In the current saturated and heavily competitive market, SMBs need to revamp their digital marketing strategies to attract more clients and customers. Regardless of your industry or the size of your company, an online presence is vital to business longevity and making big bucks.
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Fortunately, you will not need a big budget or expensive marketing campaigns to achieve the desired results. All that is needed is creativity and motivation to make a huge impact. This article highlights some of the marketing hacks you can act on today and see a surge in your customer base.
Create an Optimized Website
Regardless of whether you use your site strictly for information or as an eCommerce platform, this happens to be your number one marketing tool. Most customers are already decided on what they need to purchase even before contacting you.
It is, therefore, important to make sure that your website is well optimized, responsive, and updated. Tools such as Webmaster and Google Analytics will help you or your website manager generate useful information about your website.
By leveraging on such information, you will have an idea of how many people visit your site, the pages they browse, and for how long. These tools will also help you understand the keywords that people use to search for your brand online. This data can be useful to website managers when gauging the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and when generating new web content.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
If you want to boost your online presence, you should consider investing in SEO. This is the process of improving your visibility on search engine result pages (SERPs). You want your website to appear on the first page of the SERPs for more visitors to click on it.
If your website does not appear on the first page, then there is work to be done. The first step in SEO is keyword research, which is the process of looking for keywords to focus on in your web content.
Tools such as AdWords and Keyword Planner will help you come up with a keyword that your business can rank for. After generating a list of focus keywords, go ahead and localize some of them by adding your city name or location into the phrase (e.g., custom clear stickers in New York).
Once you have a solid list of keywords and keyword phrases, incorporate these keywords into your webpage content. Once these pages are indexed, your website will start ranking for those specific keywords, and your online visibility will improve.
It is important to note that you should not expect to see an instant change after implementing an SEO strategy. This is a gradual process that will take three to six months before you begin to see any changes.
Blogging
You have definitely heard the phrase “content is king.” Updating your blog frequently is a great way to keyword-optimize and refresh your website. To achieve this, design a blog schedule and follow it to the letter.
Blogging is a great way to educate your customers and target audience on the benefits of using your products and services, and it will also create more exposure. According to Google, a well-optimized blog article should be between 500 and 700 words with a mix of keywords.
Even though we want our webpages to rank for specific keywords, please avoid overstuffing your content with the keywords because Google Algorithms have been programmed to penalize keyword-stuffed pages.
The best practice is to place the main keyword in your title, URL, title tag, and metadata. You can then sparingly sprinkle related keywords throughout the body of your content. Make sure you prepare your blog in advance to allow yourself enough time to correct any grammatical errors.
Marketing Automation
This happens to be the new direction online marketing is taking. Some marketing tasks are highly time-consuming and repetitive. Marketing automation software is designed to automate those repetitive tasks.
This, in turn, helps improve visibility into the effectiveness of emails, social media, and website actions. With such software, you can easily track down the actions of users through the campaign process.
Some of these actions include how many users clicked on a specific link or email, users’ travel path through your website or emails, and the number of email bounces. The software automates the entire follow up process.
There are many other marketing hacks one can use to promote business performance. To get ahead of your competition, you will need to try and test different marketing strategies until you find the one that works best for you and your business. You can always re-evaluate your strategy to cope with market changes. All the best!