For business owners whether large or small, marketing strategies are constantly changing, improving, and evolving. Staying up to date on marketing techniques is crucial for maintaining brand awareness, and keeping potential customers coming to your company.
A successful company utilizes as many marketing techniques that are free, or cost little money. In addition to free strategies, there are also paid marketing efforts that help 
increase a business’s return on investment.
This article will help big and small business owners familiarize themselves with different marketing tools to help leverage your business and reach your target audience. Topics that will be discussed include optimizing SEO, content marketing, email & social media marketing, and blogging.
Summary
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search Engines are quickly taking over the game in marketing. SEO is a term that describes the rate at which online engines promote results through content and quality. For example, high-quality, highly relevant material would most likely be promoted for a search query over something totally irrelevant to a search. How do we optimize our businesses SEO? The search engines have a plethora of information that goes on behind the scenes such as site security, meta-data, meta-descriptions, Google Adwords, inbound links, outbound links, bounce rates, and more. All of these can help drive traffic to your landing page if they are optimized correctly. If your business needs help on improving its SEO, you may want to look into hiring a SEO analyst or specialist to enhance your business return on investment. These individuals will analyze your website with Google Analytics, and improve current issues.
Within SEO, there are pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, which a business can participate in to drive even more traffic to your webpage to overpower the organic search engines. For example, your small business could purchase Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Bing Ads, and more, to drive new customers to your landing page via popular sites such as Facebook.
Local small business owners may be at an advantage for utilizing SEO due to the fact that search engines will only being competing with local competitors to formulate search results. For example, if a local customer is searching for a coffee shop, the search engines are going to use their location to show them relevant results near them, instead of results on the other side of the country (geographically filtered results). This can give small business a leg up due to the fact that the greater number of positive reviews your company earns, the higher you’ll rank in local results.
Content Marketing(Online Marketing)
If your small business, you may be on a marketing budget. You can improve your SEO authority by improving your content marketing. What is content marketing? Content marketing works to enhance domain authority by improving your websites search engine tactics.
Being able to critically analyze your market, competition within the market, user desires, and user experience will help you produce the highest quality content and products that will benefit your customers. Staying up to date on current trends in the media is essential for this to work.
Content marketing requires consistent effort, and if left alone, will spoil. Your business must keep up to date with social media posts, blog posts, etc. You will also need to create creative content. A secret here is to try and create something that your competitors are not doing. Always try to “one up” your market competition. Being able to monitor your analytics on how your company is doing will help you overtime be able to see the trends within your company. Once you see visible market trends, you can brainstorm new strategies to help you improve.
Email Marketing & Social Media Marketing
Digital Marketing is an umbrella term that includes many different techniques related to engaging potential customers using the internet. The most popular forms of digital marketing are email marketing and social media marketing.
Email marketing is all about conversion rates. You want to focus on getting as many people to go from being on an email list to being a customer. How can a business do this successfully? Start by running an email campaign. You can attract current and potential customers by giving discounts, doing special winner deals, and free give aways. The idea here is to get your customers “in the door,” or driving traffic to your website. When you launch a new product, you can send out a press release to your email list as well.
Social Media Platforms
Although social media marketing has become very oversaturated, this can help enhance small business marketing drastically. Small business often need more exposure due to the fact that they are less know. For example, if you are a local business in a town, you may want to create an instagram page to help raise brand awareness. This will also help get customers in the door (or on your website). Being able to post engaging, consistent, and informative based posts on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook pages will help increase traffic. The more you show customers that you are engaging and want to help them, the better. Social media marketing will not die out anytime in the foreseeable future. This is due to the fact that it helps bring a brand closer to consumers.
Another form of marketing that has been increasing popular is using social media influencers. This can help by reaching a large audience at once. If your small business releases a new product, you can pay social media influencers such as a “Youtuber” to promote your product. Although this can be quite pricy depending on the audience size of the influencer, your ROI can increase and customers are likely to become familiar with your company. This can increase the likelihood of having customers return in the future.
Utilizing LinkedIn is key to making and keeping connections, friends, customers, and possible contacts to collaborate with. For example, creating contacts on LinkedIn may lead you to find someone you wish to interview on your podcast. This can lead to mutually beneficial relationships between you and prospective connections.
Blogging
Blogging or having podcast is a trend that helps enhance the relationship between customers and the businesses. It is a wonderful way to get the attention of potential customers, and raise interest in your brand. This is a bonus marketing technique due to the fact that it costs nothing to create a blog page. This is also a fairly quick process to do. With passion about your business, this marketing tactic should be a fun and natural process for business owners. In addition to writing blog posts, this is a great way to make connections.
You may also want to try hosting podcasts, webinars, writing articles for other online sites, designing infographics, etc. You can create a business card with your phone number and business name to have potential partners reach out. With a combination of these techniques, you will increase organic search engine traffic, and increase brand awareness.
Final Take-away
Whether you are a new business or a startup, marketing strategies are always evolving. Having a marketing plan will enhance the chances your business is a success. Additionally, utilizing these techniques will help boost your companies reputation as people start to familiarize themselves with your brand.
Taking advantage of social media platforms is crucial for any small business to survive in today’s competitive market. Knowing which marketing tactics would benefit your company the most is all subjective to your business goals. With hard work and determination, your target market will see your companies purpose. Whether through referrals, reddit, reviews via yelp, or word of mouth, these are all great ways to keep a company growing.
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