In today’s business environment, simply having a great product or service isn’t enough. Because of the proliferation of businesses that have sprung up thanks to the internet and other digital technologies, you need strong marketing to set yours apart and get it noticed by relevant customers. Here are five marketing tips that will help you make your online business a success.
Invest in On-site Content Marketing
Whether you have an ecommerce website or an online consulting business, an on-site blog can be one of your most powerful marketing tools. By targeting keywords related to your products or services, you can bring in organic search traffic using blog SEO. Unlike other forms of marketing, this traffic is largely passive once it has been established. Be sure that the blog posts you are writing provide value in the form of information, entertainment or both to your reader. If a reader finds that your blog posts are just extended advertisements with no real value to offer, he or she will be very unlikely to come back to your site in the future.
Give Away a Digital Product
A proven way to grow your email list is to give away a digital product, such as a free ebook, to website visitors in exchange for their email addresses. This product can be short, but it should be informative and useful in order to build trust with your potential customers. After you’ve given away the free product, you can begin sending emails to get the people who’ve already enjoyed it to become paying customers.
Get on Instagram
Though often overlooked by business owners who don’t have much digital marketing experience, Instagram is rapidly becoming one of the most powerful platforms on the internet for marketing. With a 59 percent usage rate among the valuable 18-29 year old demographic and a user base of which 80 percent follow at least one business, Instagram has turned into a great platform for reaching young, engaged consumers. As long as you can take compelling photographs that will visually appeal to the audience of people who would be most likely to use your product or service, you have the initial makings of an Instagram marketing campaign.
Use Video to Promote Your Business
Although written content is still very powerful, especially in the form of informational blog posts, internet users consume an immense amount of content in the form of video. Roughly a third of all online activity involves watching video content of some kind, a fact which has led marketers all over the world to embrace videos as useful marketing tools. Like written content, your videos should be informational or entertaining, rather than just an advertisement for your product. Once you have created a video that will engage your audience, you can host it on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and a host of other platforms to quickly establish a multi-channel video marketing campaign.
Don’t Be Afraid to Upsell
As any online marketer knows, it takes a great deal to turn the casual website visitor into a paying customer. Once you’ve done that, though, it makes good business sense to get the highest possible return on your investment. Upselling techniques, such as recommending additional products at checkout, can increase your site’s revenue by as much as 30 percent by greatly increasing your average order value. This increase in revenue not only makes your business more profitable, but allows you to put more resources back into your marketing to attract even more customers.
Becoming successful with digital marketing isn’t an overnight process, but it is something that anyone can do with enough time and effort. Start your marketing efforts by targeting one or two different techniques and getting comfortable with them before building more channels to bring customers to your website. As you go, you’ll be able to branch out into a wider variety of digital marketing methods.
