When you own a small business, every decision you make is critical. Your marketing strategies are among the most costly and critical ones. So how do you take the little you have and turn it into gold? Use online marketing methods as much as you can. It’s not clear to all what exactly online marketing includes. So let’s start by pointing out the main channels within it. Later, we’ll expand more about the ones that are more relevant for small businesses.
Online Marketing Channels Explained:
- Sponsored search results – you can find these in all major search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo. In this format of online marketing, you pay per a click on your ad or per 1,000 impressions of it in the search results. You can buy appearances for specific words or in related network sites.
- Media buying – buying banners or sponsored pages on portals, news sites, blogs and so on. Since there are such sites for just about every possible niche, you can target your specific audience.
- SEO – the initials stand for search engine optimisation, which basically means getting your site adjusted to the expectations of major search engines, which ultimately gets you in high ranks for specific terms. For example, if you own a flowers store in Sydney, your site can appear on the first page of Google’s organic search results for words like: Buy flowers in Sydney, Sydney’s flower shops, etc.
- Social media – promoting your brand on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest, while relying on your post/brand turning viral.
- Affiliate networks – this will probably be the least relevant for most small businesses. However, it’s important to know about it for future reference. You never know when your business will turn big. Affiliates are people that are sending traffic to your site or selling your products on their sites for a share in the profit. There are organised affiliate networks that you can register on as a business owner and they manage everything for you.
What is my best bet for online marketing?
As a small business owner, everything is gambling. You can’t know for sure which strategy will bring you the most leads and conversion. But there are some online marketing channels that have relatively low costs. However, if you want to cut down on expenses, you’ll have to spend some time learning how to do things on your own.
Let’s start with the simplest – Sponsored ads:
These are the ads that are running through the major search engines. I recommend you start with Google and see how it goes there before trying anything else.
The good thing about Google is that they are doing everything they can to help you get started and make profit. They understood long ago that your profit is their profit. This is why you’ll find endless tutorials on how to use AdWords, a good support system and a very easy to user interface.
Another great thing about Google AdWords as an online marketing channel is that you spend as much as you want. You have complete control over your expenses and you can set a daily, weekly and monthly budget. As a small business owner, I’m sure you can appreciate such an option.
Social media:
Social media is not for every business. You have to be selling something that has the potential of becoming viral. However, you’d be surprised of how many types of business can go viral with some creativity and the right approached. For instance, if you own a coffee shop, you can start a photography competition among your clients where the one that gets the most likes or shares on his or her uploaded picture to your Facebook page, gets a free breakfast. You can make this even more productive if you choose as the competition theme your coffee place, including: pictures of people drinking coffee or of people sitting at your coffee place. I’m sure you got the idea by now. The beauty of this is that once something goes viral, it continues spreading on its own, and not only on the social network you started on. This can easily cross through Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter and so on. It’s strongly recommended to have your own online page where you keep all of these images. The most optimal choice would be your own website. But you can also do this on a Facebook page that you open for your business.
SEO:
In order to use SEO, you have to have your own website. So, if you don’t have one and you’re not planning to open one, you can probably stop reading now. For those of you that are still here, let’s discuss a bit about the unique advantages of SEO.
- First of all, in the long run SEO is cheaper – once you get ranked, you don’t need to spend as much and can go down to maintenance mode.
- Second, this is something you can do on your own with very small costs, like: directory listings, time spent on getting links to your site and so on.
- Third, it’s well known that SEO traffic is the highest quality traffic you can get, right after direct entries to your website, that is. This means that the conversion rate per visits will be higher than, let’s say, PPC or banners.
You don’t have to hire an SEO agency, although it’s probably the best option. But not everyone can afford a monthly fee with the revenue expected to return only 3-6 months later (yes, SEO takes time). So the second best option is to take 2-3 hours of consultancy with a SEO expert. He or she will give you the basics, plus instruct you on how to continue and learn more independently through online tutorials, blogs and sites about SEO.
A good SEO consultant will know how to guide you according to your business’ specific needs. This will take time and some patience, but once you start seeing revenues as a result of SEO, you’ll start appreciating this channel.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. Each of these online marketing channels is a whole world of possibilities and options. Now that you understand the basic information that you need to know about each of them, you can make an educated decision about where to put your efforts.
