Marketing your small business online can be a bit of a minefield. With so many different marketing options out there and so many companies boasting about how they can extend your reach, it’s hard to know where you should be putting your money to get the best return on your investment.
Digital marketing is an ever-changing, fast-paced industry. What worked a year or two ago may not work today. You need to keep yourself ahead of the trend and understand how people are responding to marketing messages while online.
Don’t Underestimate Free Social Media Exposure
One of the best ways to market your business is through its viral reach. Growing your brand will mean sharing all manner of content on your social media profiles to attract the attention of your customers. It should not always be about your products or services. Moreover, you are often best steering away from anything that seems as though it is a cheap plug to promote your wares. Instead, grow your brand name subtly by providing shareable content that will elicit reactions and comments from users, therefore pushing your posts to a broader reach.
Know Where Your Audience Is
If your customers are using a particular social media site, that is the place where you should be promoting your brand. Do your market research. If you are reaching out to a younger demographic, you will want to be seen on Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter. Whereas Facebook has a wider age appeal. You will need to understand how the best content is created for each of these sites. It is no good creating a blanket post for all of them as your message will get lost.
If you are going to spend out on marketing on social media, you need to know who you should be targeting specifically with your sponsored posts.
Use The Right Tools For The Job
There are many great tools for managing your online advertising. But setting up new ads through Google and assessing their impact can be a difficult task. If you want to save yourself a great deal of work, apply granular automation for Google Ads. By downloading scripts that automate many of the processes that you will need to create an ad campaign, you will be able to easily identify the areas that your ads are working best in and respond accordingly.
If you are looking to extend the organic reach of your website, you could invest some time and money into developing your search engine optimization. This can involve tightening up on several things within your site to ensure that it is friendly to your customers. This means making sure that the site loads quickly on all devices.
Ensuring that you are using appropriate keywords in all of your content will allow you to increase your rankings, as will creating good internal linking structures and encouraging other sites to backlink to your content. Removing and replacing broken links will also help your site to appear healthy to Google, who will then favor your content over that of another site and push you up the search rankings.