Are you a small business owner? The online marketing can be intimidating and difficult to understand and well, where do you begin?
Online Marketing is essential to allow developing businesses to grow their audiences. With your potential audience expanding, with 1.49 billion Monthly active users on Facebook and 310 million Monthly active users on Twitter and 4.3 Billion email addresses registered. You can’t argue with, marketing your business online is the way forward. So here’s the nitty gritty:
Setting a Goal For Your Online Marketing
You are looking for ways to make your small business grow. Are you looking to build your audience and increase web traffic to your website? Or to make your business more known within your local area? No matter what, starting with a solid goal in mind increases your chances of achieving your goals. Online Marketing is a great way for SME’s to develop, but diving in head first without a clear goal in mind can leave you lost. A lot of strategy and precision goes into Online Marketing and having a goal helps focus on what’s necessary.
Creating a Marketing Funnel
The most successful businesses have an effective marketing funnel in place. A marketing funnel is when you map out a customer’s journey from when a customer is a complete stranger to when they become a lead, and then put certain strategies in place that will encourage them to move through this funnel. You can think of a marketing funnel in four parts Awareness, Fascination, Desire, and Action.
Awareness: The potential customer is aware of your product or service. They’re still a stranger, but they’ve come to your website looking for something they need. At this stage, you want to entice the customer by showing them that you possess the item/product they’re looking for. Use a lead magnet or call-to-action to give the customer a valuable resource related to your product or service (what they need) in exchange for more information about them like their email address, phone number and current needs. Find out who they are and why they came to your website for a better understanding of your target audience.
Fascination: They are actively expressing a fascination in a certain type of your products or services. At this point, you’ve given them some information and they’re interested in what you have to say or the services you provide. You’ve used your lead magnet or call to action in the awareness stage to gather more information about them. At this stage, it’s a good idea to supply them with some more information that is more tailored to their specific needs. Showing them that you not only took the time to get to know them but also have something that’s specific to their needs will show that you’re attentive to and care about your customer’s wants and needs.
Desire: They’ve taken an interest in a specific product or service. Now that you’ve supplied them with information specific to what they’re looking for, they’ve found a product or service you provide that might be a good fit for them. Invite them to schedule a consultation using an email or a call-to-action. At this stage, you want to tell them more about the product or service they’re interested in. Show them why they need it and exactly how it will benefit them.
Action: Taking the next step towards purchasing. This is when you’re able to turn your potential customer into a lead. You’ve given them valuable information, shown them you pay attention to your customer’s needs, and shown them that you have something they need that will benefit them. All that’s left is discussing things like price, payment and other aspects of your product or service that are relevant to a buyer.
Developing a Call To Action
We talked about using a call-to-action in the second step as a part of your marketing funnel, but what is a call-to-action exactly? A call-to-action is an image or text that prompts visitors to take action, such as subscribe to a newsletter, view a whitepaper or request a product demo. Call to actions should direct people to landing pages, where you can collect visitors’ contact information in exchange for a valuable marketing offer. In that sense, an effective call to action results in more leads and conversions for your website. In order to increase visitor to lead conversion opportunities, you need to create a lot of calls to action, distribute them across your web presence and optimise them. A good call to action should be attention grabbing and help lead a potential customer further into your marketing funnel.
Creating an Effective Lead Magnet
A lead magnet can be used alone or along with a call to action. This will also be used either within your marketing funnel or as a way to drive potential customers into your funnel. Supply them with something relevant to your product or service that they want. Use your offers as a way to gather more information about a potential buyer while driving them further into your funnel at the same time. This brings them closer to becoming an actual quality lead that will spend money on your product or service. The idea behind a lead magnet is to trade information. You supply something like a free download of a white paper, but in order to complete the download the individual has to fill out a form that will provide you with more information about them. You’ll use the information you gather to interact with them more as they progress through your funnel.
Driving Traffic
In order to drive people into your marketing funnel, there first has to be traffic on your website. There a variety of ways you can drive traffic to your website. Here are a few of the ones I recommend:
- Quality Content: Use content such as blog posts, press releases and articles on authority websites. Insert links to various places on your website within this content to build your brand name through exposure and drive traffic to your website.
- Keyword Strategy: Inserting related keywords into content will help your content and website show up in more search results, this leads to higher volumes of web traffic.
- Website Optimisation: Ensuring that your website is optimised and functioning at its best is essential. People don’t want to visit a website that doesn’t work properly.
- Social Media: Use engaging social media posts to attract more traffic to your site. Using pictures, video, and other relevant media will help your posts get more engagement.
Try these simple Online marketing strategies out on your website and see for yourself how much of a difference they can make.
If you want your business to grow, online marketing is the place to start.
