Do you want to improve your online and offline marketing? If you are a small business then you probably have a limited budget for your marketing. There is wide range of marketing techniques which can help grow your business. The techniques that you choose may depend on the type of business you run. For online marketing you may choose to invest some of your marketing budget into SEO (search engine optimisation) which can help you climb the rankings for popular search engines such as Google or Yahoo. SEO should be a long-term strategy and should be used alongside other marketing techniques such as PPC (pay per click), e-mail marketing and content marketing. This article is a good example of content marketing as I have posted this article on various social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and LinkedIn. The goal of content marketing is to drive traffic to your website which may not always be paying customers but increasing your traffic is a good signal for search engines and can help increase your business SEO Rankings. Social Media should play an important part in your overall marketing strategies. In most cases social media websites are free to use but posting content as a sales pitch will not normally work, so the best idea is to share informative content to help drive traffic to your website, or even set up a competition to help generate more followers. If you can drive the traffic to your website and then get those visitors to subscribe to your newsletter then you have an effective way to remarket your business services on a monthly or even weekly basis. Why not sign up for Mail-Chimp which allows you to send newsletters for up to 2000 subscribers for free!
You may also invest some of your marketing budget into off-line marketing. This may involve creating printed marketing content which you can distribute via post or when you attend networking or business events. You may also choose to invest some of your marketing budget into tradeshows, you do not need to necessarily set up a stall at the trade event you can take advantage of their tradeshow magazine distribution and advertise your business to potential customers, just make sure your advertising is catching and your offers great deals. There are many other methods of off-line marketing but in general at DCP we tend to use online marketing as we find it more cost-effective. For example we like to use YouTube to share our knowledge and skills. As you may be aware, YouTube is free to use and can be a great way to get a low-cost marketing solution for your business. It's really simple, why don't you create some videos which help other people on a specific subject area? Creating helpful videos can help boost traffic to your website. A good example is when we created a bookkeeping series of video tutorials we saw a huge surge in traffic to our website, at present have been viewed more than 190000 times in total! Sharing your expertise is a great way to show potential customers that you have knowledge in your chosen field.
For more useful ideas take a look at the info graphic below.
(Click to enlarge infographic)
