Strategies That Will Grow Your Business Online – Part 1
More and more businesses are moving traditional processes online in the aim to create more efficient models for servicing their customers. The Web offers unlimited potential to businesses that are willing to embrace its ability to transform the means by which we define ‘doing business’ in today’s hyper-competitive online space.
The popularity of search engines as the ‘first step’ in locating a business for services or products is growing expeonentially and having a latest and greatest website means squat if potetial customers cannot find your website online. SEO and online marketing specialists have been preaching the importance of ‘being found online’ for years and anybody with experience managing a business website will vouch that it’s no good having that great website if it’s off the radar. So how can you boost your businesses online potential to get found?
Focusing your energy on designing and implementing a full circle online marketing strategy can result in limitless possibilities of business growth our modern world, and I am going to discuss today some of the key strategies that can help you boost your buiness online.
Internet Marketing isn’t for every business for a couple of reasons which I will explain, however I do believe that this is slowly shifting and at some point in the near future online marketing will be a must even for extremely small businesses. However for the time being, obviously a small ‘handyman’ business doesn’t stand to reap as many benefits and possible growth as a company that produces and sells via wholesale and retail options, a range of merchandise or products via an eCommerce website.
When correctly designed and implemented, online marketing has the ability to grow and transform businesses even in the current global financial crisis. In fact Internet marketing offers possibly the strongest and most measurable form of business marketing ever to have existed and represents amazing opportunities to businesses that choose to embrace its power.
What I am aiming to outline in this article are techniques that we have exercised time and again for our clients business websites that work to grow a business online.
Powerful web design
The single most important factor of online marketing is have a powerful and high converting website. If your website was to start receiving large amounts of web traffic, is that automatically going to mean more sales and enquiries for your business? The answer is No. You can promote your website and drive traffic to arrive at your online destination from Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC), search engine optimisations (SEO), email marketing, affiliate marketing, banner advertising or any other form of marketing. However when people arrive, if your website fails to engage, compel and assist your audience to do business with your business then all the money and time spent to influence that customer to visit your website is a complete loss.
This makes your website the single most important element of your entire online marketing strategy. Does your website currently instill confidence in you that it will ensure a high conversion rate of web traffic into customers?
To be working effectively your website should be able to convert a high proportion of the traffic it receives into sales and enquiries for your business. The higher the percentage of enquiries and sales that your website converts from traffic, the more money your business will make. The more your business makes the more you can spend on advertising and online marketing, the more your business will grow and the harder it will be for your competition to beat you.
Quality Content
Creating content that conveys speaks the tone of your business, enhances your brand and inspires your readers is vital to any online marketing campaign. This relates back heavily to having a website that converts traffic. Writing content for the web is different to traditional copy-writing and many new web-copywriters have spawned up as the internet grows to be the first place a potential customer engages your business. Having a large slab of text on a page will not help your customers pick and move through your website and could ensure that they bounce off your site in favour of a competitors more digestible web-copy. Make sure that the wording on your website is effective for web users.
Search Engine Marketing
Boosting traffic to your website is important, what’s more important however is that the people arriving at your website have been pre-qualified as relevant, potential customers. Search engine marketing is about getting your website to appear on search engines for selected keywords that make the products and services that your business has to offer. This ensures that users who arrive at your website are genuinely interested in what you’re offering. If you were a plumber in Melbourne you would want to be found for words like “acquisitions” or “mergers” however it would be even better if you could localize that search and have customers searching for “acquisition services Melbourne” finding your website. It will not be of much value if a person searching for “painter” finds your website. Fortunately search engine marketing is a measurable and profitable method of pre-qualifying potential traffic is implemented correctly.
Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC)
PPC advertising is the fastest way to get your website found by people searching for your products and services. Pay-per-click advertising (also known as Google AdWords) is the process of setting up a online advertising campaign whereby you pay each time a user clicks on a ad for your business from the search engine results. For example, as ad for your website can be displayed on the front page of the search engine results for the keyword phrase “acquisition services Melbourne” right away and you only pay when someone actually clicks on the ad that you are running. This means that you are paying for real, qualified traffic. People actually searching for your business offerings are finding your website. PPC is fast becoming an expensive medium however there are still abundant opportunities for businesses. It is also the most measurable form of advertising ever and provides some of the best returns on investment of all advertising mediums.
Before you launch a PPC campaign it is important that you have setup and installed analytic tracking software and goal conversion tracking. This will enable you to cipher out best performing ads and keywords. Also this enables you to accurately calculate the cost-per-action (CPA) for a lead or sale and isolate any keywords that are too expensive to compete against your competition for the margin that they make for you. These isolating keywords can then be focused on for organic search engine optimisation.
To be continued…
This concludes my first installment of “Strategies That Will Grow Your Business Online”. The next chapter will focus on the following topics.
- Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
- Split Testing
- Blogging
- Email Marketing
- Landing Pages
- Banner Advertising
- Execute the plan
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And remember, successful online marketing requires on-going research, revision and general love for the web so get involved.
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