The amount of marketing information online can be overwhelming for business owners. It’s difficult and time consuming to figure out what will actually work for your company and your situation.
You need to focus on making your business successful, not becoming a marketing expert.
Here are five best practices that will help get you on the right path to business success:
Grow Your Online Business
1/ The primary goal of your website should be to attract leads, convert leads into prospects, and convert prospects into customers. For example, your website can attract leads with compelling content and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). If you can capture a lead’s contact information before they leave your website or landing page, you have potentially converted a lead into a real prospect for your company.
2/ Focus on driving targeted traffic to your website, not on ranking #1 for high volume keywords. This strategy applies to both organic search (SEO) and PPC search advertising campaigns. For example, if you’re a plumber in Nanuet, you’ll want someone who is searching for “emergency plumbing service in Nanuet” rather than someone looking for “plumbing”. These targeted keywords will have less traffic than a high volume keyword, however, you will end up with a higher quality lead that costs less to obtain.
3/ Never allow your business to be overly dependent on just one or two marketing techniques. The next change in Google’s algorithm could cause your website to drop in the rankings. PPC advertising costs are increasing as more businesses become active online, so your cost may reach a point where it is no longer profitable for you as a campaign. The product directory that you’ve been using may start to charge for your listing. If you can’t withstand a 10-20% drop in revenue, you should have at least 5 healthy traffic sources to minimize your risk.
4/ Optimize your campaigns to minimize the cost of customer acquisition. For example, if a large percentage of leads are bouncing off your website or landing page, it could mean you’re attracting the wrong prospect to your website or your website content is not compelling. If you are promoting your business on a particular social networking site or niche blog site, and you’re not seeing any traffic, or the traffic you are seeing is not converting to customers, you may have to modify or replace this campaign.
5/ Branding and Social Media are important components of any Marketing Plan. They provide market awareness and social engagement for your company and its products. To start to gain experience in these areas, small businesses should initially focus on campaigns with proven ROI. For example, by encouraging your customers to provide reviews on a social review site, you can measure the net increase in referral traffic from that site. By distributing press releases about your company, you create some leads in addition to market awareness; you can measure the traffic from online news sites plus the impact to your website SEO.
The Best Practices Guide: A Short Cut To Marketing Success provides additional best practices and implementation detail. The Guide is free to readers of this blog post. No obligation. Click this link for your copy of the Best Practices Guide.
About Dave Hubbard
Hi Dave,
Uncommon wisdom about growing an online business. I think the idea of varying your marketing strategy is most important. There is a possibility (even a probability) that one technique or more will begin loosing effectiveness over time making it necessary to change off to new techniques or even develop whole new approaches over time, so believing one thing will work in the long run is definitely naïve. Thanks for sharing this post with the BizSugar community
I agree- marketing and all the strategies and techniques are overwhelming to business owners. And they already have a lot to do- but marketing is essential for you business success and how everything works together to support your brand. If you don’t have a brand or defend it – others will dilute your message and you will blend in instead of standing out.
I see you registered http://www.marketingoutfield.com/blog/5-best-practices-for-growing-your-online-revenue/
for a decent period, is that for search engine optimisation?
Added to Reddit, they would find this interesting!