1. Take Advantage of Free Marketing Tools
The Internet is full of free marketing tools from email marketing campaigns to designing perfect social media graphics. While it may take a bit of effort to find tools that work best for you, the end result is a far more streamlined system. Let’s say you want to publish a post on your Twitter, Facebook and accounts for the business. Instead of going to each one of these, which is time-consuming, you can use free tools like Buffer and simultaneously share the post with all three. In fact, there are a number of social media marketing tools you can start using right now to boost your business. While some may have a monthly subscription fee, many will have free or trial versions you can test out immediately. If you have a website on WordPress, there are thousands of plugins you can choose from to grow your business in 2020. For example, you can check out Hub Spot's free WordPress Plugin that offers a rich set of tools to boost your sales and marketing performance: CRM, forms, email marketing and more. If you don’t have your business listed in Google, you’re missing out. Because of how local searches operate on the search engine today, people in your area may never see your business listed in the results page. One of the first things you should do right now is use Google My Business. It’s a free platform rich with data while making sure your local customers know where your store is located. The Internet is full of free marketing tools from email marketing campaigns, like Hub Spot's Free Email Marketing, to designing perfect social media graphics. While it may take a bit of effort to find tools that work best for you, the end result is a far more streamlined system. While you may receive more benefits from certain marketing tools by paying for premium service, sometimes the free versions are all you need. The point is you need to push the limits of these free tools to benefit.
2. Be Mobile-Friendly
Everyone needs to have a mobile-friendly website today. More than 54% of people browsing the Internet are doing so from smartphones and tablets. If your site isn’t responsive or has a mobile variant, you may alienate more than half of your consumers. Being mobile-friendly includes a variety of adjustments to the website. No Flash video: Most mobile devices do not work well with Flash. Optimized images: Rendering graphics takes bandwidth and time. Always use the correct sizes for your site. Trappable elements: Text links are often too small for thumbs. Use larger buttons that are easy to touch or click. Easy navigation: Don’t overfill the navigation menu. If it fills the screen of a smartphone, it often appears overwhelming. Easy Functionality: Visitors should be able to easily manage the site from a 3-inch screen. Some aspects of being mobile-friendly do not require a monetary investment. Things such as modifying images to fit, redesigning the menu bar and more can be done easily by yourself. In fact, using systems like WordPress hosting already does most of that for you. It’s already mobile responsive without making adjustments. An easy way to get an idea of what your site looks like on a mobile device is to shrink your computer’s web browser. By adjusting its height and width on your screen, you can get an idea of what people see when looking at your web pages.
3. Deliver High-Quality Content
Creating high-quality content is important whether it’s a company blog or a product description. It’s all about engaging the audience and giving them what they need: information. This information needs to be delivered in a way that keeps readers connected. Avoiding text blocks, separating points with headers and keeping the language easy to absorb is only the beginning. Another important aspect of content to keep in mind is remaining factual. Always base your material on evidence you can collaborate with other sources. As we live in an age where “fake news” is tossed around frequently, you want to make sure your business is seen as a legitimate source. In other words, you want your company to be viewed as an authoritative figure. Authority works to improve brand reputation as well as search engine ranking. High-quality content also involves other elements outside of text as well. While content is and always will be king, the delivery of that information is greatly important.
Site Speed As many as 53% of people on mobile devices give up on a site that takes more than three seconds to load. This means the site as a whole needs to be optimized for speed. If you use platforms like WordPress, you have access to a variety of tools to improve the performance of your website. Design Layout More than one-third of visitors will leave a site if the layout is poor. Color choices, graphics and even the overall layout of the site’s functions can cause issues for certain users. You need to deliver a good visual and functional experience for everyone visiting the website.
Avoid Fluffing Don’t try too hard to achieve a certain word count. This often leads to what’s known as, “fluff.” It’s content within an article that doesn’t seem to have a purpose other than stretching out how many words are on a web page. It can confuse your readers as well as search engine bots for optimization.
4. Diversify Your Operation
Growing a business often involves diversifying the operation. There’s nothing wrong with including elements that will help you draw in a larger crowd or benefit from existing traffic. Being diverse with your business grows income while keeping the company protected from market shifts. Like the adage goes, “Never put all of your eggs in one basket.” Keep the business flexible and easy to adapt to trends and changes. Here are a few points of what I’m talking about.
5. Focus On Your Target AudienceFocus the business on your particular audience. The more you streamline content, products and services, the higher the quality of your visitors. This means you’ll target those who are most likely to spend money with your business. For example, you wouldn’t want to create guest blog posts on a website that centers around lawn care products if you sell kitchen appliances. Any marketing you do needs to stay relevant to what you offer. The target audience will influence everything from the type of content you create to the brands of products you stock. This is a key element you’ll need to discover if you want the best chances of success. One mistake a lot of new businesses make is trying to target “everyone.” This often leads to a haphazard marketing strategy and winds up being overly expensive in the long run. Keep your focus on those who are going to directly benefit from the business. Later on, when you’re ready to pump money into ads, knowing your audience is going to save you a lot of money. Instead of showing ads to anyone, you can fine-tune them to show only to those people who will most likely make a purchase. If you’re unsure who your target market is, take a look at free tools like Google Analytics. By going over the activity data of your website, you can get an idea of who likes what when it comes to your business. Many eCommerce platforms come with a variant of this tools as well. Another good way to scope your potential buyers is to take a look at your direct competition. How do they have their content set up? What seems to be working well for them? Answer these questions and make your site better.
6. Integrate Social Media
One of the beautiful things about social media is how effective it is without actually spending money. It’s free to create a profile on most platforms and can easily put the business in front of thousands of potential consumers. However, it’s not enough to simply have a Facebook or Twitter profile. You can’t just put up a business page and hope people flock to it. You have to be a part of the premise behind the idea: being social.
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