Online Marketing Tips for Small Business Startups

You have a great business idea? That’s cool. If it is an online marketing business idea, and it is unique and promising, you could be on to something great as an entrepreneur. You are on your way to being your own boss. That gives you some measure of independence and power as a business owner. If you launch the business successfully on the internet, that’s great. That is the right way to go. You’ll be saving yourself from the initial huge capital outlay needed to rent office spaces and all, if the business were to have a physical space.

 
 
Here is a step-by-step way to go if your small business is a startup.

Plan and Prepare

Plan and prepare for vigorous marketing online. That entails a lot. Design a website with a good structure in place. This structure includes searcheable URLs, website titles, internal links, etc and should meet the requirements of successful SEO optimization. The website should be flexible, user-friendly and well optimized for mobile devices. It should be able to prominently display good ads banners, contact information and calls-to-action features.
 
Launch the Business

When launched, it the ideal time to grow your online presence and build your brand. That requires skillful online marketing efforts. As soon as the website is live, online marketing measures should be used to build the brand. That aims to make the brand known and to deliberately guide users to the website. You can now promote good content out of it, do affiliate marketing out of it and enter into any other sales/partnership deals out of it.

Attract Leads and Sales

Next is to attract leads, customers and sales. That calls for more marketing efforts. To reach as many users as possible and as quickly as possible, branding campaigns with banners should be deployed on high-reach pages of the website. This is the time to take all marketing steps that help to attract interested parties to your products and your brand. These efforts help to bring increased traffic to the website, leads, customers and sales. You can in addition use social media campaigns including how-to videos in order to increase engagement and attract more traffic to the website. To benefit from free organic traffic, the website must be optimized with good SEO and backlinks to make it visible and attractive to search engines.

Maximize Sales/Profit

This is the ultimate. Everyone is in business to make sales and profits. How you are able to maximize your sales and profits determines how successful your business is. To enhance this, you must continuously track your traffic, analyze metrics and take all measures to keep boosting your traffic with an effort to maximize sales and profits. That means more advertising, more optimizing and more monitoring of your traffic results. This you can do by using traffic analysis to find out where the most valuable traffic is coming from. That helps you to determine where best to concentrate your marketing activities/resources and through which channels. With continuous monitoring of your traffic in combination with quickly implemented optimization measures, you can ensure that the marketing measures you are using contribute to constant profit maximization.

Concluding Thoughts

All start-ups no matter the scale are by no means easy. That is why you need a well-thought-out business plan, financial potential and professional online marketing skills to see you through. If your mind is open to continuous learning, you can quickly acquire the right marketing skills to help your business succeed online. What you really need is to deploy marketing skills on your website to increase sales by skillfully converting your website visitors into paying customers. That is the good news. Every business you see doing great out there today was at some point a startup just like your own. 

Get your hands on it right away. Good luck!

8 Creative Ways to Increase Visibility for your Small Business Online

Your small business needs online visibility to do well online. This you can do in many ways aside from such common ways as your website, social media profiles, online listings, and ads. If you are already used to the common ways, you can now try these here eight creative ways to increase visibility for your small business online.

1. Make your Content Accessible to Everyone

This includes people with disability particularly sight impairments. You can attract more traffic to your website if you explore ways to make your website pages and emails accessible to people with disabilities. With about 25% of adults having one form of disability or another, using internet technology to market to this formidable group can help to dramatically increase your online visibility. If more people with disabilities have more and better access to your online content, it presents you a very valuable opportunity to expand your online visibility.

2. Be Sensitive to Diversity

This is diversity in race, gender, disability and peculiarities. Now more than ever before, incorporating diversity into your workplace and marketing material is more important than ever. This is the sign of the times to really embrace full diversity in your marketing activities. If you represent the diverse range of people within your audience in your online assets, you can get noticed by more people while also demonstrating social responsibility at the same time.

3. Seek Guest Posting

By exploring many ways to use guest posting to reach more potential customers, you increase your online visibility as a result. What you do is to deliberately search for any complementary businesses or local media outlets that have a strong online presence. Reach out to them to see if they’ll accept your guest posts on their website. If they do, you do not only get your business in front of their audience, but a link to your site from theirs can help to improve your SEO. You give out similar favors by accepting guest posts on your own blog. Both gestures help the online visibility of benefiting websites.

4. Leverage the Power of Videos

Your small business can tactically leverage the power of video for more shares and memorability and that is great for your online visibility. How-to videos are very easy to create and share too. Viewers usually retain over 90% of a message when they watch it in a video compared to about 10% when reading it in text. That is why videos are very effective marketing tools online. The shareability of videos is also very high particularly on popular social media sites like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and the likes.

5. Content Sharing by Employees

If a small business owner encourages his employees to share his business content with their own social networks, the visibility therefrom is great. Content shared by employees usually receives more engagements than content shared by brand channels. Small business owners can always take advantage of this by sharing content particularly blog posts with their employees and encourage them to share it on their social media networks in particular. That helps to generate more feedback and user content which search engines notice. Such content can greatly help your ranking and visibility.

6. Build Beneficial Relationships

To seek online visibility, having a good relationship with many different people is hugely beneficial. Going about it alone as a business owner might be daunting at times but factoring in other people with whom you have a strong relationship can help you in a number of ways. Many of such people who have their own audiences and relationships they routinely deal with can be of great help. People in this category who easily come to mind are content writers, loyal customers, fellow business owners, reporters, vendors, influencers, celebrities, sport personalities and so on. A connection with these connections can introduce you to their own connections. The ultimate goal is to cultivate mutually beneficial relationships from which organic opportunities can arise. A hugely beneficial network grows from there and that is great for your online visibility. 

 

7. Use Mobile-Specific Marketing Strategies

Good news for small business owners! Google is now using mobile-first indexing for all sites on the web. By this development, if you have a mobile optimized website, it helps your online visibility. In addition, with more than half of internet searches now being performed on mobile devices, your website can greatly benefit from such huge search data. If your website is mobile optimized, it helps to make sure your website pages and emails render properly on tablets and smartphones. It also seamlessly leverages mobile-specific strategies like, podcast ads, SMS marketing, voice search, mobile search ads, local SEO and so on.

8. Intensify Email Marketing

The biggest advantage of email marketing is that email recipients have already opted in to receive your emails. Unlike social media followers who merely opted to follow you, email inboxes don’t compete for info from hugely crowded news feeds. Marketing by email can be specifically targeted in both messaging and timing and the marketing responses can be very great for your visibility. They help your business with lots of opportunities to get quality exposure. Once you take quality time to build an email list over time, segment the list, create quality and highly informative content for your emails, and optimize the emails well enough, they help your business exposure/visibility tremendously.