Your website is the virtual front door to your business and an integral part of your inbound marketing strategy. In many cases, it is the first experience people have with your brand. But when someone comes to your website, what type of first impression does it make?
Having an inbound marketing strategy is the core to your online marketing efforts. Inbound marketing is the art of attracting our customers to us by providing valuable information, rather than pushing our products and services on them. Creating and sharing useful content helps the buyer move through the purchase process and makes your business more credible, trustworthy, and visible in the process.
We are an impatient society. We want immediate response to our requests. We get frustrated when we have to wait for anything, especially for websites to load. If your website speed does not meet the patience criteria of your visitors, they will hit the back button, sending a signal to Google that your website is not a quality user experience. That behavior over time could affect your search engine ranking.
There are many types of marketing strategies a small business can use to create visibility and generate leads. Here are my top 10 marketing tips for small businesses that will help you achieve online success.
A successful web presence that attracts your ideal client and makes a great first impression is now much more complex. It incorporates not only your website and blog, but also your social media profiles, business directories and review sites.
Before we plan our marketing activities, you need to review what you can find about your business online. Do you and your business even exist? And if not, how do you build your web presence?
Every small business can benefit from having a verified Google My Business (GMB) listing. It is an important step in your local SEO strategy because a complete, verified and optimized Google My Business listing increases your chances of being found. When you optimize Google My Business, you make it more likely that your target audience will see your business rather than your competition.
Conducting a web presence analysis for your business is the first step in developing a powerful web presence. By searching for your business as if you were a potential client in search of a product or service, you will experience the first impression others experience when they click on one of your links. Since first impressions matter both online and offline, having this important information can help shape your digital marketing strategy.
The beauty of marketing on the web is the fluid nature of the channel. We have the ability to evolve our web presence as we evolve our businesses. We can write and publish our content and continue to strengthen our messages as we learn what our target audience wants or needs. We can create offers, try them and if they don’t work, change as necessary. We are no longer on that elusive quest for perfection in the traditional sense.
Small businesses have many opportunities to increase online visibility and be found by their ideal customers if they just know where to focus. Since most of us have minimal resources to call upon, we need to be smart when selecting online marketing activities that deliver the best results for our efforts.