Nowadays, to start your business and develop it successfully is easy as never before. You can test different digital marketing strategies for your business promotion to find a cost-effective way to attract new customers. In this guide we would like to cover the following digital marketing strategies so you can have an idea on how to promote your business online: social media, paid advertising, email campaigns, and SEO.
Social media
How many hours daily you spend on different social media platforms. You definitely have accounts on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Telegram, or Pinterest. This list can be really long. Let’s switch to users’ numbers: Instagram has more than 1,1 billion registered users according to the data for 2019.
Can you imagine how many potential customers you can attract, just let your target audience to know about your business, goods, or services you offer? Like any other digital marketing strategy, social media requires time or money investment. You should create content that will arouse interest, attract new followers that can be further converted into customers. If you want to speed up the process you can create paid campaigns on FB or IG or other social media. Its really great option if you’ve started a small business and website was not launched yet or you simply don’t need it.
We can give you some examples, a small wax studio in our city, with up to 5 specialists. They decided that they don’t need a website, instead of this, they created an Instagram account, set up paid ads, integrated service that allows to book a time online and started to receive qualified leads, withing several months they enriched their contact base so their schedule was jam-packed until the end of the week.
Another case is the fixed price nail studio. The company has several branches in different parts of the city. They decided that an essential part of their potential customers are actively using Instagram. They regularly update their IG posts with work samples and use target ads to expand their customer base.
Paid search
Another way to promote your business online is to use paid ads. This digital marketing strategy is for those who would like to see results here and now, but keep in mind that it might not work well for all businesses. This implies that you already have a website or landing page where visitors will be directed.
Paid ads can increase revenue several times on Black Friday, before Christmas, Saint Valentine’s day, or on other holidays. Prepare a catchy ad text in advance, if you conduct a promotion that ends after a certain number of days, do not forget to make the appropriate changes to the settings in ads campaigns.
It is important to note that compared to paid ads on social networks, advertising in Google requires a significant budget. Cost per click can reach $ 10 or more, depending on your niche competition. You are free to set up a lower bid per click, but how it will influence your ad position in this case? Perhaps it will appear at the bottom of the first page or even the second page. As practice shows, most people rarely go further than the first five search results. That means the chances of getting a client are greatly reduced.
So, before investing in this, do a proper calculation. If you sell goods at 15 USD and have to spend half of this sum for a click, is it really worth it? A/B tests should take place before you find a key to success. How much all these trials will cost your business and will it be paid off?
Another issue you should be aware of with Google ads is Click fraud. What does it stand for? Clicks from bots, software, automated scripts. This black hat techniques can be used by your competitors. As a result, you spend your budget on invalid clicks and low-quality traffic.
Read our guide: SEO vs PPC
Email campaign and cold calls
Another technique that allows you to reach out to your potential customers. It might be a good marketing strategy but you should have a contact list. If you’ve just launched your website and don’t have visitors it looks like to get the contact list organically will be a tricky thing. You can buy a contact list with emails from lead generation companies and use services for cold mass emails to test out the water.
The clue is a super detailed portrait of your target audience. Once you have it you can start looking for potential customers and drive outreach campaigns. It doesn’t look like it will be easy and super fast but definitely a time-consuming project that requires a lot of effort.
Moreover, are you annoying about a lot of emails you receive daily? Some of them will not be even opened and just deleted.
SEO
To have organic traffic that can convert into customers (read revenue) the goal of nearly each website owner. Search engine optimization is a type of marketing strategy that will be paid off in the long run. To make it easy to understand, SEO is about to keep everything in order on your website, to have a proper hierarchy, titles that include key phrases, high-quality and unique content, internal links, image alt texts, external links, and a lot of other things. SEO campaign’s main goal is to do everything in accordance with search engine requirements to make your pages rank higher, increase website visibility, and finally get more clients. A lot of different factors influence your website positions, but the main advantage is that once you updated everything properly you can start receiving “free” traffic for a very long time.
Will try to avoid detailed explanations here and instead of diving into the theory will recommend you read one of our case studies how SEO helped to increase traffic and revenue for one travel-related website.
Conclusion
How to promote business online and which of the mentioned digital marketing strategies to choose? It’s better to test all of them to find the best one for your company. You can create a website, start SEO, while you’re waiting for the results you can start actively promote your business using social media channels and thinking of paid ads.
If you need SEO assistance, feel free to drop us a message.