Digital Marketing: What Should Your Top Priorities Be?
In a digital era, digital marketing should be the primary focus for your business. This covers a wide range of marketing techniques and forums, but given that most consumers looking for a local business start their search on the web, online marketing should be your first priority. Here are some of the top online marketing strategies, starting with a company website.
Your Website
If you haven’t already set up a company website, you should. Your website is where a lot of potential clients will go to find out about your business. Your site should be user and mobile-friendly, and load quickly – people tend to shy away from a site that takes more than a few seconds to load, so look at how to speed up your site.
Your site also needs to look good and have good content. Visitors to your site are going to judge it first by its appearance, then by the content, so make sure your site looks great – images are key, so use them well without overwhelming viewers. As for your site’s content, the obvious info will be a brief description of your company and what you do, as well as contact details (phone numbers, email, and postal address) and physical address. If you decide to add a blog or company newsletter, make sure you post quality content and update regularly.
Social Media
Social media marketing has two facets, the first of which is paid social media advertising. A major advantage of this is that you can market to a target audience based on information in their profile such as age, gender, location, and interests.
Your other option for social media marketing is to create and manage your own account, such as a company Facebook page. This works best for retailers, but can work well for service providers too. Connecting with your customers through social media makes them feel more connected to you as a business, and make you seem more personable. One of the best ways to generate and maintain a following, and advertise your business is through promos and competitions. Have people share your post or page as part of the entry process.
SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a popular marketing technique in a busy online world. Most users don’t look much past the first few results in a search engine, so you need your website to be near the top. SEO improves your rankings without you paying to move up. It also increases traffic to your website, partly by moving you up in search engines, but also by linking through from other popular sites. If your company is location-based, use a local SEO company to make sure local clients find you.
Social media and SEO are two of your best online marketing options, but are only effective if they link through to a great website. Banner ads are becoming less effective as an online marketing tool, so most companies prefer pay-per-click advertising, so they only pay for results.
