Every year technology moves and advertising your business must be tweaked just a little bit. You’ve spent hours upon hours building, improving, and refining your brand. However, the ball has moved. Whether your business will succeed or not will depend on how customers perceive it and whether or not they’ll be willing to buy into what you're building.
Most startup entrepreneurs don’t recognize this challenge until they’re faced with the problem. Most assume that as long as they have a great product or service, they’ll be able to generate consistent traffic. The first rude awakening usually comes when they discover that they barely have enough customers to keep the business profitable and they're competition is getting better at stealing clients. Fortunately, anyone can leverage the internet now and generate enough leads and sales to succeed if they have the proper knowledge. I know when you hear about online marketing, your mind immediately goes to the cost implication, especially if you’re still in the early stages of growth.
Well, you’re not entirely wrong. Some will cost you a few bucks here and there, but there are strategies that don't require a dime other than time, your consistency, and lots of patience. We’ve listed below some of the best online marketing methods that work in 2022. Ready to promote that business? Let’s take a dive?
#1. Create A Business Blog And Consistently Post Quality Content
One of the most obvious strategies to put your brand out there is to start a blog. It’s effective and almost free. Creating a blog where you can regularly post and share high-quality content is a long-term strategy that may not pay off immediately, but will eventually result in huge returns to you and your business. A profitable business blog is one that contains valuable content in your brand voice, centered on inquiries and topics that your potential consumers are searching for on Google.
Building a notable blog in any industry or niche helps to achieve several things including helping to boost traffic by piquing Google's interest. It also helps to establish you as an authority in your niche area, build an audience base and eventually provides you with a platform where you can connect with your customers more directly. You’ll easily garner the attention of consumers, other businesses, investors, and the media if you establish yourself as an authority in your niche. This will create a ripple effect and lead to more visibility, sales, and authority. Blogging is one of those things that can be time consuming and rather boring. However, building a blog can pay off big time for your brand.
#2. Leverage Youtube and Video Marketing In General
You'd be crazy to ignore the explosion of video over the last five years. In 2020, 96% of consumers increased their online video consumption, and 9 out of 10 viewers stating they wanted to see more videos from brands and businesses. Jump on the bandwagon and start doing some video marketing.
Not sure where to start? You can begin by creating a Youtube channel. Youtube is the new cool school in town. You want to learn something...anything? Hop on YouTube and in a few days you can go from novice to pro – pro enough to hold a masterclass (kidding, well just a little).
You don’t have to be overly tech savvy to shoot a simple video showcasing your business or dishing valuable and educational content to a nice sized audience. Again, the aim is to do it consistently enough to the point where you gain traction, visibility, and conversion.
If you’ve got something to say, don’t be afraid to hop in front of the camera and say it on video. It also makes for highly marketable and shareable material - put it on your website, promote it on social media, and include it in your emails.
#3. Employ Email Marketing
If you’ve never received an email newsletter that you really didn't want, raise your hand! No one? Yeah, this shows you just how important email marketing can be in establishing an online presence.
Before you can use email marketing though, you have to make sure you’ve got a way of capturing email data from your blog or website. You can easily integrate an email sign up option to your site to achieve this. Once you’ve been able to gather data, you can then put it to good use. Begin by creating a free Mailchimp account, crafting your newsletter, and sending creative emails.
Avoid being too promotional or salesy. Always provide something truly beneficial to the readers. Everyone loves freebies! If you can, give them something free every once in a while. It could be an ebook, limited access to your paid course, really anything.
Keep the emails coming, but don't spam them; else, they will unsubscribe faster than you can say 'subscribe.'
#4. Engage Social Media
If top companies like Rolex, American apparel, and other well-known brands are using social media to drive traffic to their sites and stores, it would be foolish of us to do otherwise.
Luckily, social media is free to use. There’s Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, LinkedIn, and the rest. Before utilizing any of these platforms. You want to first make sure you understand how each platform works, their algorithm, and the content type that works best on it.
As a business, one of your goals when using social media should be consistently putting up valuable content so as to create awareness and eventually engagement with your brand. This could be engaging pictures, short videos, or write-ups. Repeated exposure of your brand online will easily provide traffic, engagement, sales, and referrals for your business.
There are several other avenues you could employ when using social media to market your business. Of course a few of them would require that you pay to enjoy the stress free advantages they offer. For instance, you could leverage social media influencers and instantly get access to the millions on their platforms for a fee. You'd just have to ensure their audience matches your customer persona as well.
Another strategy you could leverage is Facebook ads. While Facebook ads are not free, they can provide a fantastic opportunity to reach the appropriate demographics for your business. Once you know your consumer base well enough, you can use variables such as geographic location, interests, marital status, gender, age, and others to identify potential customers to redirect to strategically-targeted landing pages.
#5. Use Listing Services
Another strategy you can employ is registering your business on local listing services, the most popular being Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
When you register your company with Google Places or Google My Business, it becomes more visible in Google searches and appears on Google Maps. All that is required for you is to sign up and register, then have your business verified by them.
Yahoo! also has Yahoo! Local. It's completely free and well worth the few minutes it takes to set up. Microsoft's Bing, though not as popular as Google and Yahoo, offers a similar service that can be set up in minutes. Doing these makes it easier for you to be found when your business is looked up on the web.
Other listing services for businesses include Angie's List, TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Trust Pilot. Basically, these sites help customers find trustworthy, reputable businesses online.
They are also the largest online business review sites. This is a plus for you as they can build trust with potential customers just coming across your business. You want to read up on these platforms, find out how they can benefit your business, how they work.
#6. Maximize Search Engine Optimization
When people pick up their cell phones and log into a search engine for answers, some popular words are used in the search. These words are called keywords and are used to rank content on search engines. Once you can figure out what You’ll also need to optimize your site’s off-page and on-page SEO.
Although very competitive, search engine optimization, when properly harnessed can effectively market your business and doesn’t cost that much. All in all, optimizing your website for SEO requires a level of dexterity and well-detailed strategy to overcome competition and come out on top.
#7. Engage High-Traffic Blogs And Popular Bloggers In Your Niche
Collaborating with popular bloggers and posting on high traffic blogs in your niche can be another effective strategy to market your business online. The targets are specifically blogs that have high traffic and blogs that have the potential audience you need to reach. If you can get your hands on those kinds of blogs or bloggers you’ll be able to generate your startup wave of customers in no time.
This is the strategy Mint engaged when it was acquired by Intuit for 170 million dollars. Get a long list of blogs that can help you achieve your goals and streamline them to the barest minimum till you get the one or ones that you need.
You might want to also consider guest blogging and posting on industry-specific forums that align with your niche. You’ll however need to have a background in writing or hire someone that does to make sure the blog is a great read.
Conclusion
Generating traffic to effectively market your product should be a part of your overall business strategy. Doing so will not only help to get your product or service out there, it'll also help you build a loyal customer base. Doing the things we talked about in this article aren't options in todays marketplace, they're things that must be done if you want to stand out and be the best.
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