10 Secrets to Marketing Small Business Online

Fred Schebesta – Young Entrepreneur

Being online levels the playing field, as, big or small, everyone has the same chance to attract customers.

This makes online the best place for young entrepreneurs to promote their business! If you are smart and willing to learn, your online promotion can cost you nothing but your time and your internet connection, but deliver awesome results.

By following some basic principles, you can receive the same coverage as major players and see your business take off using savvy, affordable marketing.

1. Create a Website of course!

Without a web presence you don’t exist online. So the first and most obvious step is to create one! This need not cost anything though – you can get a really great template, like a WordPress template that will have you up on the web with a website for nothing. The Frank Team’s Young Entrepreneurs website is built on a WordPress template!

The key to keeping customers happy in the online environment is to design a website that is both aesthetically (the way it looks) and functionally (what it does) pleasing. When you’re designing your website, create a situation where every page drives a visitor to action and generates a sales lead for your business.

This could mean they SUBSCRIBE to something, or they DOWNLOAD something, or they COMMENT or they APPLY or event better they BUY NOW!

2. Convert Visitors to Leads

To turn your website from a passive, “brochure-ware” site that delivers a lot of information but doesn’t deliver results, you need to refocus your strategy from delivering free information and content, to providing relevant content that drives consumer action.

Supplying information is both necessary and helpful to readers and handy in raising your search engine rankings. Always ask yourself, “what is my call to action” – these can take the form of links to downloads, requesting consumer information, advertising, offers or promotions. At the very least, encourage users to make contact with you, either by phone or email.

Main aim: get their contact details some way. This means you will then be able to start to have an ongoing conversation with them, through your marketing and contact, to eventually get the action you desire from them (purchase, attending an event, signing a petition etc)

3. Build Trust & Credibility

Being open and transparent (they can see what you do, honest) is crucial to success in online marketing.

Prove you are a real, concrete, reliable business by including as many of the following as possible: clear contact details including a physical address and landline phone number, photos and images of employees, location and equipment, third party endorsements and verification of your authenticity including ‘approved’ stamps and/or testimonials.

These days everyone is worried about getting scammed on the internet. Show your visitors that you are totally legit!

Also, be sure to reply to all contact inquiries quickly.

4. Search Engine Leads

The first step to finding what you need on the internet is running a search on a company name, product name, service or activity.

Research (and experience) shows that high search engine rankings are a major predictor of online business success. After 30 results, users stop looking, so it’s vital you sit within this top percentile.

To optimise your business’ search engine ranking, use search engine optimisation (ie: using key words your customers would use to find you on your site as much as possible, so people find you when searching) and search engine marketing (you can pay to have your site link featured on the right hand side of search results pages or on other people’s websites)

5. Email Market/eDM

The power of online can be summed up by email marketing. This is all about sending emails to certain people that promotes your business, services or organisation.

It’s a cost-effective, efficient, traceable, relationship-building tool for regularly communicating with your existing and potential consumers. It can cost you nothing if done through your existing email system, otherwise you can use online software like Campaign Monitor that will charge you a very small fee per email, when you have large email marketing campaigns to send out.

Have you heard of the 80:20 rule in marketing? 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers. Email marketing is the easiest way to continue an ongoing, targeted dialogue/conversation with your peeps.

5 top secrets for Email Marketing Success are: regularity, short punchy content, calls to action, personalisation, and maintaining a clean list (a database that is made up of real email addresses of people actually interested in hearing about you and your business).

6. Affiliate Market

As well as buying listings in search engine results, you can buy or trade listings on relevant directories and/or cross-promotional websites. Reciprocal link-backs (where you ask someone to put the link for your website onto their website and you do the same for them) improve both websites’ natural search engine listings.

Swapping links with your business colleagues, friends websites and even perhaps with your customers will help you both when it comes to ranking in the search engines.

7. Partnerships & Links

As with affiliate marketing, the success of this tactic lies in increasing your exposure through both cross-promotion on related websites, and also through upping your search engine listing thanks to increased link-backs.

There are many avenues to increasing your presence, for free or at a low cost on related websites. Submit articles to other websites and free PR websites, submit sites to directories, buy links, buy partnerships e.g. Emailcash, List on Shopferret and price comparision websites.

8. Blogging

Running a business, you are clearly an expert in your field. Invite potential and current customers to share your expertise and get a taste of how your knowledge will positively impact them, by creating a blog.

Blogs create a community around those with common interests and become a tool for sharing and developing ideas. Their major advantage is creating an open, accessible channel to boost consumer involvement.

They can be used to encourage trials, conduct on-the-ground research, and develop ongoing customer relationships. Plus there’s stacks of software online to set up your blog – all for free!

9. Email Signature

Think about how many emails you send out each day, each week, each month. Now multiply that by the emails sent by your business partners, employees and/or subcontractors. Every one of those emails is an opportunity to market your business.

As well as including your standard contact details, and always, always your website URL; the smart online marketer also uses this opportunity to promote their latest offer, promotion, or release. Alternately it can be used to build your brand identity or value-add to consumers, and grow your relationships.

10. Track & Respond

Every web host keeps detailed statistics of activities occurring on your website; from the number of visitors, to downloads, where people landed and left the site, how long they stayed, to where they spent most of their time. Google Analytics is the most used.

Analyse this information and use it to continually improve your site’s performance based on this silent customer feedback.

The beauty of the Internet is that you can change your marketing and track its effects immediately. If something is working, stick with it. If not, change it again.

Going Forward

While you may not have the financial resources of the big guns, you do share access to the same technology: online. Use it to your advantage, and watch your small business grow!

This article was provided by Fred Schebesta, Director of Freestyle Media: a full-service online marketing agency based in Sydney, Australia. Want to hear more of what Fred’s got to say about online marketing? Check out his blog @ www.onlinemarketingsydney.com.au to sign up for FREE online marketing tips