Internet marketing covers many aspects of promotion online.
Internet Marketing involves many different facets and moving parts. Fortunately, for local business; it’s not as difficult as it would be if your business was online only.
IM (internet marketing) is basically the process of promoting your business to a wider audience on the internet. There are many tools that can really expand your reach in the market.]
The top 5 online marketing tactics for offline businesses are:
Mobile
Content
Social Media
Email
Reputation Management
Let’s elaborate on these.
Mobile
As I said on my web design page, a mobile ready website is very important to the local business owner. Simply put, without a mobile website, your business is done!
Read more about mobile ready websites here.
Content
Also mentioned previously, your content needs to be informative, engaging and drive your site visitors to contact you for more information. Without good, thorough content, the rest of your efforts can be a waste of time. Remember this: your website doesn’t have to be the prettiest, it just needs to engage the visitors and have a clear call to action for them to take.
Social Media
Today, a website is just not enough. People are increasingly turning to social media (Facebook, Twitter and Google+ mostly) to gauge a business’ reputation. You need to have a decent social media profile so you too can be found on these popular and influential sites.
Email
Email may be the most important tool for the offline (and online only) business.
You need to be constantly and aggressively asking and encouraging prospects to ‘sign up’ to your email subscription form. If you don’t produce some sort of newsletter or tips sheet for them to receive, offer coupons or some other incentive not available without signing up to your email list.
Here are the reasons Email may be the most important activity you can take to promote your business. First of all, many of the tools mentioned here are free. Places like Facebook, Youtube, Google business, Gmail, etc. The problem with that is, these behemoths can, and regularly do; change their algorithms and terms of use. This puts you at their mercy. Any day, Google or Facebook can change the rules, and suddenly your profile or even your website disappears from the Internet!
There are many horror stories of businesses being wiped out overnight because they had ‘all their eggs in one or two baskets’. Namely the Google and Facebook baskets.
It’s extremely dangerous to give that much control over your livelihood.
That’s why email and a subscriber list are so important. Once you’ve gotten someone onto your list, they are your customer or prospect forever. You don’t need Google’s, or anyone else’ permission (or help) in reaching them. They gave you permission to contact them directly when they signed up.
You can (and should) have subscribers sign up using what’s called a ‘double optin’ process. A double optin is works like this:
Someone comes to your website. They are interested enough to sign up to your ‘subscriber’ list, so they put in their name and email address into the form and hit enter.
Now, your business email needs to be integrated into a tool called an autoresponder. (Basically a sophisticated, automatic email response system)
Your autoresponder will automatically send back a thank you message (to their email address) AND have a link in that message they have to click, confirming they ‘opted into’ your list the first time. This is called a ‘double optin’. They are verifying they did sign up and you DIDN’T spam them.
The double optin is the best way to protect yourself from claims of spam. You, the business owner, can prove that someone signed up once and than confirmed signing up the second time.
As a side note, but also a new important tool, would be your own app. This can be used to ‘push’ messages to your prospects or existing customers. If someone downloads your app, it gives you even better contact opportunities than email.
Reputation Management
Speaking of your reputation, you probably know that one happy customer may tell one or two friends about their experience with your company. One unhappy customer could complain about their experience (perceived or not!) to ten or more people! Ouch!
With the growth of ‘review’ sites like Yelp, Yext and the rest, a few bad reviews can seriously damage your business reputation and bottom line. If your not actively monitoring and managing your online reputation, it won’t take long for some disgruntled customer (or someone who just has an axe to grind and NEVER did business with you), to do serious damage.
Reputation management has become the most difficult of the online tasks for the local business owner to handle. Unfortunately, this is directly due to the rise of what I call ‘the social proof’ of the offline world. Perception is the truth in many people’s minds.
If your business is perceived as poor or shoddy in the world of online reviews and opinions, it could be a death knell for profits.
There are many other aspects to Internet Marketing. Things such as posting videos to Youtube and other video sharing sites. Podcasting (audio), regular blogging on your website, press releases, commenting in niche related forums, etc.
Of course, we haven’t even mentioned paid advertising yet. Things like PPC or pay per click ads (again, Google is the big dog with it’s Adwords advertising program). Bing, 7 Search and AOL also have PPC programs. Banner advertising, text or link advertising, mobile ads, sponsored ads, etc.
If you want to find out what it takes to get your business online, or improve your current online results; send an email or give us a call for more information.
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