While video may seem like an expensive trend that is out of the grasp of many businesses, it can be an inexpensive and effective marketing tool for even the smallest business.
Today, if you have a smartphone, you can make a great marketing video. A one-minute video highlighting the things that make your company unique could become your best customer acquisition tool.
Email Marketing is extremely effective for nurturing your list and generating more sales.
The success of your email marketing strategy begins with the opt-in experience you give your prospects. The opt-in “experience” on your website needs to be compelling, creative, and even exciting! Get this part right and you’ll have more opt-ins and happier subscribers. Get it wrong, and you risk setting the stage for unsubscribes and lost opportunities.
The next step is your headlines. This is what gets someone to click through. It needs to be catchy and relevant and pass any spam guidelines. The last thing you want is your email going straight to the spam box.
Search Engine Optimization is a popular online marketing strategy, and therefore, competitive, but I’m consistently amazed at how many business owners and marketers opt not to engage in an SEO strategy because of its perceived limitations or drawbacks.
Related: Top 7 Things You Don’t Know About SEO
One of the biggest misperceptions is that SEO is expensive, and it’s driven by the fact that some agencies have higher-level packages that cost tens of thousands of dollars per month.
Yes, SEO can be expensive for hyper-competitive, national-scale businesses, but that doesn’t mean it’s unaffordable for the average business owner.
In fact, there are dozens of simple strategies you can execute yourself, for free, to better optimize your site for search engines. These are just some of the major ones:
1. Find better keywords.
Optimize for keywords that are closer to your niche and have fewer competitors. Google Trends and Google’s Keyword Tool in AdWords are free tools that should give you all the data you need. For help, see this article.
Search engine optimization is a methodology of strategies, techniques and tactics used to increase the amount of visitors to a website by obtaining a high-ranking placement in the search results page of a search engine (SERP) — including Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines. (Source: Webopedia).
There are some ‘on page’ activities that you can do such as producing good content (making sure it includes relevant keywords), making sure your pages are well structured (for example, including meta information) and has a good page title with all of the images properly tagged.
There are also some ‘off page’ actitivities such as having an XML sitemap in place, setting up your Google Search Console account, website speed optimisation and a good overall technical structure (the way your web pages are programmed)
In reality, growing digitalization is the reason behind data explosion. Similarly, digital technologies offer businesses an excellent set of opportunities to get meaningful information from their data. Mobile Analytics, Social Media, Cloud storage are the few means through which consumers, organizations and employees interact with one another. Improving customer services, delivering better results and ROI, engaging more traffic, generating better conversions, outperforming your competitors, attaining cost-effectiveness can only be achieved through analyzing the data.
Previously known as Google Places, Google My Business helps potential customers find you anytime, anywhere.
It is the main way of adding your business to Google as an official directory listing. It will give you results in Google search against your company name and also make you appear on Google Maps as a proper ‘pin’ (see ‘Why bother’ below).
If you don’t register with Google My Business, you are missing out on an essential, marketing opportunity.
The main page to register and set up your company in ‘Google My Business’ is at: www.google.com/business/go/
This step-by-step guide will take approximately 15-20 minutes to complete (assuming you have your marketing text ready for copying and pasting – a bit longer if you don’t!).
Go to google.com/business/go and and click on the ‘Start Now’ button: