Entrepreneurs and business owners have never faced a crisis like the 2020 pandemic. The Covid-19 pandemic has made an impact on everyone’s lives and businesses across the world are struggling to stay afloat. But we see no setbacks in the field of online marketing, as we see progressive updates every passing day.
How much budget to allocate for marketing strategies depends on the scale of the business. Business funding can help entrepreneurs tackle some of the financial problems at an early stage. There are still numerous investors searching for an opportunity to earn a return, it’s all highly influenced in your search for how to pitch your business idea.
In the current digital era, small business owners and women entrepreneurs must understand that to survive they have to be familiar with the tactics of marketing their product online. Here are a few steps by step tips to help you while marketing online.
Defining Your Customers
Marketing strategies may be a complete waste if you don’t know who your customers are. An easy way to define your customers is by answering the simple question “what solution is your product or service offering for potential customer’s problem?”.
Creating a buyer’s persona is the initial step for all no matter how triumphant the business is. A buyer persona is a fictional or imaginary character that represents a business’s potential customers, based on what you know about customer’s behaviors, and customer acquisition.
A bonus tip for a small business owner is to create a negative persona. Often well-known entrepreneurs and business owners underestimate the importance of a negative persona. A negative persona is opposite to a buyer’s persona. It defines who aren’t your customers, saving your valuable time and some amount of effort in marketing strategy.
The Center of All Marketing Activity = Your Website
The easiest way to be found online is through your website. Building a website always doesn’t necessarily mean developing a website through complex coding. Women starting a business at home can learn to build a site on WordPress. WordPress is a free and open-source content management system with various templates used for building a website. But after figuring out the budget and scale of the business, owners might need to consider the option of hiring professional web developers.
Web developers have extra knowledge and experience in dealing with SEO(Search Engine Optimization) and converting landing pages.
The Role of Social Media Platforms
People of various age groups are scrolling through social media pages like never before. As the lockdown and self-quarantine force people to stay at home we see an increase in their browsing time on different social media. Social media is one of the most evolving, and coping with the latest trends marketing strategy.
Often underestimated and disparate way of marketing products on social media is through humorous content commonly known as memes! Large scale businesses have adequate teams of graphic designing and content creation for social media. But at the initial stage of business, you can promote your products on social media by learning basic skills of photoshop and content creation like writing blogs and using creative hashtags. You need to find a perfect fit for your business as there are countless numbers of social networking sites, as all of them have unique characteristics and features.
Explore Retargeting Methods
- Email Marketing – The evergreen part of online marketing is email marketing. A vital step in email marketing is to build an email list. But small business owners might face problems building an email list at the initial stage as customers are less in number. So an efficient way to deal with such problems is to make the most out of your home page or landing page. Simply set-up home page to collect email IDs by adding pop-up form filling before providing access to complete content or for any premium tools.
Imagine a user browsing through your website and submits her email address but ends up without converting into your customer. You can always retarget her via an email by providing discount coupon codes and giving a link to products/services of her interest!
- Display Advertisements – The most significant way of targeting your potential customers is through display ads. A classic online display ad consists of various virtually attractive elements like images, texts, logos, and a button directing either to the landing page or to a relevant converting page. We all have visited a shopping site and shown some interest in certain products but left without buying so how often do you see display ads on your smartphone or desktop related to those products!
Many social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Reddit have their display ads campaign section but the most widely used platform by brands is Google Adwords. Display advertisements will expand the business awareness around potential customers and will increase the traffic of your website.
The Last Phase of Analysis
All of your marketing strategies like email marketing, social media, conversion rates of a website, and display ads require analysis at appropriate intervals of time. There are many analytical tools available in the market but as suggested by experts Google Analytics is the free tool to start with. Google Analytics can be linked with your website and show the number of visitors or conversion rates. It also tracks the traffic coming to your site from social media platforms, paid campaigns, or from links clicked in email messages. This way you can see which online marketing strategies were the most successful over a period of time.
Google Analytics will help you to analyze, measure, and manage your online marketing efforts.
Conclusion
You have to remember that all large-scale businesses have started right from scratch just like you! So patience is the key, all the marketing strategies mentioned may not have an immediate effect on your business as those are more of long-term type strategies.
It is safe to say that 2020 is the most crucial time for your business to be visible in the trendy digital era.
About the Author
Mark Burke is a blogger and a business consultant in Alcor, a global investment bank. Mark is passionate about researching on the latest small business and start-up trends. He loves writing informative blog posts to help small business owners and startup founders in their entrepreneurial journey.
