If you are not using any strategy to promote your business, you cannot really expect for it to thrive and bring you profit. The same goes for relying only on the word of mouth, since we live in a digital world where implementing only traditional marketing tactics just cannot cut it. You need to take promoting your business to a whole other level and the best way of doing that is with the help of digital marketing.
Digital marketing can do wonders for your business and, if you still haven’t explored everything it can provide you with, now is the time to do so. Take a look at what it means for your business to implement various digital marketing activities and techniques and the extent to which they can improve your entire organization, no matter its size.
Why Is Digital Marketing Valuable to Your Business?
Digital marketing offers a plethora of opportunities for your business, which cannot be said for traditional marketing, which simply cannot help you spread the word about it as quickly. That doesn’t mean that you should avoid traditional marketing tactics and strategies altogether, since every type of marketing is good for business, but it simply isn’t enough anymore. In the day and age we live in, where new competitors keep popping up around every corner, it can be tough to stand out. Surviving on the market has become survival of the fittest and you need to make sure your voice is heard in the noise of the competition.
This is where digital marketing comes in. It opens a number of doors that can lead your business to success. It can help you reach out to millions of people around the world and manage to close many business deals. You cannot reach those people if you don’t establish your online presence and implement various digital marketing tactics to effectively interest them in what you do.
Digital marketing can help you raise awareness about your brand and build a strong reputation. When you manage to build a strong brand around your business, you will certainly get a lot more sales and greatly improve your ROI. That can ultimately help you grow your business and maybe even open another location for it – perhaps somewhere abroad; you never know.
That is exactly the greatest value of digital marketing – the possibilities it offers are endless. You can use it in so many ways to turn your entire business organization around and still leave room for more improvement. In the following sections, you will get a clear insight into how exactly digital marketing can benefit your business, but there is something you need to remember first – using inbound marketing tactics is what will enable you to truly engage people in your brand.
This means that, whatever you do, you need to let people come to you, instead of chasing your customers. Of course, you need to be where they are, that is, establish your presence on the channels they prefer to use, but you need to use inbound marketing in order to really interest them in what you have to offer. It is, without a doubt, the most effective digital marketing method for promoting your business online.
Speaking of promoting your business online, take a look at the following simple, but very effective, ways that can help you do it successfully.
Create a Professional Website
A website is the first logical step towards marketing your business online. It will give you instant credibility and make people trust you more, since it will show you are a professional with a serious business. Everyone is online these days and people turn to online sources for finding information about brands, not to mention that the majority of consumers are online shoppers. Therefore, by creating a website that will showcase your products or services, you will be able to attract many more customers, as well as provide your existing customers with more convenience.
Before creating a website, you must find a platform for it, as well as find a good web hosting provider that will upload your website to their server and make it actually accessible to people. The best platform you can choose is definitely WordPress, as it offers a number of plugins to make your website look professional and, most of all, improve its functionality.
When it comes to choosing a good web hosting provider, there are a lot of features you need to look for in order to find the one that will provide you with services of the highest quality, so make sure you do thorough research before picking one for your needs. Read the reviews for the best web hosting companies out there based on the experiences of their clients, since that will certainly help you make your final decision.
As far as the design of your website is concerned, it needs to be aesthetically pleasing and there should be no clutter, so that the visitors to your site can quickly and easily find what they need. A good design with easy navigation is key for making the best first impressions. The most important element of an effective website is fast page loading, since there is nothing more frustrating than a website that takes forever to load. You need to make sure your pages load quickly, so that you don’t get high bounce rates and risk losing a lot of customers.
Making your website mobile-friendly should definitely be one of your top priorities, since the majority of online consumers browse the Internet via their mobile devices nowadays. Therefore, make sure you implement a responsive website design that will not only provide your customers with a better user experience when visiting your site, but also improve your SEO ranking.
Google uses mobile responsiveness to determine the ranking of websites in search engines and it also indexes user experience, so optimizing your website for mobile devices is no longer merely an option – it is a necessity.
Make a Blog on Your Website
You should create a blog as soon as you create your website, because it is an excellent marketing tool that can help you effectively promote your business. It can help you showcase the benefits people will experience if they hire your services or purchase your products and it can help you really introduce people to your brand.
Blogs are great in that they can help business organizations generate a lot more leads and, thus, increase their sales and make more profit. They help build trust with customers, and you know they are more likely to buy something from you if they actually trust you. Content marketing is the best type of marketing and it is a trend that is not going anywhere anytime soon, so you need to make sure the content you provide on your blog is of the top quality, since content is what will help you sell.
Creating quality content that your target customers will find interesting and, most of all, relevant and useful, will help you attract more people to your brand. If your content is engaging and really grabs attention, it will be very easy for you to attract quality leads and convert them into customers. What’s crucial is to personalize your content and use your own voice and personality in order to make it better and more appealing.
However, if you happen to have poor writing skills, you can always hire someone to craft compelling content for you. You just need to make sure you have a team of top-quality content writers that understand the importance of great content and know exactly how to craft it in order for it to really affect your target customers and make them want to do business with you.
Don’t create plain content, but enrich it with visuals! – Visuals are extremely important when it comes to creating enticing content, because they have the power of tapping into people’s consciousness. Therefore, make sure you include beautiful and eye-catchy images in your every blog post, since they will positively affect your visitors and entice them to truly engage in the content in front of them.
Visual content doesn’t only refer to images, but it includes videos as well. Video content is taking over the world and you shouldn’t miss out on the exceptional opportunity it offers. When you add videos that showcase your products or services, you will be able to build more trust with your existing and potential customers, since you will enable them to see what they are signing up for.
You can add promotional videos, tutorials, educational videos, explainer videos, testimonials and many more. Testimonials are extremely effective in that they can provide people with real feedback based on the experiences of your previous customers, which will make you more trustworthy and boost your reputation.
If you decide to go for videos, make sure you add one to your landing page, as well as in your “About Us” section, as that will help you give your brand a personality. It will help you make a stronger bond with your customers, so that you can truly connect with them and make them interested in what you have to offer.
The best part about videos is that they will help you improve your SEO ranking, since Google made them a part of its ranking algorithm as well. Furthermore, videos, as well as any visual content, for that matter, greatly improve user experience, so that’s yet another reason for not missing out on the awesome opportunities they offer.
What’s important about your blog is that you update your content on a regular basis, but always make sure good quality comes first. Don’t stress over publishing new content every single day because, if every piece of your content is informative and relevant to your target audience, they will look forward to it every single time, no matter how frequently you publish it. Remember – quality over quantity is key.
Promote Your Content on Social Media
By establishing a presence on social media, you will be able to reach out to thousands or even millions of people, since there are more than 2 billion daily active users on various social media networks. Imagine the opportunities of reaching such a great number of people. Social media are extraordinary in that your followers can share your content on their personal accounts and across various social media channels, as well as tag themselves in your photos, which can lead more people to your website.
Therefore, your social media followers can be your brand ambassadors and market your business for you. All you need to do is engage them when sharing your blog posts by posting interesting descriptions for your content and asking for their opinion on various topics regarding both the content and your brand.
Encourage discussions and engage in conversations with people. Reply to their comments and messages, since that is the perfect indicator of you caring about them. It will show that you are not in it only for the sake of selling your brand and making money, but that you actually value their opinions and take them all into consideration. It goes without saying that you should really think that way, instead of only doing it just for show. After all, your customers are the reason your business thrives, right?
Although Facebook is still the dominating platform for promoting content, with the greatest number of users, you shouldn’t forget about Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, Snapchat and any other platform that your target audience is on. Have in mind that establishing a presence on a platform that your target customers don’t use is just a big waste of time and resources, since you won’t be able to attract quality leads that will convert.
If you implement videos into your content, you should create a presence on YouTube, since it is the platform that hosts billions of videos and represents one of the most effective marketing tools every online marketers should have it their toolbox. Create a YouTube channel for your brand and upload every single video you post on your website. It will help you grow your audience and, thus, grow your business.
When uploading videos on YouTube, you need to make sure you include direct links to your website in the description, so that the viewers can easily come to you if they want to gather more information about you. YouTube will definitely help you drive more traffic to your website and increase your conversions, not to mention that it will help you improve your SEO ranking.
Final Words
If you follow these tips, you will certainly be on the right way to promoting your business and making it stand out in the crowded online world, but make sure you implement a lot of other digital marketing strategies, since these represent just a starting point that will direct you to the right way towards your success on the market.