10 Secrets to Marketing Your Business Online

10 secrets to marketing small business online

Being online levels the playing field, as, big or small,everyone has the same chance to attract customers.

By following some basic principles, you can receive the same coverage as major players and see your business take off using savvy, affordable marketing.

1. Create a Website of course! - Without a web presence you don't exist online. So the first and most obvious step is to create one! The key to keeping customers happy in the online environment is to design a website that is both aesthetically and functionally pleasing. When you’re designing your website, create a situation where every page drives a consumer action and generates a sales lead for your business.
2. Convert Visitors to Leads - To turn your website from a passive, "brochure-ware" site that delivers a lot of information but doesn't deliver results, you need to refocus your strategy from delivering free information and content, to providing relevant content that drives consumer action. Supplying information is both necessary and helpful to readers and handy in raising your search engine rankings. Always ask yourself, "what is my call to action" - these can take the form of links to downloads, requesting consumer information, advertising, offers or promotions. At the very least, encourage users to make contact with you, either by phone or email.
3. Build Trust & Credibility - Being open and transparent is crucial to success in online marketing. Prove you are a concrete, reliable business by including as many of the following as possible: clear contact details including a physical address and landline phone number, photos and images of employees, location and equipment, third party endorsements and verification of your authenticity including ‘approved’ stamps and/or testimonials. Also, be sure to reply to all contact enquiries promptly with an acknowledgement of emails sent by users and/or response to phone messages.
4. Search Engine Leads - the first step to finding what you need on the internet is running a search on a company name, product name, service or activity. Research shows that high search engine rankings are a major predictor of online business success. After 30 results, users stop looking, so it’s vital you sit within this top percentile. So to optimise your business’ search engine ranking, use search engine optimisation (ie: having key words associated with the content on your
site so people find you when searching) and search engine marketing (you can pay to have your site link featured on the right hand side of search results pages).
5. Email Market/eDM - The power of online can be summed up by email marketing. It’s a cost-effective, efficient, traceable, relationship-building tool for regularly communicating with your existing and potential consumers. We have all heard of the 80:20 rule in marketing: 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers. Email marketing is the easiest way to continue an ongoing, targeted dialogue with them. 5 top secrets for Email Marketing Success are: regularity, short punchy content, calls to action, personalisation, and maintaining a clean list (database).
6. Affiliate Market - As well as buying listings in search engine results, you can buy or trade listings on relevant directories and/or cross-promotional websites. Reciprocal link-backs improve both websites' natural search engine listings.
7. Partnerships & Links - As with affiliate marketing, the success of this tactic lies in increasing your exposure through both cross-promotion on related websites, and also through upping your search engine listing thanks to increased link-backs. There are many avenues to increasing your presence, for free or at a low cost on related websites. Submit articles to other websites and free PR websites, submit sites to directories, buy links, buy partnerships e.g.
Emailcash, List on Shopferret and price comparision websites.
8. Blogging - Running a business, you are clearly an expert in your field. Invite potential and current customers to share your expertise and get a taste of how your knowledge will positively impact them, by creating a blog. Blogs create a community around those with common interests and become a tool for sharing and developing ideas. Their major advantage is creating an open, accessible channel to boost consumer involvement. They can be used to encourage trials,
conduct on-the-ground research, and develop ongoing customer relationships. Plus there’s stacks of software online to set up your blog - all for free! We use www.blogger.com but there’s a huge range out there to choose from.
9. Email Signature - Think about how many emails you send out each day, each week, each month. Now multiply that by the emails sent by your employees and/or subcontractors. Every one of those emails is an opportunity to market your business. As well as including your standard contact details, and always, always your website URL; the smart online marketer also uses this opportunity to promote their latest offer, promotion, or release. Alternately it can be used to build your brand identity or value-add to consumers, and grow your relationships.
10. Track & Respond - Every web host keeps detailed statistics of activities occurring on your website; from the number of visitors, to downloads, where people landed and left the site,how long they stayed, to where they spent most of their time. Analyse this information and use it to continually improve your site's performance based on this silent customer feedback. The beauty of the Internet is that you can change your marketing and track its effects immediately. If something is working, stick with it. If not, change it again.

Going Forward
While you may not have the financial resources of the big guns, you do share access to the same technology: online. Use it to your advantage, and watch your small business grow!

This article was provided by Fred Schebesta, Director of Freestyle Media.

Awesome Marketing Quotes

Three of our favourite marketing quotes are:

“Marketing is not an event, but a process . . . It has a beginning, a middle, but never an end, for it is a process. You improve it, perfect it, change it, even pause it. But you never stop it completely.” ~Jay Conrad Levinson

"Sell to their needs, not yours." ~ Earl G. Graves

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” ~Peter F. Drucker

What's your favourite marketing quote?