If you are running a small business and you have yet to unlock the potential of marketing online, you could be missing out on hundreds of leads and thousands of dollars in sales. Traditional marketing may still have some power, but in contrast to the new digital marketing techniques that exist, the traditional methods simply cannot stack up. There are a huge number of strategies and techniques which you can use online to drum up support around your business and to get the word out about who you are and what you do. If you are not sure what options you have, here are some of the best ways to market yourself online.
Promotional Marketing
Promotional marketing may not be a new concept but there is a new way fo doing it. In the past we may have offered discounts in-store, or buy one get one free offers, and the concept is still very much the same. The idea of promotional marketing is to invite someone into your business through a heavily discounted offer, and then hope they like the business enough to come back and pay full price next time. These days companies can use coupon sites such as Groupon, where they can offer a product or service for a heavily discounted rate – usually simply selling something at cost will be attractive enough – and then looking to wow those customers so that they come back again.
SEO
SEO or search engine optimization is a way of manipulating search engines positively so that your business can appear on the top page or two of the search results for keywords which pertain to your business. Let’s take SEO for dentists for example, if you have a dentist surgery in Cleveland, you want your company to appear on the first 2 pages of the search results when a customer types in ‘dental surgery Cleveland’. Through applying SEO techniques you can be sure that your company is right up there where it should be, gaining new leads and clients each day, and blowing the competition out of the water.
Social Media
Many small businesses don’t want to invest in marketing because they simply do not want to make an investment of this kind. In my view you should always invest in marketing because of the ROI which you will see, but that is far from the point. Even for businesses who do not want to invest their money into marketing strategies such as email campaigns and SEO, they should be utilizing the power of social media. Social media channels like Instagram, Twitter and Facebook give you the power to show your goods and services to millions of people in the click of a button. The best part about using social media is that if you don’t want to pay for advertising, you don’t have to, and you can still count on many people viewing your offers.
These are just 3 of many digital marketing strategies which your business should be using if it has dress of great success.
