Digital marketing is increasingly becoming an essential part of running a successful business, no matter the size.
Traditionally, most small businesses have viewed digital marketing strategies as superfluous and inefficient. While there are certainly some small business owners that excel at digital marketing and have implemented successful strategies, there are still many small businesses that completely ignore their digital market.
However, in the ever-evolving business landscape it is no longer practical to overlook your digital audience. Here are some reasons small business owners cannot continue to disregard digital marketing.
Digital Marketing for a Growing Mobile Audience
One reason small businesses can’t afford to ignore digital is a rapidly growing mobile audience.
While most businesses understand the importance of having a website, many do not realize that their site should also be mobile friendly. Often business owners think simply having a website is enough, but as mobile usage continues to grow the importance of a good mobile experience grows as well.
Consumers are increasingly relying on mobile devices to help guide their purchasing decisions. So even if you don’t sell any actual products on your website, if your site is mobile friendly it can still drive foot traffic to your brick and mortar location.
Importance of Social Media
Another reason small business owners need to account for digital marketing is the mounting importance of social media.
Social media has become an extremely powerful marketing channel as it allows for businesses to connect with existing and potential customers on a more personal level. Neglecting social media would be a massive mistake and although there are ways to implement social media marketing (SMM) strategies offline, the majority of SMM tactics must be executed online.
The impact social can have for a company’s marketing alone should be enough to convince business owners to invest in digital.
Conclusion
These are two major reasons small business cannot continue to ignore digital marketing. As social media and mobile devices both continue to grow in popularity, digital marketing will only become even more important. No matter the size of your business, to be successful you must involve digital tactics within your overall marketing strategy.
Source: www.smabusinesscan.com
It’s not surprising that local business operators can lack knowledge about online marketing, or that they can get exposed to misapprehensions about how local marketing should be conducted. Google’s CEO has been quoted as saying that the world is now generating 5 exabytes of information every two days, so it’s little wonder when local business owners are too overwhelmed to keep up with the marketing end, in addition to all of the details specific to their own industry.
It’s not just the ever-increasing amount of information that can overwhelm businesses — it’s also the fact that the search engines are now making changes to their algorithms every single day.
Perhaps it’s due to the fact that it takes ongoing attention and experience to keep up with the changes over time, or maybe it’s because many people are conditioned into attempting to perform search marketing DIY style by Googling for answers, and they can’t tell that the web page they’ve found is woefully out of date.
Whatever the case, the result is there are a number of myths about online local marketing out there, and if you’re not careful, buying into one of these can hamstring your business.
#1 Twitter And/Or Facebook Are Worthless For My Type Of Business
It’s altogether true that some types of businesses have an easier time attracting consumers that wish to interact with them on social media. Yet, even if you operate in a category of business where people don’t want to connect with you as much in social media, you probably need to be doing social media, anyway.
Social media profiles such as Twitter and Facebook pages provide you with assets to help proactively manage your online reputation, and they may help you outrank your competition.
If you’re in an industry where customers don’t want to connect much online (I bet plumbers, funeral homes, attorneys and doctors can relate), you might be able to help position yourself as an industry expert by focusing on networking with colleagues and commenting upon topics related to your field and curating related content.
#2 We Don’t Need To Optimize For Mobile For Our Type Of Business
I hate to tell you, but if you don’t understand how much mobile usage has been increasing for the past ten years, chances are you’re still using a buggy whip with your transportation, a Victrola for your music and are maybe even churning your own butter.
Around 40% of time spent online is on mobile devices now, and this percentage is only likely to grow. So, make sure your site is optimal for those devices. Google has stated that failure to optimize for mobile can now impact your rankings, so this is one myth you had better lose pretty quickly.
#3 We Have To Have Great Ratings/Reviews!
Averaged ratings are not a ranking factor in Google (except in cases where users are allowed to filter/reorder results based on rating values, and for those business types that appear in the Local Carousel, which may factor in reviews slightly more). Thus, if you think this is a requirement for rankings, you’re probably off.
Obviously, people everywhere often take criticism very seriously, and it can be a gut-punch when you pour your heart into your work and aren’t met with glowing admiration in return. Chefs have been known to commit suicide over the loss of a Michelin star, for instance (an obviously maladaptive response), and there have been lawsuits over reviews. There are repeated stories of businesses claiming to be unfairly damaged by TripAdvisor reviews and other online review sites.
It’s true that ratings and reviews can have an impact on your business, but they’re not affecting rankings. To play it safe, follow tips to get more reviews, make reviews work for you and respond effectively to bad reviews.
If you’re doing a number of the other promotional activities you should be conducting, these should influence reviews positively, and also reduce your vulnerability to any one review site (and to reviews in general). Good social media work and other content development can help ensure that review sites are not the only things ranking for your name searches.
Finally, having all positive reviews may actually reduce consumers’ trust that your reviews are real — having a few negative reviews is realistic for a business, and I’ve seen some owners who respond professionally and effectively to those, transforming lemons into lemonade!
text from Search Engine Land
“Test everything; assume nothing!” That’s because we know that after all these years on the internet, you just never know what strategy or angle is going to work best for you…until you test it. This applies even to your star-performing strategies, because there’s always room for improvement.
4 Ways to Increase Online Sales
The bottom line is, testing is the only way to discover what works–and what doesn’t–on your website, and it’s the best way to start increasing your sales exponentially. And if you take the plunge and use just one of the following tests, you’ll learn just how true this is, especially when you start seeing a dramatic improvement to your bottom line.
Test #1:
Offer just one product or service on your home page. Do you sell a number of products or services on your website? If so, I’d strongly recommend you test whether or not this is the best strategy for you. We’ve found that offering fewer products in one place with more copy describing those products always translates into higher sales.
It’s all about focus. Instead of trying to please everyone who visits your site by offering a large range of products with minimal detail about each one, if you offer just one product–or one set of related products–you can really focus on one key set of benefits and answer all the possible questions and doubts your visitors might have about your product. And you don’t have to stop selling your other products–you can always offer them to your customers from other web pages or by using follow-up offers.
Of course, the only way to find out for sure if this will work with your target audience is to test it! Design a sharp banner for your lead product, and put it on your home page. Then run the test for a week or two to see how it increases your sales.
Test #2:
Add impact to your promotions with hover ads. I’m sure everyone’s familiar with pop-ups: They’re the small windows containing a special offer or other information that sometimes “pop up” when you visit a website. Love ’em or hate ’em, pop-ups have been a very useful, online marketing tool for years. However, because a percentage of internet users disliked them, Google, AOL, Netscape and others developed pop-up blocking software to combat them.
Of course, internet users should be able to choose whether or not they want to view pop-ups. However, much of this software automatically blocked pop-ups, meaning visitors to a site started missing out on valuable information that could benefit them.
But that was before we discovered a very impressive technology that actually lets you use ads that behave like pop-ups but that aren’t pop-ups–so they don’t get blocked. They’re called hover ads, and they’re well worth testing on your site.
In fact, when we tested adding a hover ad to our site, sales increased by 162 percent! These ads are effective because they put important information, such as your opt-in offer or a special limited-time promotion, right in front of your targeted visitors.
You can test placing your opt-in offer in your hover ad to see if that boosts subscription numbers. When we did this, 86 percent more people subscribed to our newsletter. You can also test how many more people click through to a special offer page on your site through a hover ad vs. through a regular link on your home page.
Test #3:
Add credibility to your landing page–and enhance your visitors’ trust in you. It’s vital that your landing page establishes your credibility: It’s through this process that your visitors come to trust you and feel comfortable enough to buy from you. There are several ways you can do this effectively and we’ll talk about two of the quickest and easiest ones here. If you’re not already using these techniques, revamp your copy and test it against what you’re using now. You’ll be surprised by the difference.
One of the best ways to establish your credibility is to include customer testimonials on your homepage or landing page. These should be excerpts from genuine e-mails or letters from customers expressing how your product or service helped solve the particular problem they faced. This last point is important: A customer testimonial that states how your product benefited them is much more effective than one that just says something like, “Your product is great!”
You can also enhance your credibility by adding a section to your website that outlines your credentials, experience and any background information that makes you qualified to solve your target audience’s problem. Your aim should be to effectively convince readers that you are the best person to offer them a solution to their problem.
Test #4:
Instill urgency–and convince visitors they need to buy now!
- Offer a limited-time price discount where visitors must buy before a certain date in order to qualify for the discount.
- Offer additional bonuses for free if visitors buy within a certain time frame.
- Offer only a limited quantity of your products or services.
- Offer a limited quantity bonus.
When testing your site, it’s vital to test just one thing at a time so you know exactly which change influenced the results. A method of testing known as “split testing” does just that. It allows you to split your audience into two groups and test, for example, one headline with one group and another headline with the second group–both at exactly the same time.
It’s an ideal testing strategy for any online business, but especially for newer websites with less traffic, as it provides an excellent method for generating accurate test results no matter your level of traffic. By trying different strategies out you have a big chance to improve the sales effectiveness of your site with one of these guaranteed ways to turn visitors into buyers. See what works for you.
from http://www.entrepreneur.com
Whilst more people are embracing creativity and experimentation, there are some things that we’ve learned that are universally true, some aspects that, regardless of the medium, will remain influential in success. Those elements are human factors. You can’t do business without people. It’s people who purchase your products, people who spread your brand message. You can’t succeed in social media without understanding the importance of building and maintaining human relationships. Whilst social media is technology based, it’s people who drive it, and we don’t build relationships with avatars and user names alone. Here are three things that will help humanize your brand and build better business relationships through your social media presence.
1. People want to connect with people. They don’t want constant brand spiels and blatent advertising. People want to know they’re important, that they’re being listened to. Businesses need to keep in mind that each of those profile images is representative of a person at the other end. You need to listen as much as you can, hear what’s being said, then use that feedback in your planning. This is why social media monitoring is so important, it’s your window into the consumers’ world. The more you can tap into it, the better your company will be positioned to establish a place of relevance and trust. Stats show that people expect a brand to respond to a question posed on social media within 60 minutes. That expectation is only going to increase. Social media is an opportunity for people to have a voice – you, as a business, need to hear it.
2. Gratitude and acknowledgement are critical elements in developing community. Just as in real life, saying thank you goes a long way in building relationships. You should think of social media in the context of any other relationship. If a person recommended your expertise to someone else in your neighbourhood, you’d want to thank them for the good word. Same in social media, you should always seek to acknowledge and thank people for sharing your content, for talking positively about your brand, for recommending your offerings. Small actions can go a long way – think about how good it feels when a major influencer re-tweets you or ‘Likes’ your post. It’s recognition, it’s gratitude, and you’re more likely to feel a connection with that person or brand because of it.
And here’s a further positive I’ve noticed – as a result of social media’s culture of acknowledgement, I’m now more active in sharing my gratitude with people in real life when they help me out. It’s a small thing to say ‘thank you’ to someone who’s made an effort in your service, but it can make a big difference to their day, just to know someone noticed. This is a major part of building your social media community.
3. Most brands look at social media in terms of how it can help them, not how they can help others. While this makes sense for obvious reasons, the latter approach is more conducive to success. Actively seeking out ways your business can be of benefit goes a long way towards improving your social media results. How can social media help you serve clients better, increase your capacity to meet client needs? The more you can view things from the perspective of how you can help, the better your interactions will be. As noted earlier, people want to feel important, respected, listened to. Their social media profiles are their voice – brands that are able to listen to them, make them feel that they are valued, those are the businesses that are achieving higher levels of engagement. Social media is not a broadcast platform, it’s a two-way conversation – If you want to build your brand and have your message spread through people’s social circles, word of mouth is crucial. Approaching each connection from the perspective of how you can help, in line with your brand mission, should be a guiding principle of your presence.
There are many opportunities in social media, and the parameters of how best to utilise the various platforms are constantly evolving, providing businesses the chance to think creatively about how they engage and excite their target audience. Whilst the path to conversion is not always as direct as traditional media, the path to people is clearer than ever – you now have more opportunity to listen to what people are saying about you, to get an understanding of how your company and products are perceived. These insights are of significant value. Incorporating them into your planning, and working to help improve the consumer’s world, will go a long way towards solidifying your ongoing success.
Source: by Andrew Hutchinson of Social Media Today
