Many business owners and managers accept that online marketing will help their business but they lack the skills to know how to go about internet marketing. Here are some tips to help you on your way to online marketing success.
Your Landing Page
As one might assume, the most important page of your website is your homepage. Your homepage is also called the landing page as this is the page that users land on when they first arrive at your site. The key purpose of the landing page is to sell your business and entice users to explore further into your site.
A key beginners mistake is to try and cram as much information on the landing page as possible. This is a bad idea because it can make your page look messy and unorganised. The overload of data can confuse or frustrate users and cause them to leave your site. The landing page should give the users the flavour of your site and contain as little content as possible without seeming sparse. You could put several articles that have a “Read more” section that draws the user further into your site.
Your navigation bar at the top of your website should have clear separate categories. For example, if you are a plumber you won’t want to have “Apartments” and “Houses” as two separate categories. You will want to have “Residential” as one category. Once the user reached residential, they can move further into the site to find the specific services for apartments or houses.
Website Content
It is important that the content on your site is original. Not only will users spot blatantly unoriginal content, but Google will punish you for copy and pasting content from other websites. Your content also needs to be relevant to your business. This is so users won’t be confused and also so you can focus on some keywords to help your rank in Google. Trying to cheat on good content will often be a waste of time, so if you don’t have anything original to say, it’s better not to say it at all
Social Media
Social media is growing as a tool for growing community awareness of your business. As with a website, you can’t just create a social media page for your business and expect people to subscribe to you. It’s not that easy. You will need to offer people an incentive to want to like your page, even if that incentive is just that you went to high school with them.
As with a website, you will need to maintain your social media page with fresh information. You could link new content from your webpage to your twitter or facebook pages. Also make sure you answer any enquires people have on your page.
Monitor Whether Your Efforts are Paying off.
There are various tools you can look into to monitor whether or not your online marketing campaign is working. There are sites such as Zopim.com or Google Analytics that you can use to monitor the traffic to your site. There are numerous tools such as TwentyFeet that inform you of your standing on Twitter and Facebook. Always remember to ask new customers where they heard about you. Keep in mind that more traffic to your site doesn’t necessarily translate to sales. It might be that your site ranks well in Google but customers are put off by your site or the services you offer on the site. If you are getting a lot of traffic and not much business, consider where your site might be going wrong and implement a new strategy.