How to Make Business Successful Online in 2015?
Online advertising is becoming more popular than offline advertising. Every business is trying to become more dependent on online advertising rather than offline marketing. Business marketers are now investing more money in digital marketing. Earlier, marketers used to employ various form of advertising that includes print, outdoor, OOH, radio, TV etc. advertising to make brand awareness and generate enquiries. Recently I met my client who is a Vice President at reputed real estate agency in Mumbai. He was not aware of the impact of digital marketing so I explained him about various techniques of digital marketing. Offline advertising is costly and various marketing activities including printing promotional material, outdoor promotion through hoardings, Radio, OOH ads can cost around INR 50,000 per enquiry. One of my clients was surprised after seeing the significant difference in offline and online marketing. The reason is digital marketing can bring down the costs to Rs.1000 per enquiry is 49 times lesser than offline marketing. Add to that effectiveness of online marketing allowing reaching millions of people in an easy and effective. Thus, there is no doubt that Digital marketing is the most affordable and effective marketing technique available today.
Though it might appear simple to say that digital marketing is affordable and effective marketing technique, the truth is achieving success through online marketing is a tedious task; think of millions of entrepreneurs like you competing with each other to promote their products and services. The sheer numbers of competitors is only one factor that makes it hard to achieve success. Though, Internet is not governed by any country or organization, you have to still play by the rules in order to benefit. Any shortcut to achieve success and your website might be blacklisted from search engine results page.
Here are few facts that every marketer should know,
A research has proved that around 50% of the visitors come to the website through different mobile devices. Facebook has just declared that 70% of their advertising revenue comes from mobile devices. So your website has to be responsive and inquiry form should be placed at the right place so people have some queries regarding your product and services can directly contact you through inquiry form. Don’t make them search for ways to contact you else you will lose them.
Techniques to Make Business Successful Online:
- Website: A responsive website and a blog to post important content to keep the users updated is a must. You need to regularly post updates related to your business and encourage users to participate in discussion through comments. The navigation system should be pop-up free else the user is more likely to get irritated and leave the website with a bad impression and never return. An inquiry form should be placed where it can be easily found allowing the customer to feed in his contact number and address for further communication. The website should be SEO optimized in terms of content, meta tags, breadcrumb, images, URLs, navigation, videos etc.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): No online business can survive without search engine optimization. A website would never rank on search engines without SEO activities; in simple terms your website will not appear in first few search engine results page which means it will remain undiscovered most of the times. A website should be SEO optimized with Meta tags, URLs, Alt tags, Sitemaps, Content, and should have interesting and useful content and be error free etc. These things are essential in order to rank higher on search engine result page. Content marketing is a heart of SEO and you cannot think of search engine optimization without it. The inquiries generated through SEO activities i.e. organic activities is much better than social media marketing, Pay Per Click ads, display ads etc. Google makes changes in their algorithm every month. Recent changes were made for mobile websites. According to recent algorithm the organic ranking for desktop and mobile website is different; if it’s not a responsive website. This has lead to drastic changes in the way of digital marketing. So your website should be updated and upgraded regularly to rank higher on search engine result page (SERP) and survive forever. One of the biggest benefits of SEO is generation of quality leads with higher conversion rate. This is the primary reason for SEO being the most preferable and accepted activity in online advertising industry.
- Pay Per Click Advertising:
Pay per click advertising is a backbone of search engine marketing. Google search, Yahoo search and Bing search network and other ad network are used to run pay per click advertising campaigns. A bidding system is used in pay per click advertising; the advertiser who bids high for specific keywords gets first position on sponsored listing on search networks. An advertiser has to pay for every click it gets through sponsored ad listing on search network. You can generate many inquiries by running PPC ads. Business marketers run PPC ads to generate inquiries until SEO activities generate enough inquiries.
- Search Engine Marketing:
Search engine marketing i.e. SEM is one the important techniques of Digital Marketing. This technique is used generate inquiries and create brand awareness as it works on cost per click (CPC) and cost per thousand impressions (CPM) model. It creates brand awareness by providing billions of impressions on various sites like news, finance, education, sports, entertainment etc. Display advertising (banner and flash) is used for brand awareness. The leads generates through display ads are less in comparison to search network. Yahoo and Google display network is world’s leading display network in which millions of sites are registered. There are various Ad networks in the world e.g. Komli, Infolinks, Chitika, Ad Magnet etc. from where you can run display ads.
- Social Media Marketing:
Social media marketing is a best technique to create brand awareness. Social media advertising is a backbone of social media marketing. A business can be made successful by implementing social media marketing techniques. You can promote your business through Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, Vine, Instagram, and Behance etc. SEO of the website can’t work without social media activities. A business might get unsuccessful if you ignore aspect of social media. It would be right to say SEO and Social media are now dependent on each other. Facebook is world’s number one social media site and it provides similar ad format like Google Adwords. You can run banner, boost post, page likes, video view, remarketing campaigns on Facebook. Other social media sites like LinkedIn offers promoted post, promoted company and group advertising. LinkedIn is second expensive advertising platform after Twitter. Twitter is the most expensive ad platform where promoted tweets and hashtags are charged more than any other online ad network. Facebook ads are cheaper than any other ad network where you can promote your company page, posts, videos, landing pages etc.
- Email Marketing:
Email marketing is oldest but an important technique of digital marketing. Business marketers use this technique to generate new leads or attract customers. Email marketing performs better for ecommerce websites than service-based websites as ecommerce website contain thousands of products. Ecommerce marketers offer discount and offers and mail it to new or existing customers and generate sales. Most of the big ecommerce giant’s like eBay, Flipkart, Snapdeal, Jabong, Myntra etc use email marketing to remarket the new products to the customer. It also helps in service-based website but it should be done smartly. You need to update blog regularly on your website then you can email the same blog to existing users and subscribers which will help you to get some visitors to the website. You can connect with many influencers, bloggers, and experts through social profiles. You should email your latest blog posts to them and take feedback from them which help you improve content and attract visitors to the blog. There are several email marketing software’s in the market but I prefer to use Mailchimp.
- Content Marketing:
Content marketing is become more popular after Google Penguin update. Content marketing means promoting, distributing or sharing content online on social media, blog, article, PR, forums etc. sites. There are millions of users who want to read new things online and they are always in search for such information on search engines. We promote our content through such sites and get visitors to our site. Hyper linking some keywords in the content helps to improve organic ranking of the keywords. Search engines now prefer unique and new content that will attract new users. Content marketing has completely changed traditional SEO activities. Now SEO experts have to promote content in a smart way to improve web ranking in the search engine. SEO experts hunt for niche based websites for content marketing. There are various content marketing techniques that can be used e.g. guest blogging, forum marketing, blog commenting, article submissions, press release submissions, and sharing content on social media profiles. You can share your content on LinkedIn groups, Google+ communities, Yahoo Answers, Review Sites etc. It can be used to promote your brand and also generate quality backlinks that will help improve web ranking.
- Online Media Planning and Buying:
Online media planning and buying is affordable than traditional media planning. Online media planning is somewhat similar to search engine marketing. We run various types of ads on online media planning i.e. skinny ads, roadblock ads, expando banners, banner ads, interactive ads, flash ads etc. The advertising model used on online media sites is on daily basis or monthly based. They offer cost per click or cost per thousand impressions ads. We can research websites by using ComScore tool which helps us to find popularity of the niche based website. We can analyze the website by visitor’s age group, type, geo location, popularity in city or states, bounce rate, average time spent on the site etc. Online media planning and buying is primarily used for brand promotion. You can’t expect much leads from these campaigns as you do not have control on the type of visitors through these campaigns. If you are using Google and Yahoo display network, you can easily control the type of visitors to your website using filters based on interests and age-group.
In this article, I have explained about the all digital marketing techniques that can be used to promote business online. Businesses who have successfully implemented these techniques can be seen reaping benefits of online marketing. You need to understand all activities are essential for online marketing and generate enquiries at reasonable cost. Digital marketing is cheaper than traditional TV, Radio, Print, Outdoor, OOH advertising and now approached by small and medium enterprises worldwide. If you have any queries regarding online advertising, get in touch with me by commenting on the same blog.
