Are you planning to start your new business or want to grow your existing business or brand on the Internet? With the help of social media and the Internet as a whole, marketing, promoting and putting out your message is like a whole new dimension now. You need to understand the trends, develop methodologies and create strategies and rightfully implement them in order to thrive in the digital world. Take a look at the key ingredients discussed in this blog which you’ll need to set up your online business, craft engaging content, reach the right audience and drive sales, all of these can be achieved through step by implementation of these tips.

Know your competitors and differentiate key strategies

When you are starting out in the digital world, put a bit of time into researching your competitors first. Figure out who your competitors are and analyze their website and social media presence. Knowing your competitors will give you an edge in laying down strategies, developing content, reaching the right audience and much more.

How to find out who your competitors are? There are several ways you can find out:

Google Search: Use keywords and related search terms that you think to define your business, products or services. The search results you get, are your competitors

SEMRush: This an online marketing tool offering tons of features of our different marketing needs.  You can use their Competitive Research Toolkit to better understand your competitors from different aspects like traffic analytics which shows what’s driving the traffic and sales, pad search competitors which helps you discover your competitors who pay to be on top of search results and much more.

Ubersuggest: This a free marketing tool by Neil Patel which offers various useful features including competitor research.  You can find top SEO pages on your niche, understand what they are doing and how can you set yourself apart with better SEO strategies. Domain Overview feature allows you to get insights from your competitor’s social media and marketing strategies. Other features include content ideas and site audit. This tool is a handful for all that it offers for free.

Setup your website in your customer’s perspective

Your website is your virtual storefront, remember that.  You don’t want your store to look all messy, filled with unnecessary stuff, or a bad design. Your homepage should look attractive and engaging. You don’t just want people to visit your website for a few seconds and leave.  Understand what your target customers and clients might look for on your homepage. The most important thing is navigation. If people land on your website and get overwhelmed with a lot of information or get confused about how to navigate around, they will leave instantly.

Your website checklist:

• Create a responsive website. More and more people are using mobile phones and tablets to browse the internet and look for what they want, so make sure your website design mobile friendly.

• Optimized homepage: Put the necessary information on the homepage, which reflects the right message about your business, your vision, who you are and what solution are you providing. The graphics should be appealing and the content, high quality.

• Optimized navigation: Create a friendly navigation system where visitors can easily browse through the pages, and find out useful information. Your website should typically have a homepage, product/service page, about page and contact page.

•  Fast loading speed: If your website does not load fast enough, visitors will simply abandon your site in seconds. You can use Google Search Console to test your website.

If you don’t have a website developer, hire one. Build a compelling website, which tells your unique story through visuals. When you are starting out as a small business, a lot of your effort and resources have to be focused on creating a reputation through quality visualization.

Optimize the use of social media for your business

Yes, the world of social media is overwhelming and if you do not use this opportunity effectively and efficiently, you will be depleting your resources, wasting a lot of time, and getting no results. There are multiple social media platforms out there today – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn. 

Your first job is to understand what purpose each of these platforms serves and how you can best leverage it for your business. The best idea is to start off with one primary platform and create engaging content consistently with a strategy, once you get a hold of it and start doing well, take up another platform, and when you succeed, take up another one and so on. Each of these platforms has users or audiences of fairly different demographics, understanding which users will be interested best, and understanding which platform’s medium will best reflect your message will give you an edge.

Are you confused about where to start? 

Do you know how to optimize your social media accounts? 

Do you know how to create the right content that will bring in followers and drive engagement, sales, and awareness of your business?

If you are struggling to answer these questions, take up our Social Media Brand Mastery Course which offers you complete training starting from setting up and optimizing your social media profile, crafting the right content, attracting the right audience and monetizing your marketing strategy.

Make use of Google My Business, Yelp for Business Owners, and Yahoo Small Business

Registering your business in these three services will help your business to be more discoverable when local people are searching for something similar to your business. For example, if you’re searching for “cupcake stores near me” in Google, it will show you related results or stores near you as a business listing showing your location, contact, opening hours, short info about the business and reviews. Make sure to include all the important details like address, opening hours and contact info. Most importantly make sure you get reviews and ratings from your clients and customers. If you are just starting out and don’t have any reviews on Google My Business or other local online business listings, ask someone from your known circle to try your product or service and leave ratings and reviews. You can also encourage them to do so by offering discounts or free trials and providing feedback.

Consider Email Marketing as an important business strategy

It’s a good thing if people visit your website or follow you on social media but that’s never enough. Having people visit your website and just leave without any trace or conversion is not what you want. That’s where email marketing gets you an advantage.

What is email marketing? Simply put, email marketing the marketing process where you collect emails from prospective clients or customers and reach out to them and promote your business, offer resources, and information through an effectively crafted email strategy that goes straight to their mailbox.

There are many email marketing tools out there for you to choose from, like MailChimp and GetResponse. With such tools, once you sign up, you can collect emails through your website by integrating the tool or simply use a landing page to collect emails if you don’t have a website. You can create campaigns to send out emails to subscribers to create awareness, to promote your product or service and much more. Having the right subject line is the key when sending out emails.

Get your hands into Influencer Marketing

What is it and how can it be beneficial for your business? Influential marketing, unlike traditional marketing, makes use of influencers of a certain niche to target a specific consumer base. It’s not new, we have been seeing this, advertisers paying money to celebrities, and athletes to showcase, use and promote their products. This is carried on now in a similar way via social media.

When you determine who your niche market or potential users of your product or service are, the next step is to find figures of large social following you think can put out your message to their followers or admirers. But you need to make sure such influencers are aligned with what you do and can magnify your brand message to the right audience. Two things to keep in mind when reaching out to an influencer for promotion.

Context and Credibility: How does his/her audience base view that person, and how the influencer is perceived? Reach and salesmanship: Understand the influencer’s reach, and the ability to deliver and magnify your message.

Create quality visual content

In the age of the Internet and Social media, content is really a big deal. People are consuming content in massive amounts every day in different forms – videos, articles, images, and webinars. You need to have a solid content strategy. It is important to understand that what you might be thinking to write about or record a video or podcast about, is already out there. Create very unique high-quality content which looks professional. 

Create appealing and engaging videos. Videos should be a must in your content strategy. If you are not used to editing videos, you can start off with apps like In-shot and Magisto. Their in-built features help you create professional-looking videos without skills.

Now you know how important video is for your content marketing strategy.

Use LinkedIn for your business

LinkedIn is a dedicated professional and B2B platform. Create your business profile and optimize it. You can share your content there. You can connect with like-minded professionals with whom you can talk about your business, and promote your product or service. Join groups related to your business where you can find targeted people. Answer questions, share ideas and talk about your business. This will lead to awareness and engagement.