Small Business Marketing: 3 Must-Have Tips to Do More Business Online

Online small business marketing has changed. Gone are the days when websites were little more than static online brochures. Things have progressed at a pace, and are now much more dynamic and geared towards building a two-way relationship with customers or customers, rather than just providing one-way information. As such, there are a number of things to consider when developing websites to market small businesses online. So as a small business, whether you’re developing your site yourself or, more importantly, reporting to a design agency, here are three important things to keep in mind.

1 It may sound obvious, but for a website to be successful, its development needs to be part of an overall marketing strategy and geared towards the specific goals you want to achieve – they won’t increase sales or business overnight! ! If your main marketing goal is to get more business, it’s important to consider two key things. One, how best to create a platform that provides new and valuable information and support to existing customers to build and maintain good relationships and generate repeat business, and 2 how to attract new leads to your site and then convert them into repeat customers. pay.

2 Any worthwhile dynamic website or blog will require new and updated content, so it is important to agree on an ongoing plan for regular updating. Therefore, when marketing small businesses, it’s important to remember that they will often require a content management system (CMS) to do this, which they can frequently change and update internally. Yes, a small business website may still have some static pages with credentials, terms and conditions, etc., but the ability to update other pages, including dynamic elements like a blog to share your expertise, latest news about your niche , etc. is vital, and all will add value and build ongoing customer relationships.

In addition, the use of video and audio on websites and blogs is increasingly being used as people become more used to hearing, seeing, and listening to things in different, more dynamic media (for example, YouTube videos occupy more and more spaces number 1 and 2 in Google and others). search listings).

A key reason for a good CMS is that small businesses want the flexibility and control to make changes to their site, without the ongoing costs of an agency. There are several CMS packages available now, which have all the functionality a site needs built in, instead of having to build sites from scratch with html, coding, etc. Often a business will work with an agency to customize such a package to their brand in the first place, leaving them with the CMS to make the updates themselves.

3 Agencies will often include a price for submitting a website to the various search engines/directories to help it get listed in the search engines (i.e. being found on Google for example) and is known as search engine optimization (SEO). SEO can be an art unto itself, and submitting your site to search engines/directories is just one of the many things that go into an SEO strategy. There are other things small businesses need to do on a regular basis to appear and be found on Google and other search engines. The idea is that you would like to be number 1 on Google for a number of relevant search terms so that potential customers searching for those terms will find you.

There’s a lot more to consider with ongoing website development when marketing small businesses (and I haven’t even touched on all the new social media marketing stuff, think Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.), but these tips They should give small businesses a starting point to avoid the expense of going down the path of a static website, which likely won’t deliver what they expect and, more importantly, will need ongoing development. It is better to spend a little more time now on having a proper marketing strategy and profitable website development, so that you do not have unpleasant surprises and additional costs that you did not know about in the future.