The backbone of every business is marketing. Today we are going to take a look at how you can take your business to the next level by implementing some changes to your marketing tactic.
Learn The Types of Marketing
- Direct – Direct marketing refers to anything which markets a product or service directly to the customer. This could be telephone calls, newsletters, flyers in the post or talking face to face.
- Indirect – This type of marketing is more subtle, and concentrates on building your reputation while marketing your product or service. Social media is a great example of this because not all content you post has to be related to a product, you can create a relaxed tone of voice with your followers and share trending topics and fun posts too.
Build A Website
A website is a huge building block to creating the best business you can. Everyone uses the internet, and if anyone ever wants information on something or someone, Google is the first port of call. Make sure you have a working website which is clean, precise and simple. And check that your location is accurate on google maps. This will give off that professional vibe as well as well as drawing interest from prospective customers.
Building a website isn’t as technical as you may think, you can use a CMS system such as WordPress to build a simple website, with a clean theme at a low price. All you’ll need to do after that is create a domain name and assign it to your site. You can find out how to do this here.
Start A Blog
Every man and his dog are blogging these days, and it isn’t difficult to see why. With creative content becoming more and more important in the online world, many companies are now starting their own niche blogs to draw people in.
Being online is all about sparking conversation, and creating unique content which relates to your business is the best way to gain interest.
Get Social
Social Media is the hub of digital marketing. With a huge range of platforms to choose from, you’ll be spoilt for choice. Choosing which social accounts to open depends on your target audience. If you are a B2B business, then LinkedIn and Twitter would be great options for you because LinkedIn is for professionals and Twitter has an average user age of 30-36.
If you are a young blogger or fashion brand, then Pinterest and Instagram would be the best options. Instagram is mainly used by females in their 20s, and Pinterest is a hub of creative flair and ideas.
Create Some Great Graphics
You don’t need to be a qualified graphic designer to be able to make stunning images and logos for your business. Apps such as Canva have made the process much easier, giving you the option of the type of image you want to create, and they provide templates to work to. It’s simple and very effective. You don’t have to pay big bucks to brand your business, just take some good photographs yourself and turn them into marketing material for free.
SEO
Search Engine Optimisation is a scary phrase, but contrary to what you may believe, it doesn’t have to be too complicated. The basis of SEO is that keywords can increase your ranking on a search engine. For example, if you were looking to do some SEO for lawyers– you’ll want to choose keywords which fit what a lawyer is. Check out the competition and see what sort of word they are ranking highly on, and choose those. So if you searched in google ‘injury lawyer’ – where do you rank compared to your competitors?
You can add keywords to any part of your website. In the title, on the homepage, the about section and even on individual blog posts. Optimising your content will increase the chance of seeing your website on the first page of search results.
Run A Campaign
By running a campaign, you could double your page views, increase engagement with your website and put your brand in front of a lot more people. If done well, it can result in a higher conversion rate and better sales for your products or service. There are several types of campaign you could try:
- Search Engine Ad – Using a search engine such as Google, you can create a small banner ad which will appear on all search results with your chosen keywords. You can also choose the duration of the campaign, the regions it will be active in, and you can use Adwords to track the progress and success as it runs.
- Social Media Ad – If your company has a Facebook Page, you can choose to either boost a single post, or boost your whole page. Again you will be able to choose keywords to target, regions and demographics such as age. You will be able to track your views and engagement alongside this.
- Banner Ad – A banner ad is any advert which appears as a banner on a website. You could choose a magazine which is relevant to your industry, a blog or even a general news site. It depends on who your target audience is and what your aim is.
Get Analysing
Using apps such as Google Analytics, you can track the views, engagement and bounce rate to your website. Bounce Rate is important because it shows when someone clicks onto your site and immediately clicks away; the lower the bounce rate, the better as it means people are staying on your landing page for longer. You can also track the demographics of your audience, so this includes the age, gender, geographic and languages. This can help you determine whether you are reaching the desired audience and whether your campaigns are showing any success.
You can also analyse on social media. Twitter has an analytics section where it gives you a breakdown of views, engagement, and followers throughout the month, and also shows you which tweets were most popular. This allows you to decide what works for your audience and what kind of content they want to see. You could also create a poll and ask directly.
