TheMarketingblog

Marketing your business: 4 ways the web can help

If you constantly find yourself coming up short of your marketing targets, then it’s probably time you sought some advertising assistance.

Rest assured, the internet is more than capable of aiding you in your bid to promote your business. All you need to do is embrace the usage of its many facets and, more importantly, use them correctly.

Doing the opposite and using them incorrectly could end up doing more harm to your online presence and brand than good.

To find four ways the web can help you to market your business, make sure to read on.

Update your LinkedIn profile

A quick, cheap, and effective way to establish your online presence is to set your business up with a LinkedIn profile. You can’t just set this profile up and leave it to its own devices, though.

You need update it as soon as you possibly can, as having a LinkedIn profile that displays outdated facts about your company will do you more harm than good in the long run. For one, it will show you to be too lazy to tend to your online presence. What’s more, it could confuse your customers with regards to what it is you actually offer.

When updating your LinkedIn, be sure not to just copy and paste your resume and company bio onto your profile. Write something new about your business (or have a professional copywriter write it for you) so that you can let your passion for your market shine through.

Also, be sure not to be half-hearted in this endeavour — if you’re going to do it, go the whole hog by uploading written content, photographs, videos, and infographics. Not only will this make you look far more professional, but it will also help you to establish some form of credibility.

Find the social media platform that suits you… and utilise it fully

If you’ve not got your finger on the pulse of social media, you wouldn’t be remiss for thinking that social media sites and platforms are all the same.

If you were to garner a deeper understanding of social media, however, you would quickly realise that the different platforms are, in fact, not at all the same… not in the slightest.

Each different platform offers its users a different experience, and each allows for different types of advertising to take place upon it.

From a marketing standpoint, it is essential that you find the social media platform that allows you to advertise your business your way. If you consider a successful advertising campaign to be one where customers reply and interact with you, then you should utilise Twitter; should you wish to run competitions on the other hand, then you would probably be better suited to Facebook.

When it comes to social media, it’s all about finding your own groove.

Consider launching a PPC advertising campaign

Pay-per-click (PPC) marketing may be popularised on Google, but it’s really taken on a life of its own on sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

There are now a plethora of opportunities for you to place adds specifically in the places that you know your customers spend their time. By taking this kind of advertising approach, you can be sure that your content reaches the right people, at the right times.

When it comes to launching a PPC advertising campaign, it’s important to:

  • Know your specific goal (is it to generate more sales or encourage more people to sign up to your service?)

  • Find the perfect place to advertise (take the above advice about choosing the right social media platform for you)

  • Choose the keywords you wish to bid on carefully (they must say everything there is to say about your business)

  • Set your budget (be it daily, monthly, or annually)

  • Monitor your PPC campaign and continually find ways to improve it.

Make use of insight tools

How can you expect to run an effective digital marketing campaign if you don’t know how your business is currently performing online?

Quite simply, you need to garner an insight into the popularity of your company before you make any big advertising decisions going forward.

By not doing so, you could very well end up wasting your time, effort, and resources on rolling out a marketing campaign that you really do not need to roll out.

There are plenty of pieces of insight technology out there, one of the most effective being the LexisNexis social analytics tool. When used, this type of data intelligence tool will unearth a host of interesting facts about your business’s current online performance.

It will monitor your social media handles in real-time to show you how many people are interacting with your business via them, it will pick up all web-based conversations that take place regarding your brand

It will also provide you with an insight into how your competitors are currently performing and what they are doing to bolster their online presence.

With the information that an insight tool can offer you at hand, you can then push forward with your next digital marketing campaign in a far more focussed and concise manner. This information will allow you to make advertising decisions going forward that are informed and backed up by your past performance, and that will only bode well.

Your existing customer base is fine, but what happens when they seek pastures new (which they are well within their rights to do, by the way)?

Quite simply, you need to constantly look for ways to draw new customers to your business, which is why you need to take your marketing endeavours incredibly seriously.

When advertising your business and trying to make it seem as attractive as possible to potential consumers, make sure to use the world wide web as your ally. Update your LinkedIn profile, promote yourself on the social media site that suits you, run PPC campaigns, and make use of insight tools.

By doing all of this, you’ll find yourself well on your way to marketing success sooner rather than later.

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