How to Increase your Small Business Online Presence with Social Media

Small business owners deliberately take advantage of social media to increase online presence for their businesses. The vast user bases and sharing capabilities peculiar to social media platforms make them ideal amplification tools to help increase online presence for your business. This is in addition to the fact that a vast majority of consumers rely on social media for product recommendations and actually make purchases based on these recommendations.

Here are five things you can do to increase social media presence for your small business.

1. Be Active on Social Media

This is a given. The more active you are on social media, the easier it is for you to get noticed. To make social media a part of your online presence therefore, the first thing you need to do is to have an active account. That done, you can start publishing high quality posts regularly as well as making well-informed responses to likes and comments on those posts. At the same time, you can reciprocate with liking and commenting on your followers’ posts, answering direct questions/messages, sharing content from other sources, and much more. If you do this consistently, your online presence will increase proportionately.

2. Think more of Audience not just Followers

On social media, your online presence hardly improves with more followers. Rather, it is your following that improves with a stronger online presence. When you think more of your following as a great audience you can market to, you can work to cultivate niche audience of individuals who are interested in what you are offering. That translates into more likes and comments on your posts and more user-generated content to boot. As most marketers very well know, marketing campaigns with user-generated content result in higher conversions rates than campaigns without it. Meaning, user-generated content helps to build your online presence better on social media.

3. Limit the Number of Social Media Platforms you Use

Expert social media marketers always advise marketers to limit the number of social media platforms to only the numbers they can conveniently handle. This is because online presence is all about quality and not quantity. You can settle for the platforms your preferred audience is using, then limit the number you choose based on your bandwidth. If you have just one, two or three accounts with solid engagement, it is much better than having several accounts with weak activity. For most small business owners, the preference is always among the most popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube and Pinterest depending on what products/services they are marketing.

4. Make Posts with Emotion for Shareability

If you want to generate engagement on social media, you must make quality posts regularly. Posts that generate engagement are hugely important if you want social media algorithms to locate and display more of your posts in users’ feeds. In addition, quality posts compel your followers to consume your content more and to share it with others widely. To craft quality posts, you can use emotional words and phrases in your captions, use compelling stats, evocative images/photos/graphics and even add emojis for effects. If the posts are easily relatable and link-free such that your followers can consume quickly, it increases their shareability. The more your posts are shared, the better for your online presence.

5. Have Social Media SEO in Place

Some social media sites are some kind of mini search engines in their own rights while relying on keywords in some cases. For this reason, just like the SEO on your business website, you can also have SEO in your social media posts by including your preferred and popular keywords in your profiles and posts on the platforms. You can use many of the same keywords as you do on your business website. But, you may choose to have a preference towards some idea-oriented and lighter-hearted queries because social media platforms are more of the browsing and interactive type of socializing. It is recommended that both hashtags and keywords be used sparingly in your posts to improve your social media presence. If you use them sparingly and focus more on location-based and niche terms, you can manage to increase your visibility to the right audience in their right locations.

How to Use SEO to Increase Online Presence for your Small Business

The online presence of your small business website is directly related to the strength and effectiveness of your business. So, to increase the online presence of a small business, owners readily turn to Search Engine Optimization, SEO among other factors. When the SEO of your website is good, it helps to increase the online presence of your business. SEO helps the business with more first-page appearances in the SERPs of search engines. A good SEO doesn’t just mean stronger web presence; it also equates to more traffic to your conversion-optimized site and greater credibility for your business. 

 

Here is what you can do to have a good SEO.

Deliberately create quality content on the website.

Research and select the relevant keywords to your business niche.

Carefully place these keywords on your website content.

Optimize all the photos and images on the website with these keywords.

Build backlinks from other credible websites to your own website.

Improve your Core Web Vitals to align with the page experience update.

Optimize the website for mobile searches to make it easy for mobile-first indexing.

Use schema markup so that rich snippets can appear below your site title in the SERPs of major search engines particularly Google.

Give priority to local SEO to enable the business take advantage of local searches.

If you write a business blog, target more keywords with it because the core pages of your website can only take a limited number of keywords.

Make sure each post of your business blog is individually optimized for relevant keywords to help it rank for those keywords and to appear in search results for the tons of searches for the keywords.

When you are blogging especially for online presence, it is recommended that you:

Vigorously promote your posts multichannel using social media and emails most especially.

Target question keywords with H2s to increase their chances of showing up in “People also ask.”

Target one keyword/keyword theme per post and include it in your titles, headings, image file names, alt text, and meta-descriptions.

Use numbered and bulleted lists where appropriate to be featured snippet-friendly.

Final Words

If you are able to carry out these activities diligently and consistently on your website content, chances are very high that you’ll have a good SEO in place and your small business online presence will increase appreciably.

How to Increase Online Presence with your Small Business website

Your online presence derives from your small business website. This website is your main contact window on the internet. That is where consumers first make contact with your business. No matter how someone finds out about your business, either through social media, an ad, a listing, direct mail, or through a friend, their first instinct is naturally to check out your website. A considerable percentage of consumers won’t consider doing business online without a credible website. This is because consumers consider it more convenient and appealing to browse for information on a website at their own time and location. Engaging with the business, getting more information and actually making a purchase, is also very convenient through a website. This is more so in times of severe restrictions the world is experiencing at the moment because of Covid-19 pandemic. If your website is well-designed, well-hosted, easy-loading, user-friendly, mobile-friendly and optimized well enough, it helps to increase its online presence.

To enhance that, you must opt for a very modern and attractive website for your business. Because consumer expectations are increasingly getting higher these days, having a good website helps to make your online presence stronger. That is if consumers can easily search for it, interact with it and do business with it. A tidy majority of consumers admit to judging the credibility of a business through its website design. This is further reinforced if they can seamlessly interact with the website and not experience distracting glitches. All these help to increase the online presence of a website, making it the type of website that helps a small business to generate leads, customers and sales.

Search engines are the strongest online agents that help to enhance the online presence of a business website. This is why marketers always strive to make their websites search engine-friendly. This they do by way of Search Engine Optimization, SEO. It is recommended to always perform SEO on your website with the latest updates in mind. That is what helps it with good search engine rankings and a strong online presence eventually. SEO is a free way to get on the first page of major search engines SERPs particularly Google’s. Doing so is the hallmark of a strong online presence. To get SEO right on your website, you must embark on deliberately targeted SEO efforts like link building, content creation, keyword research, selection and deployment on the content of your website. This may take time, considerable efforts and patience but when done right, it becomes a lasting asset that can help to increase online presence for your business over a considerable period of time.

Why Your Small Business Needs a Strong Online Presence

Every small business needs a strong online presence to do well on the internet. Online presence is one credible and effective way to place your business in front of your target audience. The more avenues available to you to place your business in front of your target audience, the more opportunities you have to build awareness for your brand and to improve your business reputation. Aside that, there are some other ways a strong online presence benefits your small business. Such as:

Marketing Round-The-Clock: A strong online presence gives your small business the opportunity for 24/7 marketing around the globe. If your business has a strong online presence, it is easy for people to discover you, learn about you, engage with you, and reach out to you anytime of the day convenient for them and from wherever they are. They can do business with you round-the-clock on the internet no matter what device they are using to access the internet.

Get Discovered: As experienced marketers like to say, establish your business firmly on the internet and get discovered easily. This is because a strong online presence makes it easy for ideal customers who don’t yet know you exist to discover you. They can do this even when they are not directly searching for what you are offering at any point in time.

Earn Google’s Trust: If you want to get organic traffic to your business, you’ve got to build the trust of major search engines particularly Google.  This is because Google takes more than just your website into account when ranking. Its algorithms are programmed to take a holistic look at your assets across the web and how consistent they are. That affects your ranking in Google SERPs.

Present as Legitimate Business: Most online shoppers/consumers always rely on multiple sources of information before making their buy decisions. If their search results show your business as a legitimate business, you can earn their purchases. If however you fail or neglect to provide enough information about your business across credible online sources, consumers and search engines may ignore your business completely.

Get More Conversions: Experienced marketers very well know that it takes several encounters with a business before a lead becomes an actual customer. A strong online presence for your business makes it prominent and available for such encounters. Being prominent on multiple channels creates the right opportunities for such encounters to happen much more quickly. You get more conversions as a result.

Key into Consumer Buyer Journey: There is research evidence that over 60% of consumers buyer journeys start online. A strong online presence makes your business available to be found by these consumers. That engagement can take place at different points in their buyer journey towards becoming customers, irrespective of whatever devices they are accessing the internet with.

Herd Mentality: All your online assets are relative and interdependent on one another. Each of your online assets and identities gives power to one another. That is why each channel performs better in concert with the others than it would on its own. These assets thus help your small business better when they work in concert like a herd.

Save Time and Money: Every small business owner always operates very tight ads budgets. Whatever saves costs is always great for the business. Digital marketing helps to save costs. Digital marketing platforms all come with data/metrics to let you know what’s working and what’s not. That vital info helps you to allocate your ads budget judiciously and to use it efficiently in your marketing activities. That is in addition to the fact that most digital ads are hugely cost-effective.

Proven Marketing Strategies for Conversion Rate Optimization

If you run your small business online, conversion rate optimization ensures you get the highest conversion rate possible by marketing effectively and managing your sales process efficiently. This warrants that you focus on all types of conversions to help the steady growth of your sales revenues. This also means a better focus on all marketing actions and activities that lead to conversion rate optimization. Many of these activities revolve around content marketing which greatly underpins conversion rate optimization. Your website content must be of high quality, educational and informative enough to be of any help to the conversion rate optimization of the site.

Here are some tested and proven content marketing strategies helpful for conversion rate optimization.

Leverage Social Media

Presently, social media because of its huge popularity appears to be one of the greatest tools for boosting business conversions available to business owners. You can leverage your marketing activities on this popularity to get good results. First thing is to get your business on social media and build a steady following for it. Next is to share your marketing messages and even promos widely on the platforms. That will help your business to better elicit engagement and interactions with its social media audience. With an engaged social media following, leads, conversions, customers and sales follow in logical sequence from your efforts.

Improve Your Website Content

The most effective marketing window for your business online is your website. By steadily populating your website with high quality content, you increase its ability to attract traffic. You must therefore endeavor to fill your website with the right content that is well aligned with your business niche. This you can do with effective and creative blogging on the site to address your website visitors’ needs for useful information. Blog posts that provide real value to readers are the most helpful as against those that overtly promote products/services which may be boring in the main.

Market with Captivating Videos

Having a captivating explainer or how-to video on the homepage of your website can be very effective to engage and convert customers. You can explore a range of different tactics to ensure that your video content greatly helps your conversions. If for instance, as with explainer videos you are able to provide value to show customers how your products help them to solve problems, it can be great for your conversions. Videos showing customers how to use your products can help to ensure buyer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction helps to increase recommendations and improves reviews in no small measure.

Personalize Your Content

As most online marketers very well know, personalized content is always a very effective content to market with. Therefore, you need to explore all ways to make things personal for your business customers. In this quest, you need reliable data and metrics which you can obtain through Google Analytics and Email marketing automation tools. You can effectively use this data to optimize your content to meet the needs of individual consumers. Doing so can result in higher sales figures for your business.

Improve Your Website Loading Speed

Online surfers are always in notorious haste. The reason smart marketers like to capture their attention as quickly as possible. To do this effectively, aside from improving on the content of your website, you also need to improve the loading speed of the website. Ideally, you should ensure every page on your website loads in just 2-3 seconds since many visitors have little patience with slow loading websites. A fast loading website helps to decrease the bounce rate on the site, while slow loading increases it. A decrease in bounce rate keeps visitors longer on the site and helps conversions better.

Use Strong Calls-To-Action, CTAs

It is not good marketing to leave it to chance that your website visitors know how to convert. Visitors must be “lured” to do something for them to do what is expected when they hit your business website. That is where the right call-to-action, CTA becomes imperative in effective marketing. With the right CTA, marketers can effectively lead buyers where they want them to go and to take the right actions they want them to take. Some of such actions include helping to commit your website visitors to a purchase by showing them exactly what they need to do. When your CTAs are strong and effective, they engender more conversions and sales.

Salient Online Marketing Tips for Pandemic Restrictions

Online marketing is a very effective way to keep your business moving even amid pandemic restrictions. It is online marketing that provides the convenience and effectiveness to remain in business even when free and unfettered human interaction is severely restricted. That is made possible if the proper strategy is in place to market a business through successful online marketing campaigns. Restrictions no doubt pose huge challenges for many businesses particularly small and still struggling businesses. The most viable way around these challenges is online marketing. Without it, many small businesses do face very tough times getting their marketing messages out and to sell their products/services. Online marketing lends itself to marketers as an effective way to promote products/services even in the midst of pandemic restrictions.

Here are a few tips that can help make that possible and result-oriented.

Build Your Online Visibility

If your business is not visible online, it is virtually impossible for it to make sales. So, you must take very conscious steps to systematically build your online presence. Because of the restrictions, many more people are going online to search for products, shop, and generally do business. Your business can take advantage of this increased online consumption if it has a strong and robust online presence. Increased online presence helps the visibility of your business. This visibility is made possible by way of robust SEO strategy that helps your website to appear within Google’s top search engine results pages, SERPs. That visibility makes it possible for people searching online to easily find your business.
 
Optimize Your Website for Local Searches

Yes, most businesses particularly small businesses are local.  Because most people are forced to stay at home during the pandemic restrictions, it is just natural and more convenient for such people to patronize local businesses more and more. To take advantage of this, small business owners must make sure to implement local SEO strategies to optimize their websites for “near me” searches. With these local SEO strategies, customers and prospective customers can easily find your website, thereby increasing the likelihood of your business getting more purchases from local people.

Connect with Customers on Social Media

Even with pandemic restrictions or do we say because of it, many people get on social media daily either for entertainment, news or even mere socializing. Most people are spending most of their time in their homes and some take to social media to fight boredom. Marketers can latch on such opportunities to push their products and their brands on social media. Some other people could even be on social media, looking for updates and deliberately interacting with their favorite brands. Business owners can take advantage of this to strengthen their brands through deliberate promotional efforts to connect customers and prospective customers.

Make Special and Attractive Offers

Making special offers to customers at times like this tends to get good attention. You must be able to think outside the box to serve your customers better in the unfortunate situations they now find themselves. For effectiveness, business owners can highlight special offers through PPC ads and social media. If you offer customers special and attractive offers, you are being proactive in your marketing efforts. These efforts are likely to prompt your customers to positively respond to your offers by making more purchases from your business. For such offers, you can consider special discounts, price adjustments, bonus offers and even giveaways. These offers can positively help to keep your customers engaged and your revenue streams flowing steadily.
 
Market with Pay-Per-Click, PPC Ads

Business owners can effectively use PPC ads to gain competitive advantage at times like this when more and more people are staying in their homes and spending more time on the internet. With PPC ads, business owners have great opportunities to promote their products/services directly to their target consumers. That makes competitive advantage easily possible for their businesses and the results can be very encouraging.

Optimize to Effectively Compete

In online marketing, everyone is out there on the internet doing about the same things to promote their businesses. Business owners who tend do these same things slightly differently tend to have some advantage in the market place. These are business owners who can leverage better the power of SEO. A good SEO helps to increase organic traffic to websites. The ultimate aim of a good SEO strategy is to stay on top of the SERPs of major search engines particularly Google. That way, people easily easily find your website when they do search with specific keywords with which your website is optimized. That means if you endeavor to optimize your website and content regularly, it is difficult for it to lose out to your competitors in the SERPs rankings. A loss in ranking ultimately translates to a loss in organic traffic, leads, customers and even sales revenue.

Have a Long-Term SEO Strategy

Like the Boys Scouts motto says, if you are a business owner, “Be Prepared.” There is no way the current pandemic restrictions will last forever. Things are bound to change with time. Be sure you are fully prepared for that eventuality. This is because when normalcy returns as it is bound to, people’s shopping and buying habits will also change. So, you must take steps now to formulate your SEO strategy with a long-term perspective. What you do today for your SEO campaign will inevitably impact your future organic search traffic. If you halt your SEO campaign now, it will be a great setback for future campaigns. Therefore, you must continue your SEO campaign with the post-restriction business environment fully in perspective. It will help you to remain competitive even in the post-restriction era.

How to Promote Your Service Business Online

If you are a service provider, just like every business owner, your business must have been adversely affected by the general restrictions occasioned by the covid-19 pandemic. What you should worry about now is how to promote your service business to create a better online presence or boost your existing online presence with a view to attracting more customers back to your business. However, the unique nature of service businesses warrants unique business promotion activities and somewhat different marketing strategy simply because services involve intangible products.

If you want to effectively promote your service business online, here are some tips for getting found online.

Create a Blog

Because of the intangible nature of services, every service business thrives on reviews, recommendations or word of mouth. Technically, the trial of a service is often impractical because it is an intangible product. This is why it relies hugely on recommendations to generate trust in its ability to meet the needs of customers. If you create a blog on your website and encourage user-generated content in the form of reviews and articles, it is one effective way to ensure visitors to your website trust and believe in the service you offer. By writing good content on your blog about customers’ experiences with your services, it somehow helps to build the much needed credibility for your business. Continuously writing in-depth, factual, and relevant articles in your blog posts is one great way to sustain customers’ interest in your service business. A good blog does that seamlessly.  

Invest in Search Engine Optimization, SEO

Search Engine Optimization, SEO, is the key to helping your target market find your service business online. It is what helps search engines to rank your website in their SERPs. If you are offering a service online, because it is intangible, you really need a very good SEO to get noticed online. SEO simply involves a complex set of algorithms created by various search engines to determine the rank of links that address a user’s query. That is what enables search engines to make the highest quality links appear highest in search results. As such, these links get noticed by searchers first and they tend to click on them first in order of priority. That simply translates to higher organic traffic through such high ranked links. Your website benefits from good organic traffic by these efforts. SEO is hugely technical in nature because of its complexity. Because of this, you can only implement a good SEO strategy yourself if you have the knowledge, technical skills, education, experience, and the right SEO software. Alternatively, just like many business owners do, you can hire the services of professional agencies or individual SEO experts to handle SEO for your business website. In terms of costs, doing it yourself is most cost-effective if you know how to.

Use Emails to Market

Email marketing is extremely effective to promote a service business. It is not only cost-effective, it is also very effective to get new customers. By using emails to market newsletters, marketers get better results for their service businesses than marketing on very popular social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. The reason for this effectiveness is simple. Emails are direct, reduce noise, and are guaranteed to reach the intended audience in the form intended. It is however very important to know how to get your potential customers’ email addresses before you can optimize email results. By deliberate efforts, you can build a reliable email list of your customers and potential customers over time. Without this list, the effectiveness of email as a marketing tool is greatly reduced. Marketers can build this list from a combination of existing customer lists, lists obtained by offering webinars and physical meetings, and email lists of potential customers obtained by offering an incentive to them in exchange for their email addresses.

Collaborate with Other Businesses

Many service businesses need some form of synergy to grow. That calls for business collaboration with other businesses. Through faithful friendship and cooperation, a service business can collaborate with another for a mutually beneficial fruitful relationship. The symbiotic nature of this arrangement ensures that both businesses benefit from each other’s audiences without any encroachments. For instance, a logistics business can collaborate with a courier business and they both benefit handsomely from the arrangement. Same way businesses can collaborate and mutually benefit from business networks common to both.

Teach Online Courses

Service business owners can promote their businesses by teaching online courses/ tutorials related their business niche. If you offer such technical online courses/tutorials to your website visitors, and what you offer has high quality, it can help generate a lot of traffic for your business. This traffic comes in two ways for two reasons. The first is that people are always eager to learn, especially if it is free, qualitative and beneficial. Secondly, free courses and tutorials help to build some form of rapport with customers even before you offer your services to them. From these efforts, you can arouse the curiosity of your consumers. Next is to make your sales pitches and make your sales. Businesses operating professional services online can do so effectively by offering free apps, free software, or other types of training as a way to demonstrate their proficiency and to garner new customers. Free apps offers and the training to use the apps effectively can often lead users to purchase the apps. That is good business.

7 Proven Ways to Grow Your Service Business Online

Service businesses are now taking very prominent places online just like many other businesses. Many are still coming into the market daily thereby making the industry seriously competitive. Since everyone is struggling for space and attention to do profitable service business, businesses are always in search of viable ways to do better business. Online marketing is one of the best strategies service businesses can use to improve on their services and do better business. By engaging the best digital marketing tools and strategies, service businesses can better reach their clients/customers and be able to manage them better. That translates to more and better business.

Here are seven proven ways you can rely on to grow your service business online.

1. Know Your Target Clients/Customers

No doubt you know the service you are rendering. By knowing your clients/customers, you can serve them better. Knowing your clients/customers well enables you to draft and send the right marketing messages online. If you are able to define them well enough, know their needs through certain characteristics, features, and other salient facts about them, you then determine how your service business will fit them. The better you know them, the easier you’ll find it to reach out to them, with the right marketing messages, through the right channels and the right way.

2. Have a Well-Hosted Website

It may surprise you to know that these days, when people want to look for a service business to engage, their first point of call is usually the internet. They first search online for local service businesses near them or in their locality. That is the reason an authoritative website comes handy.  Such website helps to provide online, your detailed service business information which includes the types of service(s) you offer, how you offer them and any other useful content information. The website helps to support your brand, reinforce it and grow it online by providing a smooth and intuitive user experience to all visitors. That is good for business no doubt.

3. Build Your Brand

Most online marketers are always in the business of building their brands in perpetuity. Service businesses are no exceptions. Fact is, there are thousands of service businesses competing for attention online and your potential clients/customers know this. They know they always have lots of these businesses to choose from. That is why you must always stand ready to provide strong reasons why your brand is preferable to others. Doing so helps to secure good patronage for your brand if you position it well enough. So, you must consciously build your brand online. Building your brand simply means familiarizing your potential customers with your business as distinct from all others in its niche. If your service business is well branded, that will help to distinguish it from the other service businesses. Good branding helps to give your service business a friendlier, more recognizable and memorable outlook. Online, you can better help that by choosing unique brand colors, logos and fonts for your website displays and content. Somehow, these help to enhance your online presence by creating a consistent image for the consumers of your service to see and easily remember.
 
4. Create a Blog

Every service business needs a quality blog for the sole purpose of attracting more potential customers to its website. Marketers have discovered that blogging is one of the most important segments of a successful content marketing strategy. It helps to attract the much needed organic traffic to the website. So, if as a service business marketer you want to attract organic traffic to your website, all you need do is to create a quality blog. Regularly populating the blog with educational, informative and even entertaining content is one great way to grow its readership. You can through your blog answer trending and burning questions, become an authoritative resource for service delivery information to interest and excite your customers and potential customers. Marketers that are able to use their blogs to discuss versatile topics, share useful info about their business niche, publish tutorials, how-to posts, tips and tricks posts, case studies, statistics reports, and similar informative content tend to get a very good online attention and exposure. That helps with good organic traffic and increased business.

5. Get on Social Media

These days, the power of social media is no longer in dispute when it comes to promoting a business and reaching out to new clients/customers. Aside the huge popularity and ease of use of many social media platforms, they also offer different unique options to businesses. Your task as a service business marketer is to carefully search for and choose which social media platforms your target clients/customers are most likely to use. That is where you can successfully pitch for them to get the best results. For a growing service business, it is best to consider the most popular of these platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn and Instagram. You can easily use these platforms to promote your website, blog content, promote your services, introduce your team, personalize your business, communicate/interact with your clients/customers directly, and monitor their interest in your business. Smart marketers can use social media to have a direct link to potential clients/customers and an opportunity to show them why it is always a great idea to choose their service business.

6. Monitor Your Competitors

Whatever service you are rendering online, always have in mind that there are probably thousands of others out there doing about the same things. To get noticed from this crowd, you must invest in a strong online presence through a deliberate online marketing strategy. Even if most of your competitors may be doing the same things, if you do these same things differently, it can give an edge. You can only get that edge if you endeavor to monitor very well what your competitors are doing and how they are doing it. From the information you gather from these efforts, you can design your own unique strategies to help stand your business out distinctly from the rest of them. That is what helps to give your service business an edge. You can easily monitor the activities of your known competitors from what they do on their websites, social media handles, their blog content, their types and channels of communication, their promos, pricing, guarantees/warranties and from any other online activities of theirs you can easily monitor.

7. Market with Email

Email marketing may be “old school” but, it is still a great strategy to promote a service business. Email marketing is particularly very effective to specially market to segmented audiences, creating and building brand awareness as well as increased customer engagement. Emails are great for breaking news, announcing new business additions, promos, sending newsletters, e-books, and price adjustments to specific audiences. Emails allow marketers to send personalized marketing messages that tend to make recipients of such messages feel like the marketer is writing to them specially. Many of such personalized messages usually get the desired results for the business.

Public Relations Tips to Grow Your Business Online

Any brand that wants to grow and establish online authority needs good public relations, PR strategy. PR strategy is distinct from normal business promos and it should be used with utmost sense of responsibility otherwise it can backfire real time. Even at that, if well used, it is one of the most cost-effective ways to increase your brand awareness and ultimately increase sales to grow your business. A good PR strategy helps to get out there, mostly the positive aspects of your brand as distinct from products promotion. The more consumers hear positive things about your brand, the more they become aware of the brand. That way, they subconsciously start to build trust in the brand. That is good for business.

Every business owner can use some PR strategies to grow their business. Here are some tips from marketing experts and PR gurus.

Always Create Good Content

In PR, experts say content is of extreme importance. It can make or mar any brand if not properly handled. What influences most consumers is how your content helps to position your brand as a subject matter expert in its industry or niche. If you habitually craft high quality and fact-based press releases with succinct solutions, that helps to position your brand as an expert on your subject matter. In the eyes and minds of consumers, that helps to position your brand as a trusted and trustworthy source. As a consequence, you can attract more consumers, get more leads, more customers and consequently better sales despite competition.

Control Your Press Releases

Well, as they say in PR business, anything you say can be used against you. Even if it is not possible for you to control what other people are saying about your business, you can at least control what you are saying to the world.  The messaging you send out into the world is hugely important for the wellbeing of your brand. If you have a good PR strategy, you are in full control of what gets sent out. This is in addition to having the sole responsibility to decide how and through what channels the message gets out. That confers on you the real power to build trust as the rightful source of authentic and authoritative information about your brand. That is great for business no doubt.

Keep Up with Trends on Social Media

Yes indeed! Social media is now where nearly everyone around the world appears to be. Having a good PR social media strategy is therefore good for business. In addition to honest communication, keeping up with trends and having a strong presence on social media is now the in-thing for PR experts. Aside the huge exposure brands enjoy on social media, sending out PR info on social media is highly effective and usually spreads fast and wide. You can directly target audiences with your press releases and that enables you to expand your reach to a wider set of consumers and provide more timely updates. By maintaining a credible and consistent social media presence for your brand, the brand benefits tremendously.

Be Consistent

Yeah, consistency helps to build trust quickly. Even if implementing a good PR strategy may not lead to instant success, doing so consistently over the long-term will, provided you are consistent across multichannel and in published releases and updates as well. 

Be Honest

Remember that honesty is always the best policy. It is more so in PR strategies. Always make PR plans for the good times as well as the bad times. Bad times are very important because that is when you may be suddenly called upon to manage a crisis the brand is facing. If you think outside the box and you are honest, you can quickly restore trust and credibility to your brand no matter the magnitude of the crisis. So, having a comprehensive crisis communications plan is always part of a good PR strategy. As the Boys Scouts Motto says “Be Prepared.” If you are and the need for crises communications ever arise, you’ll be glad you planned and prepared for it. Trust matters a lot for any business. If your press releases keep consumers honestly informed, they don’t need to stretch or bend the truth to suit their expectations. Consumers appreciate transparency and that helps to build trust and grow your reputation. When consumers determine that your PR releases are honest, they tend to trust you better and they do better business with your brand as a result. PR gurus always advise practitioners to be straightforward with honest communications. This is because hiding the truth or playing down on it can only make matters worse for the brand if eventually the truth surfaces as it almost always does.

Easy Online Marketing Tips to Help Drive More Traffic to Your Website

If you are involved in online marketing, driving traffic to your website is of paramount importance. That is what brings online surfers to your website. The more of these visitors that come to your website, the higher your chances of making sales or creating links with new long-term clients. No matter the type or size of your business, you can skillfully use these easy tried-and-tested methods to attract more traffic to your business website.

Blog Consistently

Content marketing is becoming inevitable in online marketing. Marketers rely more on blogs to create and market content. Blogging is a great way to drive traffic to your site by writing and sharing great information and stories on your blog sites. If you blog consistently and share great content, you attract a following to your blog posts. That translates to the much-needed traffic. 

Prod Your Customers with Emails

Email marketing may be “old school” but, it remains an extremely powerful marketing tool that marketers rely on to attract traffic to their business websites. As a marketer, if you have built an email list of your customers over time, you can periodically use this list to send messages to your customers reminding them of new products, promos and even price slashes. You may include a catchy call-to-action phrase in such emails to elicit a desired response. For instance a phrase like, “click here to see our latest price slashes!” can get your recipients to act out of curiosity. That translates to clicks and visits to your website.

Work with Professionals for Your SEO

If you have the skills, you can work on having a good Search Engine Optimization, SEO, on your website. If not, getting professional help is a good option. A good SEO is what helps Search Engines to index and rank your website in their SERPs. A good ranking in SERPs translates to more organic-traffic to your website.
 
Run Contests on Social Media

Running contests on social media is one great way to get people to share and promote your page if you offer them something of value in return. On social media platform like Instagram for instance, we often see businesses asking their followers to ‘like’ a photo, tag friends in it, and then share that photo to their pages. Doing so enables them to enter a competition to win valuable prizes. The benefit is that the more people who share it, the more likely it is that their followers will start to come to your page to follow you and enter the competition too. That translates to good traffic. The tradeoff however is that you must endeavor to give out prizes regularly to winners as promised. By doing so, your business will attract more and more visitors and even more new followers.

Promote with Event Hosting

You can choose to join an online event or host one yourself. Marketers prefer events like webinars, online conferences, online seminars, other online activities, and even parties. These activities allow them to fully network with fellow marketers and peers in their niche industries. If a marketer hosts an event on his platform, he will drive traffic immediately to his website. But, if he chooses to speak in some other marketer’s event/platform, his topic must be hugely interesting, authoritative and informative enough, to drive traffic to his website.

Market with Influencers

Marketing with influencers relies on one very simple business concept. What marketers do is to identify and reach out to someone with a huge social media following on very popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube for instance. They arrange with such persons to help them promote their products for a fee, commissions on sales or simply in exchange for free products. Influencers help out by endorsing such products or even recommending the products to their large followers. The right candidates with influencer credentials are usually celebrities, TV personalities/stars, movie stars, beauty queens, sports personalities, etc. etc.  For a marketer, what matters most is to choose someone in the right sphere and with the right kind of following for the products you are marketing.

SEO Tips to Optimize Your Mobile Marketing

Most digital marketers are increasingly dependent on mobile online marketing in their online marketing campaigns. Mobile marketers are now doing more and more business on the go. It now appears that major search engines like Google, prefer the mobile version of your website as against the desktop version to determine ranking in their SERPs. For this reason, websites without a mobile version or with a poorly optimized mobile website tend to rank poorly. The only available remedy for that is to undertake some simple and in most cases, do-it-yourself mobile SEO tasks to enhance your mobile website ranking.

If you want to maintain a good online visibility and increase patronage for your brand, you can use these simple techniques to boost your mobile marketing campaigns.

Optimize for Local Searches

Google reports now attribute up to 60% search inquiries to mobile devices. Now that is quite a huge chunk of search results. When you factor that into the fact that more small businesses are doing better at local business, you’ll see the real necessity for optimizing your brand for local mobile searches. To optimize for local searches, you can tinker a bit with your website’s positioning online.  This you can do by simply including both your city and state in title tags, the URL, the H1 heading, and Meta description of your website. These simple tweaks can help to enhance your digital presence and make your brand more accessible to local customers. 

Optimize your Content for Mobile Devices

If you optimize your content for mobile devices, it presents and searches better in such devices.  Optimization makes content easily readable and scan-friendly and that tends to work better on mobile devices. With basic A/B test format, you can easily determine which types of mobile content perform better on mobile devices. The type of content that performs best is what brings the best results. That you can only know for sure by simply testing and retesting.
 
Optimize for Mobile Keyword Searches
 
From Google reports, marketers now know that mobile users search differently than desktop users. That is why it is essential to specially optimize your website for mobile keyword searches. Doing so is one great way to directly place your content in front of the right audience online. You can take full advantage of many effective online tools like Google’s Search Analytics tools to find keyword comparisons by device. From that, you can determine the right keywords with which to optimize your own type of mobile device.

Market with Google My Business

Yeah, Google My Business has gradually become a very crucial online business mart for marketers. It is readily one of the most important business listings many business owners now create for free. Creating an account in Google My Business is not only free but also very simple to set up. By simply filling out their blank forms with the relevant marketing info about your business, you are on. When people enter a search term for your type of business online or via a Google app, boom, they hit on your business information. Everything thereafter depends on how good your business pitch is on the mart.

Optimize Graphics/Images for Mobile Devices

It has become increasingly important for marketers to market with graphics/images as content because of their relative effectiveness as content. Optimizing graphics/images for mobile devices is aimed at improving their page loading times on these devices. Huge and cumbersome graphics/images are slow to load on mobile devices, making them not very helpful in mobile marketing efforts. You can optimize graphics/images on mobile devices by using a page-speed tool that can compress or change image dimensions for faster loading times.

Don’t Ignore Plugins

Yes, online plugins are very useful tools for optimizing mobile sites. Don’t ignore them. Popular free blog platforms like WordPress have in-house plugins designed to make your mobile site more user friendly. You can take full advantage of that in your own business. WordPress is an extremely versatile platform for content marketers.  It offers plugins to improve site speed, optimize images, and take care of other important mobile SEO tasks. WordPress has one very useful in-house plugin tool named WPtouch.  With it, you can easily create a Google-approved mobile-friendly version of your website. This you can do on your own even without using professionals to update and optimize your website. A proper use of the right plugins can help your brand to maintain good visibility online.

Use Social Media for High Visibility

Because social media sites drive a huge amount of traffic through mobile devices, you cannot afford to ignore social media if you want high visibility for your business. Credible research reports indicate that around 80% of social media users spend their social media time on mobile devices. Now that is good news for mobile marketers. Therefore, if you want to maintain high visibility with mobile users, you must prioritize your social media marketing strategy. Do not ignore hugely popular social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok and others. They have their peculiar specifications and features suitable for many types of businesses. You can therefore make it part of your social media strategy to use platform-specific advertising to engage strongly with users. Out there on social media, you can be prolific in your content postings to ensure your brand stands out by way of high visibility.

Review and Update Your Directory Listings Regularly

In the course of any online business, changes are inevitable. Business addresses, telephone numbers, emails and product listings change from time to time. It is good to regularly review and update these changes to make them current and useful. As a marketer, you must be aware that aside your Google My Business account, mobile users also use other websites and applications to find your brand online. That makes it imperative for you to regularly review and update all your business listings online. Pay particular attention to your social media accounts, Google My Business, Business Directories, Articles Directories and other websites where you have your business information. Making these reviews/corrections helps to ensure that searchers reach and access the right and correct information when they search for your business/brand name online.

10 Online Marketing Tips to Make More Money Online

Increasingly, many people are daily moving their brands and businesses online ostensibly to make more money at lower costs. They are getting more involved in online marketing for same reasons. The internet now provides a very efficient online marketing environment for smart marketers to make money. However, it needs emphasizing that making money online requires the right skills, continuous practice and experience. Even though the internet has made online marketing easily accessible to everyone, you must have a good knowledge of the internet, changing trends, creative marketing skills and be able to leverage the internet and other digital services well enough to make money online.

These ten tips to enhance your digital media presence can help you to make more money online.
 
1. Make Your Website Flexible and Responsive

Your website is your business window to the virtual world of the internet. It must be fully representative of you and your business. It serves as your virtual store and front office from which you can reach out to your audience/customers online. Your website must be well designed and with the right aesthetics, user friendly and fast loading enough to handle and encourage your visitors to do business with you. Make sure it is compliant with mobile devices since very many shoppers now habitually shop online via mobile devices including cellphones. A functional website is the first thing you need to make money online.

2. Have a Good Content Marketing Strategy

In digital marketing, content is king. Your content must be informative, educational and entertaining enough to attract traffic to your website. You must be able to post such content fresh on very regular basis to command respectable online presence. The more traffic your website gets, the more business it does and the more money it makes for you. That is the real reason you must always have a good content marketing strategy in place. Such strategy must involve blogs, promo/marketing posts, how-to videos etc. When your content is good enough, it attracts better traffic and helps your digital marketing campaigns to be successful. Good content helps to create a very positive brand image for your brand online, thereby making it sufficiently attractive to customers to attract their patronage.

3. Precisely Identify Your Target Audience

If you market online, your main assignment is to satisfy customers. That is your target audience. If you can service and satisfy your target audience well enough, you get a boost in sales/revenue as a reward. This is why your brand must always have a specifically targeted audience for whom your products/services are aimed. It helps your business better if you take deliberate steps to first identify your audience, survey them, and understand their needs/preferences including their shopping habits and demographics. Armed with this information, you can then work through the market dynamics that will help you create specific content needed to transform many of your website visitors into buyers. You make more money because of increased business therefrom.

4. Set Achievable Targets

If you have some experience in digital marketing, you must be aware that the internet is a hugely crowded and highly competitive business environment. On the internet, there are all types of brands and businesses fiercely competing for customers’ attention and sales. You cannot afford to be roaming aimlessly all over this digital space expecting good results. You must set your sights on achievable goals then focus all your marketing resources on these goals. This is what enables you to get some traction and to make some sales revenue on the internet.

5. Don’t Ignore SEO

Yes, you already have a website. That is ok. But, if your website is not optimized to make it visible to search engines, it just sits out there in the huge internet void without anyone noticing what it is up to. That is why you cannot afford to ignore Search Engine Optimization, SEO techniques on your website. These techniques involve the tactical use of free online SEO tools to choose and place keywords for the on-page, and off-page optimization on your website. With a good onsite SEO, your website ranks better on the SERPs of search engines. That way, it turns up more and better in organic searches. What that means is more and better in-bound traffic to your website. Consequently, that helps to cut down on your marketing costs significantly, freeing up valuable resources and thus more money for your business.

6. Track Results with Google Analytics

Online marketing without measuring results is akin to shooting in the dark. This is where the all-important free online tool Google Analytics is hugely important. It is near impossible to make meaningful progress in your online marketing strategy and fresh content posts if you are unable to measure the results/performance of your marketing activities. Google Analytics helps to provide meaningful insights into these marketing activities. You can use the info from the insights to improve your website and rejig/refocus your marketing campaigns for better results. It is important to keep a constant check on the metrics from these insights. You need them to help you track your performance well and to analyze what works for your brand and what does not. That way, you can take more and better marketing decisions to improve your earnings.

7. Take Advantage of Social Media

If you want to make more money online, take my advice; get your brand on social media, particularly the very popular platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others. These social media platforms provide a very wide range of tools/apps that can help you promote your brand very widely at little or no costs at all. These platforms are free to join and some have many professional tools/features helpful for promoting brands/businesses. If your business is active on social media and you post good and relatable content regularly, you can quickly build a very strong and authoritative social media presence for your brand. A strong social media presence with a very large following means good traffic and better sales revenues.
 
8. Automate

Marketing automation is imperative online to save costs and increase revenues. Free online tools abound to help you automate some of your marketing activities like blog posts and email scheduling and timing. By effectively utilizing free online marketing automation technology, you can streamline many of your marketing activities/campaigns to enable them run automatically online without your physical involvement after launching. That helps to save valuable time and money. With more time at your disposal, you can be more creative at writing marketing contents and blog posts. Better content means more traffic, more sales/revenues.

9. Leverage on Paid Advertising

Yeah, sometimes you have to pay for some form of advertising to get more traffic. That is where Pay-Per-Click, PPC ads become very handy. With PPC, your brand gets instant exposure on search engine results. That means more in-bound organic traffic. PPC is the type of marketing where marketers have to bid on the amount that they will pay for each click leading to their web pages. If your website is yet to have good search engine rankings for whatever reasons, PPC ads can help with quicker results. Your ads budget must be able to accommodate the expense though. That may be well worth it when the results start coming in with increased traffic flow. Paid advertising gives your brand a very good opportunity to attract even more potential customers through automated machine logistics of the social media channels as well as Google ads. If properly done, paid advertising is an effective way to generate more sales/revenues.

10. Leverage Social Media Business Features

Yes, many social media platforms keep innovating and improving their services to accommodate brands/businesses who want to market on their platforms. This is the reason you can now access Facebook Business Page and the new shopable post feature on Instagram among others. These, are very powerful tools which marketers can take good advantage of to promote their brands, websites and businesses in digital space. For instance, with the new shopable post feature on Instagram, you can make people directly visit your website or shop a product directly through Instagram. With these tools/features now helping to make online shopping easier and more convenient, a brand using them earns more patronage and more sales revenue mostly through impulsive buying.

Strategic Insights to Grow Your Online Marketing Business

Online marketers generally benefit more from the experiences of others who have been there before them and are still there doing their thing. Small business owners who are doing great are always willing to share some insights as distilled from their experiences. Discerning online marketers who benefit from these insights can use what they learn from the “experts” to grow their own online marketing businesses. Now, consider these insights.

Invest in a Practical Website

Your marketing window in the online virtual world is your website. Having a well-designed and practical website is thus imperative. Online, your website is where your business is at and that is where customers can effectively do business with you. Investing in a practical website is therefore good for your online business. If you hire the services of a reputable web developer, they can help you to build a website that works cohesively with any E-commerce platform of your choice. They can build a website for you complete with professional product images and some great content, which they can upload onto your website in such a way as to make it aesthetic and user-friendly. That is the kind of practical website your business needs.

Make Sure Your Website is Secure

In today’s business world, particularly online business, everyone is concerned about security. Doing business with an insecure website is not advisable. If you want to do business online, one of the most important considerations for your website is security. In the course of your online business, you will no doubt be using common online payment methods like credit cards that allow shoppers to do business from your website in a simple and efficient manner. Of course, you know credit cards always carry very private financial information of shoppers. Without a secure website, such information can easily be hacked by fraudsters thereby helping in no small measure to endanger the financial well-being of your customers. Make sure your website has first-rate security in place as one practical way to protect customer data and your own business data as well.

Market with the Right E-commerce Platform

To market seamlessly with an E-commerce platform, you must spend quality time researching the platforms to enable you decide on any that best suits what you and your business really need. The best E-commerce platforms to do business with are those that give you all the features you need to start off your online business and to scale and manage it well. This is hugely important because practically, E-commerce platforms act as dependable backbones of any online retail enterprise. They are usually well-positioned to allow the front-end and back-end of an online shop to work seamlessly together effectively and efficiently.

Have an Effective SEO Strategy

You cannot afford to overlook an effective SEO strategy for your website if you want it to useful online. Good SEO allows search engines to find and rank your site well enough to send organic traffic to it. A good SEO strategy allows consumers to search and organically discover online retail shops and products right from the comfort of their homes and offices. All that shoppers need do is simply to query search engines with the right keywords relevant to your website/business and the search engines send these shoppers straight to your website, if your SEO strategy is helpful.

Be Digital/Online Savvy

You cannot do business online without the basic knowledge of how to do business online. You must know practically everything you need to know which you greatly need to run a successful business online. You need to own and operate a practical website to allow you post fresh content regularly and to write a blog to promote your products. Running free accounts in very popular social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and a host of others can greatly help your online marketing business. From your website, you must know how to run ads, write blogs, post marketing videos and share links to your product in other online marketplaces. You cannot do without these practical online skills, if you want to market successfully online.

Simplify Your Business

In online business, simple is beautiful and simple is practical. The simpler it is to do business with your website, the better the business the site does. You can also do what other marketers are already doing and you can simplify yours for better business. You can link up with popular E-commerce sites like Amazon and sell your products in partnership with them. Purchases, payments and check out procedures must be simple enough to make your website attractive to do business.

Take Advantage of Your USP

Every business has a Unique Selling Point, USP. It takes some efforts to discover what it is. If you want to succeed as online marketer, you must find your unique selling point. Study and analyze what your competitors do in their online marketing business then discover what you do better than they do. That is your USP. It is your USP you can rely on to do exact same things your competitors do but you do them better. The more and better you do the things that tend to set your business distinctly apart from others, the better for the business.

Don’t Distract Customers

Customers are the main reason you are in business. Doing anything in your business no matter how mundane to distract them is a no-no. For this reason, you must ensure your website is user-friendly and attractive enough to sustain customers’ attention instead of distracting them. Always remember that customers come to your website primarily to shop and not to be entertained. Enticing them to do things in your website that detract from this mission is a distraction that you must avoid as much as practicable. If customers come to your online business and they do not buy from you, you are not in business.