6 Essential Tips to Boost your Small Business Marketing

To give your small business a boost, you’ve to explore ways to increase your marketing activities. With increased marketing, the business is better placed to generate leads, customers and sales. Even amidst stiff competition as expected with any online business, you can increase sales and make profits if your marketing is right. In that quest, if you want to have more customers than your competitors, these here six essential tips can help you out.

1. Get a Standard Website Design

As most marketers very well know, website design plays a huge part when it comes to attracting online customers. If you have the knowhow, you can design your website yourself. If not, you can use the services of professional webmasters to design a standard business website for you. What really matters in the design is that the website must be attractive, loads quickly and optimized for search engines and mobile devices. Such is the website that allows you to brand your business correctly. That is the type of website that quickly reflects your business values and is attractive and interesting enough to attract the attention of potential customers.

2. Intensify Content Marketing

Content marketing is one great way to attract traffic to your website. If you regularly put out highly informative and educational content from your website, you attract readers. That is traffic. By getting people curious to read your information, you arrest their attention. If that curiosity gets them back to your website often enough, you can use other marketing techniques to sell to them. Dishing out more free and informative content to cater to the needs of your readers, potential customers and customers through helpful blog posts and how-to videos helps to grab their attention better. That translates to traffic to your website. The more traffic you attract to your website through good content, the better your chances of getting conversions, customers and sales.

3. Market with Paid Ads

If your marketing budget can accommodate it, it is advisable to boost your small business sales with paid ads. Online, the best paid ads option is pay-per-click, PPC advertising model. Through this model, you only have to pay for the ads when someone clicks on them. That makes PPC cost-effective and it allows you to grab the user’s attention in a matter of seconds. The ads are laser-targeted, the reason they get very impressive results. Here is how they work. Online, anytime someone searches for something that you are targeting to show above your competitors, your ads show up on top of the most-optimized websites. What this means is that even though you do have to spend some bit money, it is always worthwhile since PPC ads enable you to instantly claim a high position on SERPs without having to go down the long, tedious and highly technical route of SEO. Ranking highly on SERPs translates to good organic traffic.

4. Market on Social Media

These days, if you are a small business owner and you are not marketing on social media, you are missing a lot. In this age of internet, there is hardly anyone not on social media doing one thing or another nowadays. What is really interesting about social media when it comes to online marketing is that it allows you to target the right people, in the right places and at the right times. The friends/followers you build over time on social media are people you already have many things in common with. This is the audience you can easily segment and market to, to get the best results. Your content can be shared easily on social media making it go viral in quick time if it is interesting and captivating enough.

 

5. Don’t Ignore Search Engine Optimization, SEO

If you market online, you cannot afford to ignore SEO if you want to boost sales for your small business online. A good SEO makes your website attractive and visible to search engines. Through it, search engines rank well your website in their SERPs. Search engines are programed to follow a set of rules for ranking websites. If your SEO is good, you can certainly attract more customers from online channels, courtesy of search engines. That usually emanates from good organic traffic back to your website. SEO involves all the practices supervised and enforced by search engines’ algorithms to provide the best results to internet users.

6. Add Affiliate Marketing

You can boost sales on your small business website by adding affiliate marketing to make more money. What an affiliate marketer simply does is to link a product merchant to a buyer and commission is earned from the effort. How is this done? Through your business website, you can display affiliate links and promote a merchant’s products through these links. Once a click is made through these links and a purchase is made, you earn a commission. It is as simple as that. Affiliate marketing is really feasible out of a standard business website because you leverage the internet tools therein to allow you skip all the tedious marketing tasks and still be able to make direct sales. Commissions payable are pre-negotiated and agreed upon and pay-outs become due and paid as soon as a sale is concluded.

4 Smart Ways to Protect Your Online Privacy

To make your data safe online, you need some online privacy arrangements. These days, every business owner needs to take deliberate actions to address the many challenges facing consumer data online. One way to go is through consumer data privacy protection. Even with strong regulations against data hacking in many countries of the world, the practice is still not abating. What to do? Just find creative ways to protect your consumer data online. It is just not enough to simply resent data hacking and hold strong opinions about privacy. What matters most in the end is what actions you can take on your own to ensure your data stays private for your business. Here are some recommendations.

1. Use a Private Search Engine
 
To avoid being tracked easily online by any and every one, you can use a private search engine. The privacy of your data is better guaranteed that way. Major search engines particularly Google cannot guarantee your data privacy. You know why? Google makes money by tracking you, collecting as much information as possible on you, and then sells your attention using ads based on that. You can’t stop Google from making money can you? If you use private search engines like DuckDuckGo, you can still get great search results without being easily tracked and targeted by others. You have a better protection for your data privacy as a result.
 
2. Use a Virtual Private Network, VPN

Good examples of VPNs you can use and depend on are Express VPN or Norton Secure VPN. Online, it is possible for people to spy on the websites you’re visiting, where you’re located, and even the identification number and type of device you are using to access the internet. The most reliable way to stop these persons is the use of VPN. Most VPNs readily protect your private information from online predators. They can even make it appear to spies as if you are browsing elsewhere different from where you actually are. They are capable of disguising your internet access device as well.
 
3. Check Permissions

As many small business owners very well know, many apps and browser extensions people like to use usually come with a list of permissions that you must have to sign off on before you can start the services. Without these permissions, the services may not even work in many cases.  So, if you don’t give the required permission, it is virtually impossible for unauthorized persons to have access to your data. If you double check the permissions an app has access to, it is one great way to stop the app from accessing specific data it doesn’t have the permission to access. 

4. Manage Your Privacy Settings

This is hugely important for your privacy management. Any time you are on social media, you inadvertently leave a data trail about you on the platforms. This holds true as well on major search engines like Google. Through privacy settings, social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter for instance allow you to decide for yourself what info you choose to publicly share or privately share or not share at all. Through these privacy settings, you can limit who can find you via your phone number or email address and whether or not your profile can show up on search engines. You can also through privacy settings regulate who can see or comment on your posts and who can share your posts. What you choose to do depends on what you intend to keep private or what you want others to see and share. This no doubt varies for one business owner to another as their individual privacy settings take care of that.