Draw In New Customers With Internet Marketing
When you think of marketing, you may still think first of TV ads and billboards, but marketers are increasingly doing their work online. This is especially true when it comes to small businesses, as online marketing is much more easily tailored to suit small budgets and niche audiences, and overall overheads are lower, but that’s not the only reason. As people spend more and more time online and use the Internet in an increasingly focused way, this approach is becoming more effective than traditional ones. But how does it work?
Online Advertising
When you advertise on TV or the radio, you’ll have the option of picking which shows your ad runs next to. When you advertise in newspapers or magazines, you might be able to pick the page, and when you advertise on billboards, you can pick the location. Beyond this however, you don’t have much control. When it comes to advertising online, you can use sophisticated tools to target prospective customers very precisely according to aspects like age, geographical area, spending habits and personal interests. Generally, you’ll pay for each level of targeting, but this means that the response rate to each ad is much, much higher. There are numerous places where you can advertise or talk about your product or service for free.
Sponsorship
One of the difficulties with more generic online advertising is that it’s difficult to be confident in your ability to reach a large audience. One way around this is to become a sponsor. Charities and online TV shows are always looking for sponsors. By connecting with them, you can reach their established audience and associate your name with a brand people like and respect. This can be a great way for new companies to get themselves noticed.
Competitions
Another great way to draw attention to what you sell without having to spend a lot of money is to run competitions. Again, there are many sites online that list competitions and direct people to them. If you make enough effort to publicize your competitions using sites like these and social media, you can get thousands of visitors to your website just by offering a single item as a prize. As a rule, competitions are more popular if there is some element of skill involved (even if it’s just answering a trivia question), because this persuades people that they have more chance of winning than if it’s just a random drawing.
Managing Social Media
Marketing is about much more than just advertising. It’s about building your brand and making sure that you stay connected with your customers on an ongoing basis. The best way to do this is through social media. Using Facebook is essential, with a large proportion of consumers now considering it unprofessional for a business not to have a Facebook page. What other platforms you use will depend on the demographics you want to reach, but you should beware of spreading yourself too thin. It’s much better to use just two or three platforms well than to use seven or eight, and struggle to keep up with them. This often leads prospective customers to expect subpar service.
Making It Personal
Ultimately, successful marketing is about building up a connection between you and your customers so that they feel individually important to you, just as they feel with a local shopkeeper who knows their names and asks about their families. Keep good records so that if a customer contacts you with an inquiry, you’ll know if they have done so before. Ditch the hard sell in favor of a friendly, problem solving approach. Remember that if they like you, they’ll talk about it, and you’ll not only have won one loyal customer, you may very well have won their friends too. Online marketing is something you will need to make the effort to succeed in, because at this stage, the alternative is being left behind. The good news is that it’s much easier than you might think.
