3 Top Ways to Kickstart Your Online Marketing

Create a User-friendly and Engaging Website:

Most potential customers today are doing significant research online before making a purchase decision. Often, they’ve already made up their mind before they ever contact you directly. That’s why having a user-friendly, easy to navigate website is so vitally important. Your navigation should be simple and clean, with easy-to-understand titles. A robust about section and FAQs, as well as product listings and descriptions that are transparent and easy to find are also a must.

But it’s equally important to get viewers to interact and lead them to the products or information that you’re most interested in promoting. This is where eye-catching call-to-actions, assessments or quizzes, click-to-book buttons, chatbots, and featured articles come into play. The more time a viewer spends on your website, the easier it is to get their questions answered, and the more they engage with and consume the information you present, the more likely they are to make a purchase.

Finally, your website plays a key role in SEO performance, so it’s important to use SEO friendly structure and site-mapping, to use keywords properly, to utilize text headers, and optimize word count. You also want to ensure your web performance and site speed are top-notch and that your website is mobile friendly, since this is the most likely way people will visit your business these days.

Build and Connect through Email Marketing

Keeping in touch with your customers through email is one of the most effective online marketing steps you can take. This is a superior way to build your customer relationships and engage on a personal level with prospects at any time, in a way that’s convenient for everyone. Emails can be customized to individual subscribers through various omnichannel tools, so you can talk to them about what interests them specifically about your business and offer a personal connection that’s meaningful and engaging to them.

For instance, if a prospect has shown interest in a specific product on your website, you can target them through email with a special offer or send them more information about it. You can also broadcast giveaway promotions, freebies, and events to attract interest in specific services or engage followers with current news and relevant industry information about your business. This keeps them thinking about you even when they’re not in to shop and brings you first to mind when they suddenly find they need the product or service you happen to offer.

Optimize Your Local SEO and Digital Content

Your first step to optimizing local SEO is to claim your business listing with platforms such as Google, Yelp, and Bing and to optimize them. Each offer free listings that business owners can use to increase their online presence, improve their SEO (both generally and locally), and ensure their information is accurate in search results. This has become vitally important to any digital marketing strategy today since search browsers like Google have been focusing more and more on providing local search results as a priority. In fact, Google offers several features through Google My Business which will improve your online presence drastically, including content posts, click-to-call, booking options, and more directly from search results.

This leads to the second part of the equation – content. The more places your business is posting information, articles, and videos online, the higher your chances are of being found. SEO friendly content in multiple forms and in multiple places will all work together with your Google My Business listing and your search results to boost your SEO scores and increase your online presence.

You’ll want to create blogs, eBooks, brochures, datasheets, research papers, product features, news posts, and perhaps most importantly, videos. The more creative and engaging content you can create the better because people love it. Especially videos. Statistics have shown that consumers spend more time watching video than any other content form and are more likely to respond to video. Make sure you share this content not only in your website, but in your social media and your Google My Business and other browser listings.

This advice for kickstarting your business’s online marketing is all well and good, until it’s time to implement it. Now you have to find the time, the people, the resources to do it. This creates a time deficit for your other business operations, the expense of additional employees, the cost of whatever tools you must purchase to implement these strategies… and these are all the reasons that businesses continue to avoid having an effective online presence.

But there is an easy and cost-effective solution! You can outsource your marketing to a reputable agency who can take care of all of it for you -- and has the tools and expertise to ensure success. Outsourcing will not only save you time and optimize your results, but it’s significantly more cost effective than paying for an employee and providing them with all the benefits employees today expect. Not only that, but you save on the cost of various tools you’ll have to purchase to try and do it yourself.

Plus, the benefits of delegating your marketing tasks to experts are invaluable. You won’t have to worry if you’re taking the right steps, sharing the right ideas, reaching the right people… it’s all taken care of for you, so you can focus on managing your business.

Inline Marketing can provide all the services listed above, and more, saving you time (which equals money), the expense of additional employees, and the investment in various marketing tools. We have a proven track record of creating and implementing customized and all-encompassing digital marketing campaigns for businesses of all sizes. Contact us to discuss your needs and options and kickstart your online marketing today!