Ok, so marketing your business online is important; we all know that but how the heck do you go about it? This is a broad question, and there’s a lot of different ways to answer it, but it’s a question I get a lot. Here’s the good news: marketing your business online doesn’t have to be a thorn in your side. There are a lot of basic steps you can take to maximize your conversions, increase your bottom line, and start marketing more effectively.
These steps all tie together if you go in order, so bear with me. All the outgoing links you’ll run into on this page open a new window, so come back to it once you check them out.
Marketing Your Business Online: Start With Your Website
Hear me loud and clear before you go any further here. Your website is your first and most important step. You can have the most effective content strategy, high quality ads, and an unlimited budget but it’s your website that has to drive those conversions. Whether you need contact information, sales of your product or service, or brand awareness, your content is everything here.
Writing quality ad copy takes time, and is sometimes better left to the professionals, but regardless of which path you go on that, write content that is optimized with strategic keywords and that is written with your target audience in mind.
For a bit more about the technical aspects of marketing your business online with SEO, you can check out this link later (it’ll open in a new window).
Network! Use Social Media and Blogging
Look, marketing your business online without social media or blog content is like trying to play golf without any clubs. As much stigma as there is, and as frustrating as social media platforms can be to build and manage, it’s very important you integrate it into your strategy. 
With blogs, you’re able to target an unlimited amount of sub-niches and smaller target markets with quality content, build brand awareness and thought leadership for your company, and give yourself a ton to work with when you start reaching out to people with newsletters and paid ads. If you click on ‘social media management’ in the nav menu above, you can learn more about this.
In the mean time, once you have plenty of quality posts on your site, you need to move on to…
Mapping Out Your Content Strategy
Marketing your business online requires patience. Why is this? Simply put, once you GET people to your website and your offers, you need to maximize the value of their visit. Someone may need more information, have to wait to make a purchase, or otherwise not immediately convert to a customer. In the mean time, you want to have conversion opportunities wherever you can to get visitors to opt in to newsletters or follow you on social media.
This retains their attention to your business for the future, but of course, you need to keep feeding them useful information. By now you should have a site full of great ad copy and some blog posts written up on a variety of topics, right? Yes, because you’ve been following me step by step.
What you want to do is map out a schedule of times you reach out to your subscribers or mailing list with information and offers. It might be a prompt about a new service or product relevant to them, it might be an informational blog post to draw them back into your website, and then implement.
How do I get those contacts though? Good question, and it brings us to the last aspect of marketing your business online…
Advertising!
I’m going to level with you, a good PPC strategy and campaign is the cheapest, most effective way to get the word out these days. Pay Per Click advertising works like this:
~You choose an audience and a daily budget.
~You write a killer ad up (the better you do, the better your ad will perform).
~You link to your page, your quality blog content, or another landing page that has conversion opportunities (to purchase your product or service, enter their contact information, etc.).
When your website is working well, you have plenty of content and solid offers to promote, and your social media profiles are up to date, it’s just a matter of implementing a strategy that gets people wanting what you have to offer.
This is by far the most in depth part of the process, and a lot of background knowledge and trial and error is necessary. Many people hire full time specialists for marketing their business online with PPC, but often times they will outsource the work to freelancers or firms like ours.
(If PPC is something that is making your head spin, I’d be happy to give you a little crash course specific to your business. Drop me a line here with your questions.)
Get Started
If you made it this far, I hope the gears are turning and the light bulbs are going on. Marketing your business online takes time, and commitment, and a little bit of research, but it’s not Everest. It can be done for a business of any size, and if you need affordable options for help, I have good news for you: We can get your digital marketing plan in good shape.
Contact me on this form below, and I’ll do a website analysis for you totally free. No sign up commitments, no gimmicks. I’ll let you know where your digital marketing strategy is at, and where it can improve. If you take the info and go at it yourself, great! If you think I can help you out, we’ll come up with a project that meets your goals and your budget.
Cheers!
Justin-CEO/Marketing Strategist
