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As a business owner you now have now more low-cost and effective web marketing opportunities than ever.
Web marketing can make any small business become more visible online and attract more customers. But marketing your business online means much more than creating some Google Ads and building a nice Facebook page. Following are five web marketing tips that will help you capitalize on the opportunities that exist online.
1.Determine Your Goals
What is the goal of your marketing? To direct more traffic to your website? Generate more phone calls? Boost your Facebook and Twitter follower count? Get more email subscribers? Since all of these can help your business grow, you will ultimately want to do them all, but as a small business, it’s wise to focus on what matters most to you.
For example, if you’re selling your products and services online, it would be best to target traffic to your website and build a large email following that you can nurture and contact regularly, rather than attempting to make a one time sale immediately. The numbers work in your favor when you have a list of clients and prospects you can regularly contact by email .
2.Evaluate Your Online Competitors
Look at it this way – two small businesses offer similar products in the same price range. The business that uses social media as part of their web marketing, engaging prospect and clients will usually sell more than the other business.
Evaluating and keeping track of your online competition can be a complex process involving a thorough assessment of the main keywords around which their marketing campaigns are based, as well as how they are used in social media sites to build a following.
Unless you have someone on staff dedicated to managing and building your social media presence, it’s worth the investment to have an online marketing company assist you, or even do the work for you.
3.Track Calls and Use Analytics Software
Call tracking helps you keep track of where incoming calls originate. For example, you run two ads with the same offer but use different headlines, and a different phone number. Tracking the number of phone calls generated by the ads shows you what your market responds to. It’s not uncommon in tests like these, for one headline to outperform another by 200 to 300%. That’s a significant difference.
Analytics refers to the process of tracking and analyzing data related to your website, web marketing efforts, and online social presence. Analytics provides insight into how people use your website, what content they prefer, how they react to your calls-to-action, as well as how your keywords perform.
Many small business owners don’t bother with call tracking and analytics because they don’t understand the technology or how to read the data.
Taking the time to learn how to read and interpret the data will help you make better decisions on where to invest your marketing budget.
4.Optimize On-Page and Off-Page SEO
In today’s competitive online environment, search engine optimization (SEO), to make your website rank higher in the search results page (Google, Bing, Yahoo) is a must if you want to increase your visibility.
SEO is technical. Unfortunately most business owners have only an elementary grasp of what it entails and how important it is to their online presence.
The online world is constantly evolving. What worked 12 months ago, may have lost its effectiveness today. That’s why business owners who are serious about building their sales and profits, see on-page and off-page SEO as an investment.
Closing a sale is considerably easier when the buyer is ready to buy. And with online search, it’s the buyers who initiate the sales process. Think about that for a minute. Online marketing is all about creating opportunities for hungry buyers to find you, get to know you, like you and trust you. Compare that to buying a newspaper ad, where you hope your message will be seen by enough interested prospects to generate the sales you need to keep the lights on.
5.Make Your Website Mobile Friendly
Today, most people use smartphones and tablets to find local businesses on a map or obtain their contact information. Also, more and more people are using mobile devices to make online purchases, especially since mobile ads have higher conversion rates than general Web ads. The problem is that if your website has been built for desktop computers, it may not display properly on the small screens of mobile devices.
A quick solution is to switch to a responsive, or mobile-friendly web design, or create a mobile version of your main site. This is especially important as Google has announced that on April 21, 2015, websites that are mobile friendly will have an advantage in ranking above their non-mobile friendly competitors.
Is your website mobile-friendly? Check your site with Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test and find out.
The Bottom Line
The Web is brimming with marketing opportunities for your small business, and it would be a pity if you do not try to make the most of them.
Web marketing done right produces a positive ROI that leads to more profitable bottom line. It’s an investment that keeps on producing.
Interested in learning how your business can gain an advantage over your competitors? We’ll show how your business can thrive online.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]