How To Market My Business Online – Comprehensive Guidelines
There are a lot of factors you need to take care of to get your business up and running, but in the end, there’s little you can do if you can’t get to the right customers. If they don’t know you exist, they’ll never come to you. That’s why devising a marketing strategy is always the top priority in planning any business. And in this digital age, it’s all about the question “How To Market My Business Online”.
Digital marketing has expanded to embrace a wide variety of fields, tools, and strategies. Most of the time business owners focus on one form or another of social media marketing, but digital marketing includes a lot more. Your brand can be represented in a lot of different and creative ways, and the digital signage experts know best about it. It takes ample creativity to showcase the essence of your business in the right way, using the right tools, to target your potential customers. And you won’t be able to deploy your brand’s advertisement without having a good, solid foundation to convert onlooking passersby into online visitors who’ll become your loyal customers in no time. Getting your online brand on its feet might feel daunting, but with the right guidelines, you’ll be able to get in the game in no time.
How To Market My Business Online – Setting Your Goals
Just as you’ve definitely started your business plan by listing your goals and objectives, having a clear idea of what you want to get from your online marketing is crucial. When you have clear goals, you’ll know which strategy to devise, and you’ll be able to use the right tools to get you the exact results you want. So, what are your goals and expectations of online marketing? Do you want more conversions?
You might want to focus more on that if your online business has been running for a while but you still aren’t getting any customers. Are you just getting started and you want to build brand awareness? Do you want more engagement from the community? In a way, all of these goals are interrelated. However, setting your priorities clearly will help you direct your focus to the right means.
How To Market My Business Online – Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Online marketing is a huge field that encompasses many tools. You can take the help of paid advertising tools to increase your reach, but you’ll always need to set the right foundation strongly at first. The first—and most important—foundation you need to build is to optimize your online presence for search engines. This is where SEO tools come to play in the most critical role. To play it right, there are two SEO factors you’ll need to work on: on-site and off-site SEO.
On-Site SEO
On-site SEO concerns all of the factors present on your website, and that’s where all of the work takes place. To optimize your on-site SEO, you’ll work on your website’s structure, coding, and content.
Website Structure
In recent years, search engine algorithms have advanced in such a way that their biggest priority has become to provide users with the best user experience. That means that they’ll refer those searching for inquiries to the websites that will provide them with what they’re looking for, in the best way they expect. Taking care of your website structure then not only means your SEO ranking will be higher, but it means that all of your visitors will be rewarded for their time. To make sure your website is well-structured, you’ll need to take care of the following factors:
- Your website is responsive, which means it’s optimized for mobile devices.
- The design and layout are user-friendly.
- The URL represents your brand clearly and directly.
- The navigation bar is well-established and direct.
- Visitors can search your website for inquiries.
- All of your pages are linked together strongly.
- Your website’s speed doesn’t take more than a couple of seconds to launch.
- Your HTML and XML sitemaps are clear and concise.
Clean Coding
Your visitors may not look into your code at all, but search engines surely will. Messy codes can result in page loading relapses and crashes you want to avoid, otherwise, they’re going to hurt your ranking for sure. Your code has to be updated regularly, with close attention to how you place your description, headings, and meta tags.
If you’re using a website builder, then you won’t have to go through the same amount of trouble in case of building your website from scratch. However, even then, you’ll need to audit your website every now and then to make sure you’re using the latest plugins and cleaning any residual or outdated content.
Optimized Content
Even the most meticulously crafted structure and code will leave any website boring without an equally well-crafted content. The content you show on your website should vary between words, images, videos, and graphic design. Whatever content you use, you have to make sure it’s always abiding by your brand guidelines, starting from the tone of voice to the shade of colors used. Crafting content isn’t just about creating an appealing content or design.
Those two are very important, of course, but for your on-site SEO, you need to make sure you’re using the right keywords that’ll attract your visitors. Keywords are what potential customers put into the search bar to get answers, and keywords are also what the search engines look through their database to deliver the search results. By placing the most researched keywords your target segment is most likely to search for, you’re ensuring your place among the results delivered.
Off-Site SEO
Off-site SEO is all of the factors you work on outside of your website to take care of your SEO ranking. This includes backlinks, social media signals, and reviews.
Backlinks – Brand Mentions
If search engines trust one thing, then it’s reputable brands that are already established with a strong fan base. If any of those brands mention you on their websites, that’s a golden voucher for you, which directly translates into a higher ranking. This takes more than one form, so if a well-trusted website refers to its own visitors to your website, or “backlinks” in another term, then this reflects positively on your own trustworthiness. Search engines are even able to see any time your brand has been mentioned by other reputable brands, which has the same positive effect on you.
Social Media Signals
Your online presence also plays an important role in how search engines rank your website. Whenever your audience engages with any of your social media platforms, it registers as a social media signal. Think of the reactions, comments, shares, and any sort of engagement from your followers. Whether it’s Facebook reactions, Instagram comments, re-tweets on Twitter or active followers on LinkedIn, all of these increase your social media signals. In turn, these signals play a direct role in increasing your website’s SEO ranking.
Reviews
When it’s all about user experience, it makes a lot of sense that reviews can make or break your online business. Getting good reviews from your customers won’t only encourage others to visit you, but it will directly affect your SEO ranking positively, too. Alternatively, bad reviews will do just the opposite. Reviews are most important for local rating, so if the focus of your business is getting local customers, getting positive reviews should be in the heart of your marketing strategies.
How To Market My Business Online – Content Strategy
Optimizing your website for the search engines builds the main foundation for your marketing strategy, growing and maintaining your presence heavily depends on your content strategy. No matter how strong your foundation is, if you leave it as is, it will get old, and new competitors will take over. Your content strategy needs to be ever-evolving, but first, you’ll need to figure out what works best for you. Only then will you be able to improve and develop. To figure that out, here are the steps you need to take.
Studying Your Audience
Knowing your audience well means everything in the digital marketing world. It will help you figure out the right keywords to use, understand what they need and craft your content accordingly, optimize your campaigns to attract their interests, and turn them into loyal customers by offering them value.
A good way to start figuring out your own customers’ persona is by analyzing the existing customers of your competitors. What are they like? What are their behaviors, interests, and needs? How do they react to what your competitors offer? By analyzing your competition, you’ll get valuable lessons from their good and bad experiences.
Choosing the Right Kind of Content
Depending on your business, you’ll be attracting different kinds of customers. And depending on your target segment, one kind of content will be much better to deliver than the other. For instance, if your main purpose is to entertain your audience, your smartest tools would be to use videos, quizzes, and games to engage with your visitors.
Those tools won’t bring you any good if you’re dealing with professionals who want to know trusted facts and news, in which case you’d better focus on case studies, webinars, product features, or data sheets and guidelines. If your purpose is education, you’ll want to create whitepapers and demo videos.
Choosing the Right Social Media Platforms
There’s no doubt that creating a website is critical for your online business. However, building your online presence also means choosing the right social media platform to represent your business. Choosing the right platform comes down to your target segment and your brand needs. If your customers are mainly professional businessmen, you’ll find that LinkedIn is your best platform of choice. Facebook and Twitter are mainly for young adults, teenagers, and parents. YouTube works best for emerging businesses with the focus on multimedia, which gives them a chance of their videos going viral.
How To Market My Business Online – Creating Content Marketing Strategy
Once you decide on your target audience, the tools, and the platforms you’re going to use, it’s time to create your content marketing strategy. By going back to your marketing goals, you’ll be able to answer the following questions.
- What’s your priority in your marketing strategies?
- To achieve your targets, what will your campaigns be?
- How many posts do you need to post? Often? How long will the content be?
- What are the platforms you’ll be using?
After getting these answers, you’ll be able to create an editorial calendar that schedules all of your posts all over your platforms. Understanding how to promote your business online is the shortest way to let all of your potential customers know about you.
The answer to the overall question “How to market my business online?” starts with setting your goals, after which you devise your plan. Your online presence starts with your website, and optimizing your website for the search engines is the most important foundation for your online business. Next comes your content strategy, in which you use the optimal tools to achieve your goals and reach your customers.