How to Promote Your Business Online

How do you promote your business online? Many business owners believe that just by creating a nice looking website, the visitors will flock to the site and they just have to sit and wait for the money to flow in.  It doesn’t happen that way. There is no “if you build it, they will come” online. With over 1 billion websites in the world it, is very unlikely that people will stumble upon your site without you having to do anything.

The weird thing is, most of these sites exist without being seen. The average person doesn’t venture very far across the web, only visiting 96 separate domains per month, according to a Nielsen estimate in 2013.

Can you be found on Google?

Search Engine Optimization, SEO

Without Search Engine Optimization it is unlikely that your will be found in the search engines for any relevant phrases.

• Keywords research, finding appropriate keywords that targets the audience you are after and relates to the content of the site. This sets the theme of the site and selecting the phrases that you want the site to be found by.
• On-page SEO, this is the optimization of site pages to represent intended content as well as possible in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines
• Offsite SEO, Domain Authority Building
• Traffic Data, visitor behavior, time on site, pages per session, bounce rate, pogo sticking.  

Content Marketing

Content marketing is critical to keep your website fresh and relevant in the space you want to fill. SEO doesn’t work if you don’t have good interesting content to optimize. You need to create relevant, interesting content to attract your target audience, and ultimately drives customer action.

Location Targeting

Making sure you NAP (name, address, phone number) and other relevant business information is correct and consistent on all online business profiles and directories.  This is important for both local and mobile searches.

Social Media Marketing

Creating Social media presence on the social media that is most relevant for your business, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Youtube, Google+, Instagram etc. Social media has become important engagement tool for most businesses and can increase your reach. Many businesses are using social media to drive traffic to their site, answer customers questions.

Mobile Optimized Website

Can your business be found on a cell phone search? With many websites having more than half of their traffic on mobile devices, your website needs to be well optimized for mobile devises and can be found in searches on all devises.

Email Marketing

Email marketing helps you market your products and services with the use of the email messages with the best chances for making a profit and reaching your goals.

SMS Marketing

With a 90 percent open rate, SMS gets your messages read faster than any other channel. Implementing effective SMS messaging between brands and mobile device users is a great way to engage customers throughout the buying process. SMS marketing is also great for lead generation.

Reputation Management

Reviews are important representation of your level of service or quality of your products. Reviews also affect your local search ranking,

Referral Marketing

Referral marketing is a method of promoting products or services to new customers through referrals, usually word of mouth.

PPC Pay-per-click advertising, Social Media advertising

Search engine advertising such as Google Adwords or Bing advertising are one of the most popular forms of PPC. Social media advertising such as Facebook advertising is another channel worth exploring.

Online PR

Online PR activity is closely associated with improving results from many of the other digital marketing communications techniques in particular social media, SEO (link-building), partnership marketing and viral marketing / word-of-mouth marketing.

Video Marketing

Video is projected to claim more than 80% of all web traffic by 2019. Adding a video to marketing emails can boost click-through rates by 200-300%. Embedding videos in landing pages can increase conversion rates by 80%.  90% of customers report that product videos help them make purchasing decisions.

Offline Promotion

Offline promotions such as direct marketing, radio advertising, TV advertising, print media can be specially valuable leverage if integrated to online media.