it come to providing more localized search results when required. To take advantage of this, it is imperative for you as the business owner to understand the value of local search marketing.

The greatest advantage of local search marketing has to do with the quality of the traffic you are likely to attract. Most of the people searching for goods and services are looking for local. Thus, defining your location will give you exposure to the people that matter most.

In conclusion, it is apparent that there are several effective internet marketing strategies you could integrate into your overall marketing strategy whether your business is online or offline. Discussed above are the online marketing strategies that will always be relevant. Whichever strategies you choose, always emphasize quality before quantity.

internet marketing strategies

The Online Marketing Your Customers Really Want

When it comes to online marketing, you want your company at it’s best. Websites that have a solid reputation have a done a really good job at marketing themselves off and online. It takes a lot of hard work and time, but pays off in the long run.

Establishing your reputation and trust factors with anyone that contacts you is a must. Here are a few of my favorite online marketing tips when it comes to representing yourself or your brand online.

Online Marketing Tips

Be Social…

Social Media is the easiest and best way to communicate with the new generation of customers. This works for both good and bad reviews. Make sure you’re spending time responding to negative reviews online.

Handling negative reviews can help just as much, if not more than positive reviews when a customer is searching for a service. Some customers even put more stock into trusting that you’ll see your service through, right or wrong.

Be Persuasive…

Online MarketingUse the words that your customers are searching for. Focus on persuasive words that encourage customer interaction, in particular: new, instantly, and free. When customers see these words, they’ll enjoy their purchases more due to assumed value given to them.

Don’t just sell your products, show that you’re willing to go the extra mile and offer an outstanding service to them. Afterall, the customer went through the steps to select you, don’t let them continue to feel the hassle of a difficult process if it’s unnecessary.

Be Personal…

Always show the customer seeing themselves needing your service. Avoid getting granular right from the start. Take the time to listen to the customer. Hear their issues and give high level advice you think they would need. Automatically focusing on the granular nitty-gritty details may confuse the customer or cause confusion about the service they’re searching for and push them away.

Personal customization is perfect for establishing long-term relationships with clients. If you personalize everyone’s experience, the customer in turn will likely remember you the next time; or even recommend you more easily to their friends and family.

Be Genuine…

Customers appreciate a quick response to any question they have. If a customer is reaching out to your business through email, social media, contact form, etc; always respond genuinely.

Only push a service or a product if it can answer a direct question that a customer may have. Being aggressive for a sale can have a very negative effect on your brand or business(Verizon Pushy Sales Tactics). Make sure your responses are proper and serve a purpose to benefiting the customer.

Quick tips for answer a message:

  • Avoid aggressiveness – pushy sales pitches end up pushing people away
  • Stay transparent – avoid smoke and mirror message
  • Recognize responsibility – take ownership of any mistakes, or if you can easily help a customer in need

Be Understanding…

Just like the being genuine above, listen to your customers when they speak. Take their actions and insights and work to see if it will improve your process. Work to make sure that you can adapt to their needs to continue providing the best service possible, even if it’s a per customer situation.

Be Smart…

Knowledge is power. Don’t hesitate to write or promote what you know on your website. Start a blog, start writing, take pictures of your work, and get personal reviews in text and video. Start showing off and don’t hesitate to show that you’re a subject matter expert in your field.

While this is the most “SEO” friendly concept in this post – it rings true across the board. There is a time and a place to show your work, the brand support, etc. Becoming a subject matter expert is the end game for a lot of businesses. Brand trust gets established the most in this phase, and you should always think about ways to show off your good work.

So there you have it, my favorite tips when it comes to online marketing. What are yours? Feel free to leave your favorite ideas or recommendations in the comments below!

Internet Marketing For Small Business Tips

Every site owner thinks it’s more complicated than it is to market themselves online. In reality, it’s super simple to get these 5 internet marketing for small business tips right in order to set yourselves up for success, and possibly get ahead of the competitor within the internet marketing front.

Sure, when it comes to applying SEO techniques to your website, there’s more complicated strategies and tactics that can be used. That’s where SEO consultants like myself would come in, however these fundamental SEO and internet marketing for small business tips are what I ended up spending a majority of my time on, simply because the small business owner didn’t understand to apply these helpful tips in the first place.

Internet Marketing for Small Business Tips

Write about your services

Too many times to count have I seen this fundamental tip completely missed when it comes to adding information about the services the business provides. I cringe when I see a service page that has a list of services performed and nothing more. It’s not service specific either, hair salons, construction companies, healthcare professionals ALL do this incorrectly.

In order to have a better chance of being found on Google, you must create more pages to your site. The more pages your website has, the more opportunity it has to be found by people searching for specific terms.

A few simple tips come from this recommendation as well;

  1. Each service should have it’s own web page.
  2. Each service page should have 300-500 words of content discussing the service, areas of support, anything relevant that the customer may search for
  3. If possible, pages should have testimonials / before and after shots of projects / something captivating that could convince a person to hire you

Get social!

Another fundamental thing that is often considered a missed opportunity. At this point, for local SEO purposes every single business should have a Google+ Business Page, Facebook Page, and a Twitter profile. Those three social media sites can have the ability to help your website, but also give people an outlet to write about your business(good or bad). What a better way to get the temperature of your business over time, or use it to push out services/daily specials you may have.

While it’s true that a lot of this is common knowledge, it is frustrating as a consumer when you can’t find anything about a particular company online. In this day and age, it’s almost alarming to not see something about a company within the social media sphere, which is why it’s astounding that it still isn’t an accepted practice when owning a business.

Utilize business directories

No, I’m not condoning the practice of submitting your website to every single directory you come across on the internet. In fact, employing that tactic can actually hurt your site than help it. Specifically what I’m talking about, is finding local directories in your area that you can trust, using the website Moz Local.

Moz Local is a free tool for providing you their own healthy directory of websites that are considered signals to ranking for local searches. The goal of your business citations within each directory should be correct. Every detail from address to phone number should be the same across all sites. Doing this allows Google to make the connection and consider these local citations to your business. Local citations are good for business.

Manage your reputation

Remember the advice above to create a social media presence for your business? Once you have established that presence online, you’re going to need someone to manage the accounts, be in charge of the day to day posting, and be able to effectively handle a positive or negative situation online. Bad reviews are going to happen, the ability to respond to a bad review will effectively help you in the long run for when people search your business. They’re going to see that negative review, but they’re also going to see how you handled that negative review. Nothing like turning a negative into a positive right?

These few internet marketing for small business tips can immediately help you wrangle in your internet marketing skills for your small business instantly. It’s not always about taking the short way out, and a lot of the times small business owners are looking for that route.

Of course these internet marketing for small business tips are easy to grasp, but can take time and patience to perfect. However, even the novice of people looking to help their own business online can make an impact with a bit of research and practice. When it comes to the Optimization of your website, it’s not always about showing up in the rankings higher than everyone else. Rankings will come, by doing these kind of optimizations. The more people that visit your website, they more chances to convert, and optimizing for those experiences can have a more profound benefit that just your rankings. It can help; ROI, reputability of your company and brand awareness.

The factors that get improved with these kinds of simple internet marketing for small business tips help immediately and in the long run of your business success. Feel free to leave a comment or send me a message if you have any questions, I’m always willing to offer advice!