For many businesses, digital is the only way to go about their marketing these days.
Cheaper, quicker, and more measurable, online marketing provides so many benefits to businesses that many choose to focus exclusively on digital techniques. It is especially useful for businesses on a budget, including start-ups and smaller businesses that don’t have a huge marketing budget for newspaper and TV advertisements.
So which techniques should you focus on when you start promoting your own business online using digital marketing? Here are a few of the most effective to get you started.
Set up an email newsletter
Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective and powerful techniques available for online marketers.
Emails are still the number one way to keep in touch with contacts, and they are the ideal way to build a relationship over time, increase trust, and get direct access to your targets in a very affordable way.
As a result, many marketers insist that building an email list should be one of your first priorities.
“Once people sign up to your list, contact them regularly with interesting information and updates”
You should do this by setting up an account with an email provider like MailChimp or Constant Contact, and then setting up a sign-up form on your site and offering a lead magnet like an ebook or a free course.
Once people sign up to your list, contact them regularly with interesting information, updates, offers, and more. If you provide them with valuable content on a regular basis, they are more likely to do business with you in the months ahead.
Get blogging regularly
Starting a business blog is one of those things that seems obvious, but many businesses still fail to get it right.
A business blog has many benefits. It allows you to provide updates about your products and services, get a conversation going in the comments, provide value, demonstrate your expertise, create a brand voice, and much more.
Importantly, it also provides you with a simple way to publish regular and original content on your website. This is great for SEO, and it helps you to direct more people to your site where they are more likely to spend more time as a result of the content they find there.
Spend time on social media
Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are ideal platforms for marketing your business, and marketing on them can have many benefits. Although these are all free to set up a presence, they require time and effort to get a real benefit from using them.
Start off by finding out where your targets are present. Do most of them hang out on Facebook, Twitter, or another site? Then set up your presence, share your blog content, get involved in conversations, answer questions, and share valuable content that you come across. You can even provide customer service via your social accounts.
Ask customers to follow and like your pages and updates, and spend a bit of time each day on improving your presence. Over time, you may find that social networks become an important source of traffic for your website.
Build links to your site
SEO is one of the most important marketing practices of all. Publishing a blog and sharing content on social media are two aspects of successful SEO, but another important strategy is to build links back to your site.
If you hire a white label SEO company to help with your SEO, building links is one of the most important strategies that they will focus on. So make sure you have a link-building strategy in place, and continue to build links to your site on a regular basis.
Launch a remarketing campaign
Another strategy you may want to look into is remarketing. This involves advertising to people who have already visited your website, so you can try and tempt them back to make a purchase.
When people land on your site, you can load cookies onto their browsers. When they then leave your site and visit their social media accounts or other websites, you can reach out to them with targeted ads.
You only pay when someone clicks on an ad, and you can tempt them back with a special offer or simply remind them about the product they were interested in. If done properly, this can be an effective and affordable technique that can help you to make more sales that you would otherwise miss out on.
Get more traffic and business with digital marketing
These are just a few of the most popular techniques that you can focus on when you start up a digital marketing strategy for your business. However, there are many more that you can experiment with, so your best option is to try out a few options and work out which ones are most effective for your business.
“Your best option is to try out a few options and work out which ones are most effective for your business”
Then keep on measuring your results to optimise your campaigns and get more from your marketing over the coming months and years.
Anna Cross works in the world of digital marketing and has worn many hats over the years, from on-page SEO expert to social media marketing management.
See also: How to make your digital marketing work harder for you