5 Essential Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Business
Remember the craziness of starting your business? The late night brainstorming sessions, deciding on a name and then a kickass logo, your inaugural client and all the lessons you learned from him, and the fear and relief you felt when you added your very first official employee?
The ups, the downs, the long nights and early mornings. But as the new normal settles in, you start to look at the big picture. Here are the key marketing strategies to grow your business over the long term.
SEO
When done right, a good technical SEO campaign will increase traffic to your website. It enables Google (and to a much lesser extent Bing) to best categorize your site so that you are showing up on the appropriate searches, and thereby attracting your target audience (here is a good primer on the three main steps to a strong SEO campaign).
A good technical SEO campaign should only take 3-6 months and only needs to be done every few years (ideally when you’re redoing your website) and is one of the essential marketing strategies to grow your business.
The rest of a good SEO campaign is just content (specifically blogs and other resources to your site) – and the more, the merrier.
Reputation Management
For some industries (notably restaurants and commoditized services like plumbers, electricians, and carpet cleaners), testimonials are a pivotal marketing strategy to grow your business. For professional services (like those provided by attorneys, CPAs, and consultants), testimonials better serve to boost your conversion rate.
Social Media
In short: social media is not right for every business. But it is an important one of the marketing strategies to grow your business available to you.
To oversimplify, social media is where people spend their time when they’re bored. It’s also where they go when they want to feel better about themselves. This creates a gigantic pool of potential customers all congregating in the same place – which is why Facebook is a close second to Google in driving online traffic. The trick is to get in front of the right people.
Blogging
Over the long run, blogging is the most important piece of digital marketing, period (read this if you want to read more as to why). Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it accessible. So, the essence of a good SEO strategy is to create valuable information for your target audience and provide it via your site – like we do with the blog.
Email Marketing
The one thing you have the most control over in digital marketing is your email campaign. Facebook, Google, etc can change the rules whenever they want. This can cut you off from your audience and traffic to your site can plummet. But nothing can touch your email list – it’s the most direct connection you have.
What’s more – you can be a little more sales-driven over email. People come to your site for information (and then to make a decision), people use social media for entertainment. Sales pitches can anger them in both places, but they’re ok with it over email.
If you’re looking to generate leads with your marketing, you need a team to execute your strategy (and here are the questions you should ask a marketing agency before hiring them). Feel free to drop us a line if you want to learn more.