Digital marketing is as essential today as newspaper ads were before the time of television. With new businesses popping up left and right and quite a number of them your potential competitors, going digital is one of the best ways to stay ahead. Although trying to make your presence known online can be daunting, particularly if your business is small-scale, it is a necessity that can ultimately bring you more profit and a more stable customer base.
Here are several strategies that you can use to market your business digitally:
1. Set a Goal
With every marketing plan, you’ll need to start by determining your goals. Do you want your business to expand, gain more recognition from the general public, or just edge out the competition? Perhaps, you just want to gain more customers, or even establish your own franchise someday.
Starting with a goal or two makes things more concrete which greatly pushes your chances of success up. This is also very important in digital marketing, as going into it without any prior planning or research can backfire big time, and may even cost you and your business more in the long run. Set a goal to focus on.
2. Come Up with a Marketing Funnel
To get a better understanding of a marketing funnel, think of the functionality of the actual funnel: It starts out with a big entryway, then narrows down, making it effective in getting substances into an otherwise small opening. In marketing, this same concept is utilized by mapping out a customer’s journey towards becoming a lead from merely being a stranger. Strategies are put in place in various parts of this marketing funnel to ensure that the stranger moves further in through this funnel to become a lead.
3. Call-to-Action
Essentially, a call to action is something that can prompt customers to take action, such as requesting for a product demo or subscribing to a newsletter. In digital marketing, this is often an image or text that can be clicked on and which directs people to landing pages that will, in turn, collect your customers’ contact details. An example of this can be seen on various training websites, such as those that offer online training for asbestos courses, where prospective trainees just need to click on a button to sign up for an online course.
4. Create an Effective Lead Magnet
The idea here is to trade information with your prospective customer. You supply them with relevant information that they might need (for example: asbestos classes for those who need asbestos certification training), but then they’ll have to provide you with some information about themselves as well, which you could, in turn, use to interact more with them and get them further down your marketing funnel.
5. Drive Traffic
In order to drive traffic to your website, you’ll need to have three things: good quality content, social media interaction, and website optimization. Having only good content while not being very visible online won’t cut it, and you can’t expect traffic to go up on your website by mere keywords and social engagement alone. By driving traffic to your website, you can get the people that may potentially move through your marketing funnel.
Digital marketing has been around for a while now, but it remains to be an effective way to get word of your business out. If you want your business to grow, then going digital is the way to go.
