You’ve been promoting your business wrong — Cloudrovia

Yes, you are missing out on customers. Follow the checklist below & you will gain more customers than you know what to do with.

So, you’ve launched your business & you’ve tried a few ways to market it to no avail. You’ve had a little bit of traction but you’re still waiting for the wave of traffic to arrive. No problem. Read the checklist below to make sure you’re covering all bases of internet marketing. If you’ve done a few, thats a solid start but its going to take a bit more to open up the floodgates. Let us show you how to tighten up your marketing plan & usher in a never-ending tsunami of site visitors.

1. Social Media

Getting on social media is a no-brainer in 2021, its a given. It’s a great way to direct eyes back to your site & to interact with potential customers. It’s important you choose the correct platforms for your type of business, joining every single one will be a waste of your time, so do your research into what works for your industry. It will 1 or a combination of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Linkedin, TikTok, Snapchat etc. It really depends on exactly what your business does. I’m going to suggest that you choose your best two platforms as you are going to be investing a helluva lot of time into them!

Automation: you are going to want to get to grips with the most popular automation platforms. ( Buffer & Hootsuite) It helps to work a week or so ahead. Or you might be on holiday, it will make your job much easier. Most people use these platforms to avoid long gaps in their pages’ activity. Because thats not a good look!

Another way to stand out on social media is to create truly eye catching content. Headline wording, graphic design and top-quality images. Research what easy-to-use tools are available to you.

2. Email Marketing

Creating a mailing list is a great way of getting direct access to your customers. People who sign up are genuinely interested in your products, so email marketing has a great sales conversion rate. Creating the campaigns is pretty easy, even if you’ve never done it before. I’d suggest making them yourself if you’re just starting out, if your mailing list is greater than 1000 address, subscribe to a service like Mailchimp or GMass of you’re more advanced. A platform like Mailchimp will allow you to manage your email marketing on-the-go. It’s easy to use, comes with hundreds of themes, fonts & social media linking. It’s basically the Weebly of email marketing.

Rule number 1 is don’t spam your customers. Make sure you are sending top quality sales content with real offers. If you’re not providing real value, don’t hit send. Every email is an opportunity to sell, make use of it. A simple way to see how good your campaigns are is view how many people unsubscribe after opening your mailshots. If that number is double digit %….it’s time to rethink your strategy. If you can’t see those kind of stats, upgrade your email marketing suite ASAP.

3. Paid Social Ads

Now, its no secret that social media is completely saturated in every ‘niche’. Its the most effective free marketing tool, so you’ve got to expect it. A great way to get a headstart on the competition is to engage in paid social ads. All major platforms offer the tools to promote your content but Facebook rules the roost in terms of targeting a specific market. You can reach 100,000 specific users for less than a couple hundred dollars. Give it a try but ALWAYS make sure you are reviewing the analytics. Don’t neglect the performance indicators of your adverts, thats how you get better at targeting.

Ideas for using social media paid ads

Choose the perfect platform — It’s most likely to be Facebook/Instagram. Think of which platform your audience uses the most.

Set your budget — Imperative that you set a budget early on, don’t break the bank! You’d be surprised how many sales you can make from a small investment, provided your target market is as specific as you can make it!

Make clear objectives — What are you trying to achieve? Likes? Clicks? Site Visits? Sales? Conversion? Develop your ad around what you are trying to get from it. Don’t start blindly, take this seriously or risk pouring your money down the drain. Plan, don’t hit & hope. If your objective is sales, make sure the pathway from viewing the ad to buying the products is less than 5-clicks long. Stuff like that. Don’t waste your potential customers time. Get to the point.

4. Pay-per-click Ads

If you run a business where the target market aren’t the type to be surfing around on social media all day, your going to need to get into Google Ads. This tends to hit a much wider, older (on average) market. You can market locally and globally. Your adverts have a range of application from text to images and videos. Budget will be very important for this type of marketing. The great part is that you ONLY pay for the clicks your advertisement gets.

5. SEO

This is the lowest cost, highest return option. You invest nothing but time. Your rewards will take 3–6 months to begin showing themselves. Over a few years the return will be colossal if the methods are implemented correctly.

To allow your business to show up in search results, you use a method called Search Engine Optimisation, don’t be put off by the long name. Make sure your business address is registered with the two biggest search engines Google & Bing. Click those links and make profiles on both to show your business premises to internet searchers in the Maps feature. Make sure you interact with your customers, gain reviews & respond politely to critics. The world is watching!

You can also follow an SEO blog to learn more about to every-changing art form of search. Everything you can learn about SEO will help you long term. Stick at it, this really is the longest paying, longest lasting form of internet marketing.

6. Influencer Marketing

As you know, influencers are those people with obscenely large followings on various social media platforms. Find one relevant to your specific niche and reach out to them. The idea is you pay them to post or story about your products, showing you to their audience. Review, freebies, discount codes. You get it, you’ve seen what they promote, well it works so join the queue!

A quick way to find influencers to match your needs is use Ninja or BuzzSumo. Twitter is a sneaky backdoor to find influencers, just search the relevant hashtags & see who’s profile gets the most engagements.

Build a rapport or offer bucks. Don’t be surprised if someone with 1m+ followers asks for a crazy amount of money. Go lower down the influencer chain. To lower your costs, get noticed by them first. Comment, share their content, take a genuine interest in them before asking for a repost. Feel them out and see what works, you’ll win some lose some. Don’t be disheartened if it doesn’t work out, Influencers are like influenzas… another one is always guaranteed … (ok too soon).

Ideas for influencer marketing

Start with micro-influencers — Although they don’t have the huge outreach, their followers are normally more engaged than that of these massive super influenzas, I mean, influencers. (ok I’ll stop) They will come with a much smaller price tag, sometimes just a little discount will be all it takes. Try the big influencer approach with small accounts, you’ll be amazed at how flattered people become by a business liking or commenting on their posts.

Make your customers into influencers — When customers order from you, take their social media usernames. Create an engagement, offer a discount for posting your product. Reviews on services like TrustPilot will go a long way for future business.

Guest blog — A couple posts here and there are great but if you want long term growth, you need long term attention. Try guest posting on a influencers blog (easy said than done).

Okay, there you go, the 6 key parts of internet marketing in 2021. Are you covering all the bases?

Originally published at https://cloudrovia.com.