We have a perception that business runs only on investment and man power. It is undeniable that without these two, a business wouldn’t survive. Investment is a key part of running a business, it is the blood of every organization and man power is like the muscle of the body, which support and runs the organization. In fact, there are several other things which are necessary to run a business. Like management, abiding compliance, maintaining CSR and many more.
One of such thing is the Digital Marketing. It is one of the most important part of running business now a days. Since we live in a techno ear, the fashion of old form of marketing has been taken over by Digital Marketing. It has made business reach more people with little effort and money. More and more business has taken out the old form of marketing and replaced with digital marketing. This has lead to business take their promotion online.
Now, how do you promote your business online? Do you need a marketing degree for this? Not Really! Having some amount of computer skills and a bit of curiosity can at least get you started. However, if you want to make a bigger impression of your company online, would suggest to get professional help. No matter, lets start with the basics.
List your business on Google, Yahoo and Bing
The basic thing about marketing is to let people know of your existence. For that you need to list yourself in the three most popular search engines. Now, what is a search engine? Let’s take an example. When you want to search a restaurant near you, what do you do? You go to google/yahoo/Bing and search for restaurants near you. Why do you do that? Because Google/Yahoo/Bing are places where you can search information. They are the search engines. Next question is, how do they know where the restaurants are. The restaurant owners have listed themselves so that people can get their information.
Likewise, you have to get your self listed in those places. For google, you can list yourself in Google Business, for Yahoo, it is the Yahoo Local and for Bing, it is bingplaces.
Be Social
Which means be on social medias like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, etc. Create company or business page and start to market your products or services. It is important to check the quality and quantity of the content.
You should not post too many or too little content. If you post to many content the viewers will not be able to react on each posts and if too little, they will forget about you. You should also check the quality of the content, they should make the audience relate to their business.
Statistics
Be sure to measure where your business is hitting high and where it is not getting any audience. You can do it through different SEO tools. One of the most effective and powerful too is the google analytics. You can check the real time audience, their demographics, their age group and many more. There are other tools like Followerwonk, SocialRank, etc.
You can use any one of them and track which social platform you are hitting the most. If there is any particular place that you find you are getting better audience, you should focus on that social media. However you should not ignore other social sites. You might not be getting audiences now, but it might change and for that you should have content present.
Joining Other Community, Forum and Webinars
Join other community and start contributing to it. In the initial period, don’t post anything about your product or services. Try to mingle first and gain popularity. Once you are recognized, then start advertising your product or services.
Post in forums and create or join webinars. In B2B interactions, webinars is a great place to get quality audiences.
Offer Free Stuff
One of the best way to drive traffic to your website and promote your business is through offering something. Everyone like free stuff. In the mall or some place else, if you are given free samples, how would you feel.
There is a strategy involved in giving free stuffs. Most of the time, when you offer something for free to others, they feel obliged to hear or at least see what you are offering. Once, you get hooked, its the quality of your product or service, which will drive audience to client. But always remember, don’t give away everything, just a peak of what you have to offer.
Email Marketing
It might sound cliche, but it is one of the best way of reaching audiences and promoting your business. There are many online email marketing tools available with automated features to make email marketing easy and fun.
No matter which tool you use, see to it that your content is good. Place you foot in the receivers end and try to figure, what would you want to read in a mail.
These are just the basic and a few of the many ways in which you can promote your business online. There are lots of other things that you can do to promote your business online. May be in my next blog, i’ll write about it. In the mean while do try these things and let me know if this helped you.
parijanam 