Most small business struggle to have a consistent digital marketing strategy. Designing a strategic online marketing plan is key to developing new business relationships and retaining current clients. Digital marketing can help small businesses compete with same size companies and even bigger businesses. But digital marketing is not only about having a great website full of interesting information, there is much more that needs to be done in order to kick off your business strategy and start obtaining results.
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We have compiled a list of basic digital marketing tools you should be using in your online strategy. From social media to email newsletters and affiliate marketing, learn how to make the most out of your online presence.
Social media should be one of the key parts of your digital marketing strategy. This alternative is very cheap compared to other online marketing tools. You should consider the most popular websites – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn – to be part of your strategy, but you should also have a look at other platforms such as Pinterest and Tumblr. Depending on your vertical, you will see that some channels are better for the type of consumers you want to target. Once you have decided the platforms you want to use for your business, build strong profiles by updating them on a regular basis and keeping an interaction with your followers.
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Use these platforms to show your followers more about your business and the services you offer.
By sending regular email newsletters to your customers, you can keep them informed of any new products or services you are offering. Email marketing also plays an essential role in a wellplanned digital marketing strategy and can be a key factor in increasing conversions and sales.
Email marketing companies like Emailvision offer tools based on integrated marketing that combine customer intelligence with campaign management for email, mobile and social marketing.
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These type of tools can help you analyse your customers’ behaviour (including purchase behaviour and responsiveness to past campaigns), providing feedback to improve your newsletters and obtain better results.
Affiliate marketing is simply getting other businesses or people to promote your services or products and rewarding them for each referral or sale. Affiliate marketing is one of the most cost effective ways to market your business, especially for small businesses. Have a look at the different affiliate programmes available online and find the one that better suits your needs.
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This type of marketing is much less expensive than advertising, as you only pay an agreed commission for it.
For small businesses, ranking high on search engines results is very important. Your potential customers are always looking for the services and products you are offering using different search engines. Being on the first pages of those results is essential. There are two main marketing techniques you can use in order to achieve this: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC). From a SEO perspective and as a small business owner, you need to make sure that your website pages are easy to read by search engines and you also need to figure out the best strategy using keywords and link building to improve your results.
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Alternatively, you can run PPC campaigns like Google Adwords to bid on keywords relevant to your business so that your website is displayed on the paid results of a search engine results page.