One of the hardest parts of running an online business is getting new customers to your website. There are so much competition and different ways to market your business that it is often hard to know where to start and what to focus on. If you need some help marketing your online business, you should implement 6 marketing channels for the best results.
1. Search Engine Optimization
The first place to start is with Search Engine Optimization (SEO). It basically consists of making decisions that will help your website appear higher in search results. Every search engine has its own factors that they consider when determining the results’ order for searches. Knowing what these factors are and making decisions based upon them can help your site move up the results.
For example, one area you can focus on is your title tags. Title tags are the titles of your pages that appear in search engine results and the web browser. Creating great title tags, such as ones that draw in customers or include certain keywords, can help your search engine rankings. Other things you can focus on include speeding up the load times of your pages, generating backlinks, and creating great meta descriptions.
2. Social Media
The next important marketing channel is social media. When used properly, social media can be one of the best drivers of traffic for any website. Social media sites are completely free to use, and you have the ability to reach thousands of people with just the click of a button.
To make the most of social media, you’ll want active accounts on all the major platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Through each of these accounts, you’ll want to post updates about your online business, interact with your customers, and handle customer service requests. You can also consider doing things like holding contests, increasing website traffic, and social media followers.
The most important thing to know about social media is that you need to give it plenty of attention. You can’t simply update your pages once a week if you want to get the most out of it. Social media accounts should be updated every day, sometimes even multiple times per day. If you need some assistance doing this, visit this guide to learn how to find a social media marketing agency that can help you out. Creating in-house social media teams can seem like a logical step for most businesses, but in reality, hired marketers will know the latest ins and outs of the industry and have ample experience from working with various clients, helping you create the most up-to-date effective campaigns for your business.
3. Email Marketing
Many online businesses can benefit from an email marketing strategy. Email marketing is great for directly targeting people who have shown an interest in your business. You can reach them in a place that they check frequently and deliver them content that will convince them to come back to your website.
For example, let’s say an interested customer visits your website for the first time. They have an interest in your products, but they are not quite ready to buy yet. However, you offer a place where you will provide them with discount codes in exchange for their email address on your website. This customer submits their address, and you regularly send out information about your latest sales and promotions. Because of this email marketing strategy, this customer is now more likely to come back in the future and make a purchase.
Email marketing is something you can do on your own, but it can take a lot of work. To make the job easier, consider using an email marketing service that offers many shortcuts and tools. This can significantly reduce the time commitment while still getting the results from a strong email marketing strategy.
4. Pay-Per-Click
Pay-Per-Click, or PPC, is one option for running advertisements on other websites. Your ads will appear in places like Google search results or on people’s Facebook pages. If someone clicks on your ad and visits your website, you will be charged a small amount.
PPC campaigns have several benefits. For starters, you only pay when someone visits your website. This means you don’t have to spend money on ads that are not effective, only on the ones that convince people to click. Another benefit is available for targeting tools. Through PPC campaigns, you can target particular groups of people, such as men over the age of 30 that earn at least $75,000 per year and are from California. If you know what type of audience your business appeals to, you can spend your marketing budget more efficiently using adequate PPC tools.
For more information on how to run effective PPC campaigns, check out this guide.
5. Content Marketing
With content marketing, you can have potential customers initiate contact with you, rather than the other way around. In content marketing, you produce helpful and relevant content for your audience, then distribute it on the web. When your audience finds this content, they learn about your business at the same time.
For example, if you run an online business that provides digital marketing services, you could write a blog post about “10 Ways to Improve Your Digital Marketing Strategy”. Then, people looking to learn about improving their own digital marketing strategy may come across your blog post. As they learn about the tips you’ve provided, they also learn that you provide digital marketing services.
With content marketing strategies like writing blog posts on your websites, creating white papers, and guest blogging on other websites, you can generate a steady stream of traffic to your website. You can also help your brand become an authority within your niche, which will help generate further sales.
6. Referrals
Finally, there is referral marketing. A great way to generate more customers is by having your previous happy customers spread the word about you. However, happy customers won’t always do this on their own, so you may need to provide a small boost. This is where setting up a referral program helps.
For example, you can offer a discount on a future purchase to anyone who recommends a new customer. This gives your past customer a reason to share your brand and to become repeat customers themselves. By working to provide the best possible customer experience and encouraging those people to refer you to others, you can significantly increase your website traffic, making this an essential marketing channel.
Explore All Your Options
To market your online business, you must explore all the marketing channels available to you. Some will work better than others, but you won’t know which ones until you give them all a try. Go through each of the marketing channels above and set up a trial period. Over time you will see which channels work best, and you can begin to divert more attention to those, increasing your web traffic as you go along.