At Be 1st Online we are here to help you become successful with online marketing.

Whether you are trying to use online marketing for small business to find more ways of reaching customers, or someone starting a home based business who has no other way to reach customers than using the internet, it is vital nowadays to know how to make the most of your home or small business online.

The internet has changed, where once it was more simple, both in the methods used and the knowledge of what was required to do well, now it has become much more complex to successfully reach customers online. Having said that, as it becomes more complex there are also many more online marketing ideas available for ways to reach customers. The rewards are still worth it but most individuals or small business enterprises need help to be successful.

What has changed ?

Social media has been one of the main changes as well as the search engine’s reactions to it.

Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and many more social media enterprises have successfully gained huge audiences so where once it was mainly a matter of knowing how to reach audiences in Google, Bing or Yahoo, there are now huge amounts of customers you can reach in different ways through social media.

Then there is Google’s reaction to social media. Now, to organically rank in Google’s search engine, you have to have a good social media presence as well. Website links to active social media accounts are all taken into account when Google’s algorithm works out where your website ranks so a small business can’t ignore social media.

Amazon has become a search engine in it’s own right. Ecommerce sites with Amazon as the biggest player have become huge as people turn to online shopping much more, driven by better internet connections, better online delivery methods and now the growing use of drop off sites such as your local shop, post office or anywhere that wants to supplement there income by allowing Amazon customers to collect their goods there. Online shopping used to have a big drawback of having to wait at home for the delivery but now that is being solved by drop off points expect online shopping to continue growing faster and faster. Since people now go to Amazon directly to search for things they want to buy then any small business owner with an ecommerce website which uses Amazon needs to be thinking about satisfying Amazon rather than Google and look to ways to get there website or products showing up in Amazon searches.

Video marketing has arrived in a huge wave. Many home based or small business are just not using video much or at all, yet Youtube and other video channels are accounting for massive audience figures. Video is becoming the most common form of internet use and if you or your company is not using it to reach customers then you are missing out. Video marketing scares some people as they don’t want to appear on camera themselves and don’t know how to make videos, but there are many online marketing tools that make video creation easier as well as many companies that can help produce videos at surprisingly low cost. These are not high end videos but do the job of promoting your company or products effectively. This applies whether you have a small or large company or just an individual, video marketing has become an almost essential piece of online marketing.

 

What has not changed ?

Paid advertisements or pay per click marketing is still around and is still the easiest way for anyone from a small business or individual to a large corporation to quickly reach an audience. However even that is changing as Facebook has come into the market to challenge Google for market share in paid ads. Add to that the emergence of paid video ads on Youtube and you now have at more sets of rules to learn if you want to take full advantage of these paid ad methods.

It does give more opportunities as well. Some people will still be more comfortable using Google pay per click and this still works well as long as you know what you are doing and constantly analyse statistics on your ads to ensure you are getting value for your ad spend. Others who use Facebook a lot may feel better using paid ads on that medium rather than Google. Youtube video ads are yet another option for anyone comfortable with video and with the increase in video viewing on the web this can be a very good form of advertising, and of course you don’t have to use all the methods. With all these advertising methods it is alaso possible to find people and companies to help you advertise and for a busy small business that is likely to be the best option as long as you research the companies to be sure they are experienced in this form of marketing.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short is and will always be one of the most important aspects of marketing online. Although paid ads are quick to implement and find customers, in terms of cost SEO is by far the best use of a company’s cash. The only problem is that it takes time to get success depending on the market and the competition. So most companies should (but often don’t) use both methods. If a company starts spending a lot on paid ads without paying attention to SEO or their brand then they will lose a lot of money in the long term. So the best strategy is to start looking at SEO at the same time you start using paid ads, then within 12 months you are likely to find you can start reducing the amount spent on paid ads because your website and social media accounts are ranking organically and you are getting plenty of visitors without paying for them.

In actual fact SEO is just a part of a much more important overall strategy called brand optimization that all companies should look at now. Due to social media and the way Google ranks websites, your company needs to brand itself on not just it’s website but on all the major social media accounts as well. After all, to be really successful you need people to recognise your company through it’s brand. Different people interact with different forms of media so you need to be everywhere.

Online Marketing Lessons

There is no doubt most people or companies need some sort of help or lessons on online marketing to be effective online, at least if they plan to do the marketing themselves. Some companies will decide to take on staff and either look for people experienced in online marketing or train new ones in online marketing techniques. For this they will need to find companies who provide training or some sort of online marketing lessons for their employees to learn from. Other small business owners will decide it makes more sense to just find a good company which specializes in providing online marketing for small business that can handle all their marketing and advertising for them.

Where Be 1st Online can help

We are experienced in helping people learn about online marketing techniques. We provide software tools to assist with time saving and we also can help small business owners with their marketing campaigns, search engine optimization or complete brand optimization. Just contact us to find out what we can do to help you.