Anyone who’s tried understands that small business marketing isn’t for the inexperienced. Promoting your small business depends upon doing specific things and performing them well. The amount of competition we face nowadays is breathtaking, and working out how to get your pages delivering online is tricky.
Here are five important steps to get ahead of the game!
- Create a Marketing Plan – Don’t leave anything to chance. Construct a well-thought out, concise plan that maps out every one of your marketing elements along with what you need to do to make it happen. Make it as detailed as possible. At the very least fill in the broad strokes.
- Social Media Marketing – 91 percent of experiences social marketers generate improved website traffic and 79 percent generate more quality leads according to MediaBistro.com. Just how do they do this? They don’t waste time with their social media marketing. Map out a plan for social media an stick to it.
- Build a Mailing List – MarketingProfs.com reported emails averages a ROI (return on investment) of $40 for every $1 spent. This far exceeds keyword ads ($17) and banner ads ($2). Don’t be fooled into thinking collecting and building an email list is dead. If you don’t build a list, you are failing to build your business! You simply cannot afford to leave such a large source of potential profits to your competition.
- Video Marketing – Research has shown a video is 50 times more likely to appear on the first page of Google than any other text page! That’s too good to pass up. Small businesses can engage in this by video marketing. The video market is still relatively untapped and having a simple video advertising your wares can gain you loads of Google traffic in addition to authority.
- Gain a Mobile Presence – Microsoft reports that by 2014 mobile browsing will overtake desktop browsing. If your company doesn’t have a mobile presence, then you will become invisible. This means your small business’s website better start optimizing for mobile users and it had better get it done fast. Right now, the numbers are encroaching on the 50 percent mark. Are you prepared?
Don’t Be a Superhero and Do It Alone!
No one is a superhero and you needn’t be. The world of online marketing is constantly changing and evolving. You need to learn what is working now, learn from the best, and hire the very best outsourcing you can find. In the long run, it’ll pay off greatly!
