What You Need to Know about Digitally Marketing Your Business
With many things taking place online these days, ensure that your business remains visible and thriving with a digital marketing plan. These tips can help you get started.
The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted virtually every corner of the world and every sector of business. Everything from college courses and kindergarten classes to doctors’ appointments have been moved to take place online. Many businesses have had to close their storefronts for an extended period of time – a move that is quite threatening to the survival of businesses overall, especially small businesses.
Luckily, you can keep your business alive and thriving online. Setting up a website for your company is a great first step. Once you choose a domain and get everything set up, however, you should put together a digital marketing strategy. Digital marketing is essential to giving your business the exposure it deserves.
Digital advertisements (website banners, social media posts, email campaigns, etc.) allow your company more visibility to a wider audience. However, if your marketing materials, e.g. the creative, aren’t well thought out, you most likely won’t get the outcome you’re hoping for. Whether it be the design, channel, or messaging elements, every aspect of digital marketing needs to be taken into consideration for it to work in your business’ favor.
To determine the very best ways to create and implement a digital marketing plan for your business, we’ve compiled the following tips to help any company get the most out of web-based marketing.
Get to Know Your Audience
Do you know who you are marketing to? Defining your target customer, client and audience — and figuring out the best means of marketing to them — is the first step in the digital marketing puzzle.
For any business to be effective, you need to know who their audience is, which social media sites your audience spends time on, and then you have to make sure to be able to provide content for the platforms your audience spends time on. For example, a women’s clothing business with a target audience of the 18-35-year-old female will want to create content that reach audience members for Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
Focus on Creative Elements
Your business has visual elements that make it unique to others. Use your business’ individuality to your advantage in your marketing efforts. Whether it is a logo, mascot, font, or color scheme, branding your marketing content to your business will help catch your audience’s attention.
You want to catch their eye, but also want to hold their attention long enough that they will remember your brand. Incorporating unique and creative visual elements into your digital marketing ads is crucial to the success the ads will bring you. Just remember to keep things unique, consistent and in line with your brand.
Build Relationships Via Email
Email marketing is something that every business should take advantage of. To succeed with email marketing, you need to provide your target customer with some sort of value in exchange for their contact information (email address).
If you are serious about collecting new email leads, you might want to take the time to create a free report or eBook that will help people in your industry or niche. If you’re a business that sells a product or service, you might want to offer a discount code to shoppers. Then, develop a relationship with that consumer through drip-fed campaigns using an email campaign messaging system. A few to look into include Constant Contact and Mailchimp. Keep in mind through your communications, though, that you shouldn’t be trying to sell your business around every corner. Connect first, then focus on selling.
Get Active in Industry Forums
Social outlets like Facebook and LinkedIn feature groups and industry-specific forums. Find and join groups that speak to and align with your business and start joining conversations.
Many people have the forum-posting strategy wrong. These groups are not the place to directly sell your business but are more a place to give your brand a voice and authority in the marketplace of your industry. No one likes a person who comes into a new forum and begins spamming links. Again, you have to think about doing the most amount of work for the least initial return. Add value. Chat with others. Make suggestions. Answer questions. Just don’t spam links. Add your link to your signature after a few posts or after the rules of the forum allow you to do so.
Optimize Your Site for SEO
Optimizing your business’ website for relevant keywords is an important aspect of digitally marketing your company. However, the one thing to keep in mind is that if your business is new — less than two years old — and you’ve built very little authority or content, you’re going to have a hard time ranking at the top of Google’s SERPs for any keyword that’s marginally competitive.
Pay attention to things like your site’s speed, mobile version usability, meta descriptions, image alt-text tags, reading level, citing of sources, content quality, insightfulness and so on. Site optimization is a marathon rather than a sprint, so don’t get discouraged in the short term if you don’t see enormous results. Traffic will accumulate over time if your site is optimized properly and as you continue to add content.
Our Goal
We at the Elmore County Economic Development Authority care about our local businesses and the success of each of them. During these trying and unprecedented times, we aim to provide resources for the businesses in Elmore County in order for them to reopen safely and responsibly due to COVID-19.
Take advantage of the above tips and use the internet and all of its resources to keep your business visible and relevant, whether or not your storefront is physically open at the moment. For more information, browse the resources on the ECEDA website.