Every online business has a marketing budget of some sort. For some online businesses, that are running smart marketing campaigns, their online marketing strategies are propelling their business to new heights. However, for other online businesses the opposite effect is taking place. Some people really struggle to gain any traction when it comes to marketing their business and then they begin to feel like marketing is an expense rather than an investment and a necessary investment at that. You will set yourself up to fail if; one, you don’t know what marketing strategies are worth investing in and two, if you don’t understand how to successfully implement those marketing strategies. Our Phoenix SEO team developed a list of marketing strategies that worth investing in. Let’s take a closer look at some marketing strategies that can truly take your business to an entirely different level.
- Search Engine Optimization – This is key to growing your business. When people search specific industry related keywords your goal should be the first website that they see. If you run a successful SEO campaign then you will get traffic to your website then it will be up to you and your website to convert those visitors into sales. Most people choose to go with professional SEO companies to help them achieve the rankings they are looking for but be careful. There are a lot of SEO companies out there that take advantage of small online business owners not understanding SEO. For example, some companies rank their clients for keywords that don’t have any competition and are easy to rank for. This is fine but the issue is that the reason these keywords don’t have any competition is because nobody searches for those particular keywords. So the small business owner will continue to pay the SEO company based upon the ranking results they are seeing however, they are not getting any return on their investment.
- Pay Per Click – This is a great marketing strategy for a couple of different reasons. The first reason is because you can begin getting instant traffic to your website. With SEO it can take months before you see any traffic to your website but with Pay Per Click it will be almost instantly. The downside is however, you have to pay everytime somebody clicks on your website whether the visitor buys anything or not. The second benefit to Pay Per Click is that you can use it hand in hand with your SEO campaign. You can use Pay Per Click to find out which keywords convert the best and which ones are actually worth trying to organically for.
- Social Media Marketing – Social media offers a unique way to build your brand while marketing real time to customers. Social media will put you in front of your target audience and offer you a way to grow your business directly. However, this is not an easy process and you really should do your research on how to run a successful social media campaign. One quick hint; make sure that you don’t just post advertising and salesy posts. Post things that people want to read and that people will share where with their friends.
- Affiliate Marketing – This is a great tool but a tool that is largely being ignored by small businesses. You will notice many of the larger companies that take advantage of this form of marketing but many small businesses don’t offer it. Affiliate marketing is where you essentially pay other people a small fee to market and sell your services and or products.
These are 4 forms of marketing that is definitely worth investing in and if done properly will help you grow your business. Before you get started make sure you do your research and develop a basic understanding of each of these marketing techniques. You will want to have a basic understanding of these strategies even if you plan to hire a Phoenix SEO company to help you out. The next thing you will want to do prior to starting your online marketing campaigns is to sign up for an analytics program. We would suggest using Google Analytics which is free.