People buy from businesses they know, trust, respect and believe they can work with. They choose products and services to help their own business in some way.
It might be to do with lowering costs, improving efficiencies, growing market share, maximising profit, etc. The results those businesses get must be greater than the cost and effort of buying and using the products or services.
The star-review culture has informed the business world under no uncertain terms that word-of-mouth advertising packs a real punch.
There are, in fact, few things more powerful than a recommendation from a trusted friend, colleague, or genuine blogger. If someone goes out of their way to recommend a brand or product to you without an affiliate link, you’re inclined to believe them, and so are your customers.
Email lists are essential for online businesses. It is a great way to stay in touch with your customers, without getting too pushy. Since most of your customers (and potential ones) have an email, it is a great way to reach them. They can open them whenever they get a chance.
You don’t have to worry about calling and interrupting them in the middle of dinner. Instead, they can open them when they have a few minutes.
For many businesses today, digital marketing is a key element of an overall marketing strategy, whether the business is working on a local or an international level.
The key to finding the right digital marketing elements to add to your overall marketing strategy will depend on:
No matter what your target audience looks like, you can still reach potential customers anywhere with these four digital marketing elements. (more…)
Yes, SEO is a necessary part of any business’s strategy if you want to rank in the search engine results page (SERPs). But there are certain SEO tactics that can actually harm your website and lower your ranking.
When you run a small business, you can get pretty caught up in its day-to-day functioning. You’re so involved in solving the problem you’re having right this minute that maybe you’re not spending that much time thinking about the future.
The basic idea behind content marketing is simple.
You create a piece of content that gets your audience’s attention, and sort of soft sells you, your brand, and your products to the audience. For example, if you ran an online storefront that sold gardening supplies, then running a blog full of tips and tricks for everything from vegetables to flowers would pull people in, and put them within easy buying range.
Every business wants to appear first in search results. However, very few businesses know how to do it. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a massive industry that is worth more than 80 billion, according to Forbes.
To get yourself to the first page for your target keyword, you need a good strategy that is flexible enough to incorporate changes in the future. If you are not getting the results you want, have a look at these costly SEO mistakes and see if you are committing them. (more…)
Any business could benefit from an email list. In fact, it is almost essential these days. You can stay in touch with your customers, on their terms. You won’t call and interrupt their dinner.
Instead, they will open your emails when they have a chance, even if it is when they are waiting to pick their children up from school. If they just skim through it, they can always return to it later when they have a few more minutes to devote to it.
If you own a small business, you know you need to meet your customers and prospective customers where they are. And increasingly, where they are is on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Instagram.
That’s especially true in Australia, where more than 60% of the population, about 18 million Aussies in total, are active monthly users on Facebook. The same number are on YouTube, with more than 9 million sharing photos on Instagram, and more than 5 million on both Twitter and LinkedIn.
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