Online Marketing For Small Business

Small companies have many more options online now than ever before to market their brand or products.

For a small company it is important to manage your online budget effectively so when marketing online you need to start small and be careful to see what works.

Your Website

If you have a website but it doesn’t have a blog where you can easily add more online content, you should think about adding one. It will let your customers and visitors know more about your company, or show you have expertise in your market or niche, or even use it just for advertising promotions.

A blog also helps your ranking in such as Google’s search engine as they like websites to have lots of online content as long as it is relevant and good quality.

Improving your website online ranking will eventually help you attract visitors and customers. You won’t see much of any benefit until you reach the first page on the search engines but if you employ a company to help improve your online ranking then as long as your website shows a continuous improvement you will eventually be ok. It can take months to reach the first page but providing you set and keep within your budget it should be worth it.

It is often more cost effective for a small company to look for one of the many online marketing companies for small business which exist. Internet marketing for small business owners can be difficult as it so time consuming and a good SEO or Online Marketing company will only be interested in getting good results for you, it doesn’t benefit them to take your money without providing results. A small company owner often has too much else to take care of than to spend time on online marketing.

Before starting on a campaign to improve your ranking, a company will examine relevant keyword phrases and the amount of monthly online searches for each plus the competition to see how difficult it is to rank for that keyword phrase. Then as long as you have an idea how much each new customer is worth to you over the long term, you can work out how much value it is to rank on the first page for the particular keyowrd and the amount of potential customers it will bring you.

The company helping you should work on this with you as they will have a better understanding of this process. They know the best internet marketing strategies for small business and can make sure for instance that you don’t try to rank for terms that are too competitive. You can get visitors and customers more quickly by using less competitive keyword terms and even if there are less searches for these terms, if you are on the first page you will get these visitors to your website and get customers and sales.

Social media channels

Even if you don’t use social media personally, and many people still don’t, they are still almost essential tools for business, both for marketing and advertising and for helping your search engine (Google) rankings. So if you don’t use social media for your business now, you need to start, or get someone else to do it for you.

Newsletters

Email marketing is a very effective way of reaching your customers. If someone is interested in your business and signs up to your newsletter then in future you can reach them just by sending a new email directly to them, without further advertising costs. As long as you send them either good information on relevant topics to do with what your business is doing, or good promotions of products you are selling that you know they will be interested in, then they will stay responsive. It’s one of the best forms of marketing out there and always has been.

Pay Per Click Marketing

There has been the quick option of Pay Per Click (or PPC) marketing with Google for years but now there is also Facebook ads and even Youtube video ads. Twitter has started running business ads as well.

PPC is good for quickly targeting potential customers but can cost a lot of money if you don’t know what you are doing. If you try it yourself, after reading up and getting training, and it doesn’t work very well, then rather than give up it may be better to look at using a specialist to run the campaigns for you. As long as ad campaigns are tracked so you can see what is working then it can be effective.

However while running PPC campaigns you should always be looking to improve your website and get it ranking higher as although it takes a long time, once it reaches the first page og Google it will cost you far less to reach customers than with PPC. So you should do both and track continuously.