Effective Website Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Online Business

Technically, websites are the centerpiece of your online business. They are online windows that help to provide your business insights to consumers, help you to sell products and services and generate leads. It takes quite some marketing techniques to get all these activities going satisfactorily. So, if your website isn’t working for you as you expect, you need some effective marketing strategies to get it to work for you as you expect it to. If you want your online business to succeed, you must have a marketing strategy in place on your website specifically designed to attract traffic to the website. The following strategies come in really handy in that quest.

Organic Social Media Marketing

Out there the internet, organic social media marketing is where you create a business social media account and push posts out to those who follow you. Such posts may consist of an ad, tip list or new products photos, making sure you provide the link to your website so that people can find and access your website easily from your social media posts. If your post is so well-liked and shared widely, it creates some viral effect that attracts organic social media traffic to your website. Through this traffic, you can get more leads, more followers and even make more sales.

Press Releases

Press Releases are great when your business has some news that you want to share with media outlets. PRs help to give media outlets enough information to understand the news and some basic info about your online business. If your PRs are picked up by media outlets, they may decide to feature your business in a news story at no cost. PRs help your business to expand its reach very widely and very quickly thereby helping the business to attract the much needed traffic back to your website. These releases can help to give your business brand credibility thereby distinctly setting the business apart and even making you a leader in your industry.

Search Engine Marketing

Google search usually turns up some top of the search results as “sponsored results.” These sponsored results are mostly paid ads by businesses listed in the search results. These are well targeted ads that usually point to a specific page on the website that meets the search intent. This sort of targeting is centered on specially selected keywords related to the website of the business. In search engine marketing, users always have the option of clicking on a sponsored link or going for the organic results. A business using search engine marketing aims to make its sponsored link so enticing that it best matches the user’s search intent. That best encourages more clicks and consequently more traffic.

Influencer Marketing

A business that uses Influencer marketing aims to open up its business to a loyal audience someone else has already grown. That someone else is the Influencer who already has some hundreds of thousands of followers on social media. This is always a ready audience to market to. Either as a commissions earning affiliate or with some other inducement, an Influencer can directly market the business to its followers which otherwise the business will never have had access to. Some Influencers can even directly sponsor/promote a business to their followers. Such relationship usually translates to more and better incentivized traffic back to the business website.
 
Email Marketing

Even though it has been around for quite a while, email marketing still remains a popular method used to market websites. First you’ll have to build an email list over time. It is this list you’ll have to be sending periodic emails inviting them to your website for more info, new products or even deals. You’ll get more and better responses to your emails if they cover a wide range of topics such as product promotions and sales, discount coupons, tips and tricks and loaded info to provide real value for your email subscribers. Even though emails lists take quite a while to build, they can be great marketing tools if they manage to get readers to open and read. Better still if the emails are able to get the reader to click the link back to the business website which may be the home page or a special page promoting a product/service.

SEO and Content Marketing

SEO is a technical term referring to the use of certain keywords in the content of your website with a view to helping the website to rank high on Google SERPs if and when someone searches for that keyword term. With SEO, all traffic is organic which makes it highly valuable. If your website content ranks organically, it increases the chances of people clicking through to your content through searches if they use the right terms and keywords. This is why content marketing falls into the category of SEO. It enables marketers to deliberately create content packaged in form of blogs or products review to sell a specific product/service. When the content is written well with the right mix of keywords and search terms, it will rank high in the SERPs of search engines. That translates to good organic traffic.

Guest Posts and Guest Blogging

It can be a good marketing strategy for your own website if you are writing posts or a blog for another website with links back to your website. This is either by guest posting or guest blogging or both. Regularly creating content for another website with a link back to your website is thus a great website marketing strategy. The idea is to creatively expose your own website and products to another website’s audience. Doing this helps to extend your business reach by taking advantage of another loyal audience of readers. This is one great way to get more clicks and ultimately good traffic back to your website.
 
Referral Programs

What a referral program does is to give incentives to the loyal followers of your business when they refer others to the business. Such incentives may be a gift or a special coupon code they can use to get them a discount. The idea behind a referral program is that everyone knows someone who knows someone else be they family, friends, and acquaintances. Most people generally trust the judgment of family and friends when it comes to buying products/services. The reason they’ll first ask for recommendations from such people before making purchases. That is where referral programs become highly valuable as marketing strategies. Technically, as more and more people get to know about a referral program, the easier it is to start building word-of-mouth campaigns which ultimately help the business to sell more products/services.

Online Reviews

Asking your consumer to give a review about your product/service is a great way to build brand awareness and consumer trust. That’s where online reviews become good website marketing strategies. For good business reviews, businesses can take advantage of a lot of review sites out there on the web. Popular sites like the Better Business Bureau (BBB), Trustpilot and Yelp can be of help. Just have your detailed business profile online and the review site links back to your website. This helps your business to build valuable backlinks that can help to enhance its SEO. You may choose to encourage reviews by simply asking for them. There’s nothing wrong with doing so. Alternatively, you may choose to give some sort of incentive such as a discount on future services to entice people to leave a review.

Paid Social Ads

If you need traffic and you have the resources, you may want to pay for social media ads. Social media ads are the sponsored posts that appear in social media feeds. Such ads are usually designed to target a specific demographic. They are about the most effective ads you can find in today’s market because of the peculiarities of social media. Many social media sites are not only hugely popular, they also have a lot of personal information of their millions of users stored up. This valuable info allows the sites to put a specific ad in front of an interested buyer fairly easily.

Last Line

The internet is such  a vast network that can help any business to grow rapidly. Businesses can always take advantage of the internet using their website strategies to build their brands, sell more goods/services and enhance their online reputation. Most smart business owners know they can’t afford to ignore the importance of a website to help them drive sales. But first such business websites must be found easily on the web before they can effectively render such assistance. For most websites to be easily found therefore, specific marketing strategies must be put in place to enhance the websites to enable them attract new visitors. This is exactly why effective website marketing strategies become really important. These strategies come in really handy to help a business tell its target market about its website and the products/services being marketed on the site.

Best Tips for Creating a Mobile-Friendly Website

Google reports presently attribute over 60% of online data to mobile devices. Now, that’s a clear indication that many more around the world people are accessing the internet from mobile devices. Digital marketers have quickly latched in on that vital reality to market online. Designing websites/blogs to be mobile-friendly is now smart marketing. What it simply means to have a mobile-friendly website design is that it prioritizes the design and development of a website suitable for mobile devices. The key elements in mobile-friendly website design involve optimizing the user experience on mobile devices. Thus, such websites must work optimally on smaller screens, at slower internet speeds and touch inputs which are peculiar to mobile devices. When websites/blogs are designed with the smallest screen in mind, it enables the website/blog to perform better on all devices, mobile devices inclusive. Here are some of the best tips that can help you to design a mobile-friendly website/blog.

 

Always Keep the User in Mind: You want your website to load fast and well on mobile devices, isn’t it? So, you must keep the users of mobile devices in mind when designing such websites. For a person holding a smartphone for instance, you’ll take into account at design stage what can help enhance the user experience of such a person. You must therefore focus on the user needs and wants from your website. You can then take deliberate steps to ensure that the website is designed to meet these needs.

Simplify Navigation: Mobile devices are small to handle and their maneuverability is rapid. This together with their small screens usually poses unique challenges for navigation on websites. So, if you want to improve their user experience, just simplify the navigation. This you can do by minimizing the number of navigation items and using a simple menu icon. This directly helps smartphone users to navigate the website more easily.

Design for the Smallest Screen First: If you design for the smallest screen first, it ensures that the website performs well on all devices. Pay special attention to designing for the smallest screen size. That’s about the only way to ensure that the website is optimized for mobile devices. Such designs can also perform well on larger screens too.

Prioritize Content: Content prioritization is essential if you are designing a mobile-friendly website. Since smartphones screens are really small, you must make sure that your website design prioritizes the most essential content that users are most likely to view on their mobile devices. You can simplify the content to ensure that it displays only the most important information that loads faster on mobile devices.

Use Responsive Design: A responsive design ensures that the website looks good on all devices particularly mobile devices. You can do this by using a flexible layout. This helps images to adjust to the screen size as they load.

Use Fast-Loading Images: When Images are too large and not optimized; they tend to slow down a website’s load time. This is more so on mobile devices. You can thus use optimized fast-loading images to ensure that the website loads quickly thus enhancing user experience.

Use White Space: White space is very essential for a mobile-friendly website design as it makes the content easier to read and navigate. If you use white space effectively, you can make the website more visually appealing. That directly helps to improve the user experience.

Optimize for Touch Input: Most mobile devices are operated essentially by touch inputs. This makes it imperative to optimize your website for touch inputs. You can therefore design buttons and other interactive elements that are large enough to click with a finger, but still have enough space between them to prevent accidental clicks.

Optimize Typography: You can optimize the topography of your website by designing it with the right font size and style suitable for mobile devices. You must therefore ensure that the fonts you use are not too large or too small. If for instance you use a font size that is too small, it becomes difficult if not impossible to read on small screens. Such scenario is not helpful for user experience. So, when a font is too small or difficult to read, it can make your website unusable on mobile devices.

Wrapping Up

Presently, nearly everyone around the world is clutching a smartphone and majority use these devices to do business on the internet. As a digital marketer, you’ll be losing out on this huge data if your website is not mobile-friendly. The foregoing tips can help to make your website more user-friendly and to greatly enhance the user experience of millions of mobile devices users.

How to Use Social Media for Website Marketing Strategies

As many digital marketers have since discovered, social media is one great resource for their marketing activities. It comes in very handy to use in nearly all website marketing strategies. Social media is not only hugely popular, with over 4.65 billion users worldwide, it is easy and cheap to use. It is in addition a great fun and very exciting way for marketers to reach their audience. There are so many benefits marketers derive from website marketing strategies. If they explore ways to use social media for these strategies, they have additional advantage of not having to bother so much about making search engine rankings. Following are strategies that help out this process.

Cyber Marketing Strategies

Marketers derive two major benefits when using social media in cyber marketing strategies. These strategies help build relationships with customers and potential customers by directing them to your website. Secondly, if you use the right social communities, you can easily build backlinks to your website through social media. Because some of the major social community websites on Facebook and Twitter in particular use a “no-follow” tag with the hyperlinks on their sites, they disable the ability for websites to increase their search engine rankings by linking to them from the social sites. By this action, these popular social media sites become especially useful for directing tons of traffic to the marketer’s website. However, there are other social websites, such as Digg and StumbleUpon, that don’t use “no-follow” tags. Marketers can effectively use these sites to get backlinks and to direct traffic to their websites. These benefits do not however compare to the benefits derivable from more popular social sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Internet Marketing Strategies

Using social media for internet marketing strategies is a bit complicated. Marketers really need extra care when using these strategies on social media to avoid spamming label. Yeah, you can promote your business on social media but when updating your status, you must take extra care to avoid making your products promotion too obvious. If you do, you risk getting your audience bored and losing interest in your content updates. Once you recognize that there is a fine line between spamming and regular advertising, it is left to you to strictly observe some updating strategies in your social media posts that will respect this distinction. One of such observances is that you should never make every status update you make to link back to your website. If you do, you are clearly spamming. What is advisable is to make your updates as if you are serving valuable content then occasionally throw in a link back to your website. If you blog on your website, so much the better. You can make a blog post and share on social media. That automatically links back to your website without a semblance of spam.

Social Media Interactions

Ease of interaction and sharing of information are some of the biggest advantages of social media to website marketing. On social media, people know who they are dealing with as human. They are thus very free to ask questions, give answers, make comments, offer solutions and give feedback with ease. Social media puts a personal face on you the business person and that helps to put your audience at ease. Building a reputation for you and your business becomes much easier that way. You can maintain that reputation through every single update you make on social media. You should keep your content mostly focused on your niche and how the info you give can be helpful to your audience. On social media, if you want to maintain your reputation with your audience, avoid any content about race, religion and politics. Making social media updates about these subjects no matter how subtle can hurt your reputation and even your business. It is best to avoid them all together.