Internet marketing has almost equalized the chances for all players in the market. Today, small companies with very modest investments can achieve success along with large brands, turning millions of dollars in budgets.
Despite the good payback of Internet marketing, before rushing to advertise everything, you should take into account a number of factors.
Below are a few strategies that I used as a small business owner, freelancer and startup founder. These methods have ensured stable success in the Internet market for me and many other entrepreneurs.
First of all, define the brand and its attributes to provide a recognizable marketing image. This means choosing the logo, slogan, and color scheme to use on the site, social media, marketing content, e-mail signatures, and non-digital marketing materials.
If you don’t feel creative, give the designer a list of your brand characteristics that differentiate him or her from other companies and ask him or her for a visual image. There are a lot of freelance designers on the Internet who will develop a professional style for you for a reasonable fee.
Find out what content your competitors are posting online before you publish anything about your company. See what words and marketing tactics they use and think about what they can do to get your customers interested.
You’ll learn how to effectively attract the attention of a particular site’s users to existing (and not yet released) products and services. It will also help you to customize your marketing messages, visuals and tactics.
Take the time to develop content for your website, social media and Internet profile. You may already have a website, but you still have a long way to go, as small business owners are seldom able to properly assess the amount of content they need and its usefulness in attracting visitors.
You need to add your product/service information and contact details to your site, and the importance of using video or other visual content is growing day by day. In addition, there are other marketing channels through which you need to ensure a stable supply of materials.
All content should reflect the definition of the brand and be recognizable and relevant. If you don’t know how to provide enough interesting content, hire a freelance copywriter as an effective and inexpensive way to take care of one of the most important aspects of online marketing.
Formalize your marketing strategy for both digital and non-digital tactics. All aspects of marketing should be carefully considered, and this requires a consistent and long-term effort. Create a structured plan that describes the tactics, timing, and performance indicators so you don’t forget what results you wanted to achieve.
For a small business, these measures may look too complex and even redundant, but having a formal marketing plan is an element of success that is often overlooked.
You can find examples of marketing plans on the Internet and in books to help you understand how to structure your strategy. In addition, you can always find a mentor who wants to help you.
Explore different marketing tactics, channels and platforms to choose the most appropriate one. For example, to attract more local customers to the physical store in addition to the website, we recommend exploring local marketing strategies that include search engine optimization, geolocation, mobile marketing and SMS marketing.
However, if you only do business online, use some of the tactics listed above, but be sure to develop a content strategy, email marketing strategy, video marketing strategy and promotion strategy.
Take the time to understand why all these automation and coordination tools and platforms are needed and how they work to choose the most appropriate ones for your first steps. Don’t take it all at once. Try a few tricks and then learn new ones as needed.
Allocate funds for internet marketing based on your profits and financial situation. You don’t need to invest a lot of money right away. In fact, internet marketing requires more time and effort than a cash injection.
However, it is not forbidden to use paid marketing tools to search, display and promote your site with payment for a click or action. Learn these tools – what they do, how to use them and what results to expect from them – before investing in them.
Track and measure all actions. This is probably the advice that will be most useful to you. To succeed in online marketing, you need to know what tactics provide the best results, and what needs to be replaced or optimized. This is one of the reasons why online marketing has gone beyond traditional marketing.
Tools for combining and analyzing data help to significantly simplify the collection of current information that you will never get by publishing an advertisement or press release in the newspaper.
Each measurement helps you understand what you need to change, remove or add to your approach to marketing, communicating with customers and using different channels.
Feel free to seek help, follow trends in the digital world, use your connections and contacts, engage in self-study or contact the freelance community to get services at an affordable price.
You will need patience, foresight and, above all, the ability to adapt. Success will definitely follow.
