Online Marketing Campaigns for Small Business

SEO is the key goal for online marketing of a small business. This means getting your website ranked highly by Google and other search engines so people can find you without knowing your business name.

You work hard, very hard for your money. I’m sure you also work hard at the marketing of your business. There are lots of marketing and communication channels open to a small business to promote itself including social media strategies and website analytics. Developing an effective online marketing campaign for your small business should be the centre of your effective overall small business marketing strategy.

Why?

Because the vast majority of people have access to the internet, many millions do business online and if they don’t they research businesses online before they buy. For instance, consider these figures:

Over 600 million people use Facebook

Over 100 million people use Twitter every day

You can see why being part of this vast market is so important.

So what are the key aspects of an effective online marketing campaign for your business:

1. Identify your target: This will assist you in the development or re development of your website making sure you are using the right keywords for SEO and placing them well.

2. What do you want to spend: You can achieve SEO with a limited budget but you may achieve it faster by spending some money on a web developed who specialises in SEO and social media strategies. It can though be easily done yourself, you just have to know how.

3. Choose your weapons: What are you going to use, and what are you competent at using for your online marketing campaign? If you know a little about Facebook then it can be easily used for online marketing. Same goes for Twitter. Do you know much about social bookmarking, using images for SEO and so on? And don’t forget email marketing. Make sure your message is consistent and co-ordinated using a variety of marketing channels.

4. Build trust: Online marketing is all about trust marketing. This means promoting your credibility not your product or service. Social media is a great marketing channel for business to do this.

5. Analyse: Once you have everything up and running, you need to be able to measure the effectiveness of your online marketing campaign. Use Google Analytics to measure the SEO of your website, Facebook will allow you to see who is interested in your content by how many ‘likes’ you get. There’s also a variety of other analytical websites available such as Clicky.

As you can see there is some planning involved when it comes to online marketing for your small business. There are tools and websites available however which can streamline a lot of this but there is still some ongoing effort involved. Is it worth it? Maybe consider those numbers of Facebook and Twitter users I mentioned at the start to answer that question.

So now you have some helpful hints to get you on the road to a successful online marketing campaign. Remember, it takes effort and commitment, but the rewards are worth it!