According to Peter Drucker, one of the greatest marketing minds that ever lived, “the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer.” Essentially, “creating” a customer means attracting a customer through one means or the other while “keeping” a customer means retaining her; what this means is that no matter how great your product/service/customer retention strategy is, you won’t achieve business success if you can’t “create” customers; in other words, you MUST be able to market effectively.
If you have an online business, your business is only as strong as your marketing and it’s important to realize that marketing constantly changes and evolve in the online world; in other words, what works today might no longer work tomorrow.
So, whether you’re starting a blog or just building a website for your small business, here are the marketing tactics worth considering.
1. Guest Blogging
Guest blogging became mainstream around 3 years ago and it keeps increasing in popularity every year; from major fortune 100 brands to small businesses and individual websites, businesses that rely on the internet in one way or the other – especially traffic from search engines – are guest blogging.
However, while guest blogging is becoming increasingly important it is also important to realize that it’s all about your approach; you’ll be burned in the end if you approach things the wrong way but you’ll benefit immensely if you have the right approach.
Whether you’re guest blogging for links, traffic or brand exposure, what matters this year is the quality of your content. This was confirmed when Matt Cutts, head of Google web spam team, recently released the video below:
Guest blogging is still effective this year but how you approach it is more important than ever.
If you’re new to guest blogging, this guide could be of some help:
- The Ultimate Guide to Guest Blogging
2. Presentation Marketing
Another form of marketing that is very effective is marketing with presentations; in other words, you create quality and concise presentations that gives people quality presentation while subtly introducing them to your brand. You then submit these presentations to the top presentation sharing sites and get traffic and exposure when the presentations go viral.
If this is done right, it isn’t uncommon to see a presentation go viral with hundreds of thousands of views, eventually sending thousands of visitors your way.
To get results from your presentations, here are a few tips:
- Ensure your presentations are professional and well-designed; avoid default powerpoint templates and go for a tool like Presenter
- Use more images than text in your presentations; the more visual it is, the better
- Share your presentations when they’re published; embed them in blog posts and guest posts. The more views you can get to your presentations the more likely they will go viral on top presentation sites.
- Submit your presentations to major presentation sites. An example site is Slideshare, a website that currently gets 60 million unique visitors monthly and around 3 billion presentation views.
3. Multimedia Marketing
Any form of multimedia content will rock this year; I’m referring to infographics, video content, podcasts etc.
As long as your content is multimedia and well-designed, you’ll get some great results. The reason for this is simple; people are more likely to engage with multimedia content than plain text. To prove this, a recent study from Alltwitter.com revealed that infographics can increase social media shares for your content by up to 832%. Also, having video in your content can help it rank better in the search engines.
4. Mobile Marketing
The number of people visiting sites through their mobile devices keeps increasing at a massive rate while very few sites are designed to cater to these people.
According to data from Google, 67% of people are more likely to buy from a mobile-friendly site than from a site that isn’t mobile friendly.
This year, mobile marketing will be more important – and effective – than ever; you should try experimenting with mobile ads, encouraging mobile sharing and creating viral campaigns aimed at mobile users.
Most importantly, targeting mobile users ensures you don’t lose the customers you’ve already attracted.
5. Apps Marketing
More smartphones are introduced every day and the demand for apps keep increasing; more importantly, people have quality apps with them on their mobile devices all the time, presenting you with an opportunity to reach them literally at all times.
Create quality apps that can go viral and then look for a way to link these apps to your website; when your apps become successful, not only will you benefit from the exposure but you’ll also be able to reach people who install your apps.
Ayodeji Onibalusi is a marketing professional that helps top businesses take charge by leveraging inbound marketing techniques. Check him out at Effective Inbound Marketing.
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