Online Marketing Strategies for the Growth of your Business

The Internet has become everyone’s premier shop window. Statistics suggest that the average person spends an astonishing 6 hours plus online every day, with over 2 of those hours on social media. 

If you are in business, you need an online marketing strategy. For most small businesses it should be a digital-first marketing strategy at that.

Online Marketing Strategies For Business Growth

Below are the online marketing strategies that you can use to enhance your brand visibility, acquire new customers consistently, and grow your business.

Utilizing SEO For More Customer Outreach

SEO (search engine optimisation) is the art and science of improving your rankings on search engines. With the vast majority of searches still conducted on Google, SEO still tends to focus on how to succeed on Google search.  A few tweaks to your website or article can make an enormous difference. For example, only 9% of people will click through to page 2 of their search results. SEO tactics will aim to move your page up the rankings so that customers are more likely to see you.

SEO is constantly changing. Google is continually adjusting its algorithms to improve the service for users. They have succeeded in increasing the number zero click searches, that is searches where the user gets the information they need from the search results listing and does not need to click through. Almost 50 percent of searches no longer rely on a click-through to a website or other content.  This development is making a huge impact on SEO and analytics. If you implemented an SEO strategy last year, it will need to be updated. 

Establish a Strong Social Media Presence

Social media platforms can connect businesses with their customers in a really meaningful way. While those platforms can enable you to communicate and update customers on new products, services and offers, they also enable real-time reviews and engagement. Plus, social media enables a deeper level of connection based on shared values and understanding. In other words, social media can help you to develop a powerful brand that your customers identify with. 

It’s not necessarily as easy as it sounds. If you are naturally gregarious and enjoy sharing your life online then your business social media strategy can become a natural extension of that. But even then, you will have to develop a level of discipline to manage updates and responses. Many small business owners are less comfortable with the social media environment and a solid strategy with a planned calendar of activities will make all the difference if that’s you. Start by identifying the right social media platform or platforms. Try to keep it to the one or two that make the most sense for your business. For example if you are in professional services, then LinkedIn would make sense. If you are in fashion, then probably Instagram. But your customers are the real experts, so do some research on their social media habits as part of your strategic planning review.

Don’t forget email marketing

Email marketing has made something of a comeback in the last year or so. It turns out that people are becoming a bit fed up of the bitty nature of social media and more appreciative of more thorough and regular email updates. This approach to digital marketing is also more robust for you as a marketer. You get to build a mailing list and interact in a more targeted manner with key customers. You can offer them loyalty discounts and offers. With email marketing software you can test different approaches to see what works best for your users.

Targeted Advertising

Online advertising assists your business to grow by finely targeting customers who are much more likely to be interested in purchasing and investing in your products or services. Unlike newspaper or radio ads, paid online advertising promotes your products and services only to those customers who are interested in your niche. 

Let’s take the example of Facebook. Here, you can advertise your products and services to people based on their age group, location, their interests, and much more. With this, you generate more leads and engagement and waste less of your marketing budget than you would with a broad-based advertising strategy. 

Conclusion

Much as we’d all like to just put a new website or eCommerce store out there and wait for the customers to arrive, build-it-and-they-will-come doesn’t really work for the vast majority of small businesses. You need to shout about it, you need to do that online and you need to do it to the right people in the right way.

Luckily, with online analytics, digital marketing can be more targeted and more accurate than it ever was in analogue times. Take the time to plan, review and develop a robust marketing strategy and then watch your business grow.