Understanding how to marketing business online with free or limited budget is one of the challenges most entrepreneurs are faced with today.
Marketing strategies are plan of actions set in place to advertise, promote, and sell products or services to your targeted consumers.
Having your business succeed in this present economy condition, you need to put a good online or internet marketing strategies in place. These strategies are quite effective only if you understand what you are doing.
When it comes to Marketing business online or promoting any business especially you should put various marketing strategies in place because the battle to remain St the top is though.
To Market business online is the fastest way to communicate the right message to your targeted market. However, you have to define who your prospects are and then iterate the best way to reach them.
What is Target Market ?
Identifying your target market is the first step to the success of your product or business. Target Market are the group of people who are willing and interested in paying for your products, goods and services.
Understand that your target market has to do with particular group of consumers at which your product or service is aimed.
Also know that target marketing involves breaking down the entire market into various segments and planning marketing strategies accordingly for each segment to increase the market share.
How to Identify your target Market: (Who, What, Why, How)
Every successful business owner out there in one way or the other researched and gathered information about his market. This step shouldn’t be like business plan you do once and then never revisit.
For the success of your business, you’ll always need to be thinking about how to better understand your ideal prospective customers.
Do a study to be able to identify who your ideal customer is, where they live (or buy), what motivates them to make choices, and how they behave, or the steps they take in making a purchase.
Having said that let us look at what you need to know in identifying your target market.
Who: Demographics
The first question to ask is, who needs your product or service? The ‘Who’ Include basic demographic details such as gender, occupation, age, family size, and educational level.
Where: Geo-graphics
The second question should be, where are your customers? Identifying the places your potential customers can be found is the key.
Also learn the details of the geographical area like the size of the area, its population density, and its climate. Your potential customers are more likely to live in suburban areas of big cities with slightly above average median incomes.
Why: Psychographics
Figure out the reason your customers make the choices they make. With this approach you capture their personality and lifestyle information that will help you know your customers’ buying patterns.
If, for example, people by digital information products, you can figure out how much of your own digital products they can buy. With the information available to you, consider what to do to outshine your competitors probably be adding special incentives.
How: Behaviors
The fourth thing to do is to find out how your customers behave. All customers are buying products to fulfill a need, but how do they regard that need? How do they regard your product? How much information do they have on this need or how your product fulfills it, and what are their information sources?
Effective Ways to Marketing Business Online
In this section we are going to discuss different ways to adopt in marketing your business online. The application of what we are to discuss below applies to any country in the world.
Build/ Have Your Website
The first step in pushing your business/product online is through your own site or other blogging platforms. Let your presence be registered online.
Bill Gate once said ‘any business that is not online is already a dead business’. That is to say that having your own website is a great way you can market your small business online felt online.
Look around you will notice that many businesses have a website/ blog . The essence of the blog for your site is to help your credibility and authority.
However, If you have potential clients and your target market can be found online, then consider starting a blog. I advise you go with WordPress since is the best blogging platform especially for beginners.
If your website is not mobile-friendly, it runs the risk of losing traction organically on mobile devices, which is dangerous considering nearly 60% of all searches done on Google are made from smartphones. If you still have not updated your website for the new era of digital marketing, it’s time to get moving
Uptimize Your Site For Site Engines (SEO)
This is the second most important thing do do after you have launched your business website.
The most inbound marketing campaign you can manage is the digital environment is Search Engine Optimization.
Optimizating your website has to do with improving that aspects of your website that contribute to traffic and conversions. Remember that traffic comes from good search engine, both paid search, paid social, organic social, and other sources.
For marketing your business(s) online you need to optimize your site for your specific audience.
Search Engine Optimization known as SEO is the process of increasing a website’s ranking for relevant keywords on search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo and other.
Utilize Local Listings And Citations
It’s important that as an entrepreneur you get your business listed correctly and consistently on top online business directories. You can look out for sites like Yelp, Merchant Circle, Citysearch and others to see how they work .
You can use local listing site depending on the nature of your business. For example, restaurants, storefronts or services areas have the most to gain when it comes to optimizing local listings.
Google report reveals that roughly four out of five consumers use search engines to conduct local searches. Even with this finding, many businesses have not claimed a single local business listing online, which is a huge missed opportunity.
Below are some of the listings very important if you’re looking to master local SEO:
- Google My Business
- Yelp
- Foursquare
- Trip Advisor
- Yellow Pages
- Bing Places
Should in case your business does not serve customers locally, you should optimize Google My Business in case users try to find your contact information on your website.
You will also seek for respectable local directories to get your business listed on. Also endeavour to check local newspaper websites and Chamber of Commerce to see if they have a local business directory you can get listed on.
You could as well search for keywords like “[your city] directory” to find other local citation sites or directories.
Meanwhile, add your our business name, address and phone number on these major citation data aggregators Infogroup, Neustar, Acxiom and Factual.
While adding your business to citation data aggregates, make sure that discrepancies like misspellings, abbreviations, lack of suite number and wrong phone number are avoided. If not Google will display incorrect information — or not show your business at all in search results.
Leverage On Forum Marketing
The cheapest tools for learning more about customers who already use your products and services is social media, with Internet forums being one of the more dependable tools for gathering information
Online forum is a cheap way to market your business, for instance, if you have a ‘wine shop’ and someone demand to know in the forum about where to get the best wine shop in your locality. An opportunity calls that you help the person by answering the question and directing him/ her to your shop.
Note that different online forums have their different rules. So, before you start any business promotion on the platform read their rules and regulations.
Study by Awareness conducted in 2012 revealed that one-third of marketers are looking to social media and Internet forums as the platform of choice to reach customers. Also a content marketing firm in Long Beach, Calif called Nativo says that 20 percent of Americans use forums to discuss and recommend products.
There are forums that give room for registered members to advertise. What to do here is to find forums around your target market, register a free account and start making posts.
Reach Out to Social Media Influencers
Research revealed that reaching out to social media influencers can help in achieving two different objectives. These objects are to increase brand awareness and earning valuable back-links.
People tend to trust more on what other people have to say about a particular brand/product and this is why influencer marketing has become such a powerful and effective marketing strategy to grow businesses.
However, anytime a social media influencers recommend your product or brand to their followers, they become an extension of your company’s marketing department.
Reaching out to social media rock stars and popular bloggers will definitely give you the inside track to accessing your niche audience in particular channels. For instance, Instagram influencers monetize their following by publishing photos related to the particular brand, earning a relatively big check for promoting Fortune 500 brands.
What we are saying here is that when you align your brand with an influencer, you are positioning your product or service for display to his or her already-established large network of individuals who trust what that influencer has to say.
Create Community on Social Media and Establish Your Presence
A lot of business owners are beginning to utilize social media to connect with their target audience. This can be can be achieved in a myriad of ways on each of the major social media platforms.
Deciding on the platforms when it comes to using social media for marketing, it’s imperative that you understand your target audience and where they interact most.
Here is a quick overview of the leading social media channels:
Currently, Facebook is the largest and the most widely adopted social media website, that is to say that you’re likely to find a good amount of potential customers by marketing through this platform. Facebook advertising is also second to none.
Twitter is also an excellent vehicle for customer service management and discussions. This medium could be used to either generate leads, push users to a website, or respond to questions/comments.
This platform provides as well the best opportunity to engage in one-to-one discussions with followers, all social media marketing channels can be utilized to build a dedicated following.
Instagram is also good when marking business online since is photo-driven, which gives ecommerce businesses a prime opportunity to showcase products. This social media platform allow users to post short videos which is equal good for Local businesses to capture foot traffic.
Pinterest is considered a search engine and social media platform hybrid, which provides ecommerce brands with a powerful tool for traffic generation while Snapchat skews more to the younger audience. Snapchat, therefore, can be helpful for business brands to generate brand awareness. Making do with its sponsored geofilters can give local advertisers an opportunity to reach niche audiences.
The leading professional social media platform for now is LinkedIn and can prove advantageous for both lead generation and recruiting-based campaigns.
In case you’re just getting started with digital marketing, it will be necessary start marking with your existing social networks to build your initial foundation, using word of mouth and referrals to increase follower counts.
Having said these, you must understand and learn the bootstrapping strategies to building your business. With that the little capital invested in the business will not be a waste.
About The Author :
My name is Victor and I am blogger with over 3 years experience in writing. I blog at https://www.agvictor.com
You can connect with me on facebook and twitter @agvictorplanet
