Advertising is a necessity to grow your business but it can be to expensive for some small businesses to try to compete. Having a great website is secondary to obtaining customers. As a Phoenix web design company we have witnessed some great ideas not get off the ground because they didn't do a good job advertising and driving traffic to their website. I have compiled some free or very low cost ways that you can advertise to give your business a chance against companies spending thousands a month on advertising.
- SEO – Now you can do research and start an SEO campaign on your own or you can pay a great Phoenix web design company to complete a SEO campaign either way you will save a ton of money by ranking your website on page 1. The other option would be to run a Pay Per Click campaign. To show you how much money you will save by ranking your website on page 1. Let's say you are targeting a competitive keyword that gets 8000 searches a month and the cost is $5 which is on the low end for a competitive keyword. Now lets say you only get 10 percent of those to click on your ad per month which would be 800 clicks. Now multiply that by the $5 and you are spending $4000 per month in Pay Per Click ads. When you look at the value of being ranked on page one $400 a month doesn't seem like a lot of money.
- Social Media – Use Social Media to get the word out about your company. Tell all your friends to like or follow your business. Tell all your employees to be telling their friends. Building up a following on a social media platform can be a great form of direct marketing. Best of all it is free.
- Business Directory – Submit your website to every online business directory you can find. Don't just submit them to the larger directories also submit your website to smaller local business directories as well. Hireawiz is a Phoenix web design company that not only has business listing on much larger business directories but also a lot of Phoenix business directories. Not only is this free but it will help with your SEO as well.
- Email Marketing – Compile a list of emails by offering your customers something to sign up for your email newsletter. Once you collect a list of emails you will be able to start an email marketing campaign.
- Classified ads – Whether your business is selling a product or services you can use websites such as Craigslist or Yahoo classifieds to sell your products.
- URL – Make sure to place your web link or URL on everything that you create. Whether you create an ad in the Sunday newspaper or business cards make sure that your website URL is on it.
- Offer something free – Get people to follow you on Social Media platforms and encourage people to use your service or buy your products during historically slow times by offering something free. Everybody loves free things.
- Blogs – Draw interest to your website by writing and maintaining a blog that educates your readers about your industry. Make sure not to just write sales letters and write about things that is actually useful to the reader and keeps the reader wanting to comeback for more.
- Advertising – Offer a business that you see getting a lot of foot traffic free ad space on your website and in turn they allow you to advertise in their shop. This will create traffic to your website.
- Referrals – Offer people who refer somebody to you something. Again people love free things so if you tell them to refer 10 friends and get a $50 in store credit then the chances are you will see your business grow dramatically as people are attempting to earn the free item you are offering.
There are many other ways to drive traffic to your website you must just begin thinking outside the box. Being a small business you won't have the marketing budget of larger companies and so in order to compete with them and to stay in business you need to think outside the box and come up with creative ways to drive customers to your website. If you are looking for a great Phoenix web design company that will give you results in SEO contact us today.