Digital Marketing and Social Media

Does your business use digital marketing? You do if you email customers by mass eblast or e-newsletter. Do you use social media as part of your business strategy? In today’s business climate it’s critically important to communicate through a variety of channels. No longer is it enough to just have a website, email promotional coupons, or send out a monthly newsletter. In today’s digital world, companies have a growing list of (nearly free) tools that can help take their business to the next level.

Where are your customers?

Is Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook most popular with your customers/clients? Start by identifying the two social media channels where your customers are most active—just ask them—and then use those. Don’t spend valuable time posting to places your clients will never see. By understanding what’s important to them, you can tailor your marketing efforts to reach more of your target audience. And all of these are free tools!

Ask permission

Before adding any names/emails to your email distribution list, please be sure to first get permission to add the email address—it’s against the law if you do not. This can be done by asking people to opt-in their email at every event you host, or, if a new customer comes in, ask them if they’d like to add their email to your promotions list. This then gives you your permission to send them emails.

If someone clicks “unsubscribe” from your email list then you must remove them. There are many email marketing services out there like Constant Contact, Mailchimp and Emma that will automatically unsubscribe someone from your list when the subscriber requests it. These are great tools, and inexpensive!

Bottom line, if you let them know the benefits of subscribing, such as insider deals and free expert insight, they’re more likely to sign up and look forward to hearing from you.

Content Checks and Balances

A good rule of thumb for social media content is that that 80 percent of your posts should focus on industry tips or ideas, sharing from other pages, and joining the conversation (engaging with your fans). Use the remaining 20 percent to promote your business directly (offers, promotions, coupons, services, etc.).

So Now What?

Are people actually reading your emails? What links were most clicked in your recent eblast? Did you reply to a fans question or comment on your Facebook page? Did you jump into a Twitter conversation? The more you know what your customers/clients are talking about and clicking on, the more you will understand your audience and can tailor the messaging. This is VERY valuable information that if you track it and learn from it, the stronger your marketing results will be.

Bottom Line

Creating a sustainable digital marketing strategy is pretty simple—but you get what you put into it. It does take a lot of work and time to make it effective, and you have to be consistent. Avoid starting a weekly blog or newsletter if in reality you can’t maintain it.

Don’t start a Facebook page, build a good fan base, and then only post occasionally

once every few weeks. When simple marketing is done right—wow—you will be

amazed at what you get from something so simple.

With these tips in mind—get out there and make things happen!

-Carrie Rice, Director of Marketing and Communications for the Chamber of Commerce

of Huntsville/Madison County

How to Get Customers Online

 

Here are some tips that will help you to find more customers online:
Use social networks to join in conversations with great, valuable helpful content, assist them and be engaged.

Follow up with your clients. It’s where the magic begins. Millions of dollars are lost by businesses around the world each year simply because they fail to follow up with leads from networking events, social media, email, referrals, and more.

Prospects want to see their problem solved with multiple choices. Customers want to be reassured that they have found the right company by offering multiple options for them to engage at different price range.

It is crucial that you are able to communicate the core aspects of your business to a potential customer in one minute in a way that makes sense.

The truth is you don’t have to choose between different types of expensive advertisements like the newspaper, television etc.

The Proven Strategy to Attract More Customers to Your Business?

Local Business Listing

Claiming, adding, and validating your on-line business listing page in local classifieds will increase your business, draw new customers, and scale back your promoting prices while increasing your local business’ web visibility. By claiming your page, you can tell the search engines directly about your business by using your relevant, business-critical keywords and improve trust in your geo-location for better Local Search rankings. These business listing pages are often added to location-specific search results, giving your business listing more space on the search results page. Claiming, updating, and maintaining these business listing pages is easy and, in most cases, free.

Key Benefits

Submitting your local business to a local business directory has become very important since more and more internet users are now searching for products and services online and not making use of their telephone directories anymore. A good directory listing must contain the physical address of the business, contact numbers and the website URL if permitted in order to increase exposure of the business. This will enable directory users to find useful information from your listing to facilitate a contact with your business, without requiring additional information.

Local business directories allow users to easily locate businesses in their area; hence they have become very popular over the years. A useful local directory can provide the searchers with a list of individuals and businesses that offer a product or service they will be looking for within their area. This will minimize the amount of time users spend looking for businesses on the internet.

The biggest advantages of advertising your business in a local business directory are gaining plenty one-way links that will send highly relevant visitors to your website. These will improve the search engine rankings of your site in the result pages of search engines because search engines consider inbound links when ranking websites.

Since printed business directories lack frequent updates, individuals and businesses now prefer making use of internet directories to obtain information. The benefit is that if a business changes an address or telephone numbers for one reason or the other, they are able to update their listing in just a few clicks.

Having your business details listed in a local online business directory is a fast and cost-effective way to expose your business to thousands of internet users. This is because advertising in printed media has become expensive for an average individual or small business that is just starting up. This therefore means that a business will enjoy the benefits of getting free traffic and future customers from their business listing within the directory, for free.

In the event that existing or new customer loses your business contact details, they can make use of a local online business directory to quickly search for your business and be able to get all the information they need. This is more convenient that having to browse thousands of pages in a paper directory.

The benefits of advertising your business in a local business directory are therefore not limited to gaining exposure for your company but are expanded to obtaining quality back links to your site, a reasonable improvement in the search engine rankings and an easier way for your customers to locate your business. Therefore, never take for granted the benefits associated with submitting your business to a local business directory.

Online Advertising

Advertising has long played an important role in media. Traditional media, such as television, newspapers, magazines and radio, have historically derived a large portion of their revenue from advertising, and in some cases, all of it. Online media is no exception. While there are many possibilities for revenue generation in an interactive medium such as the World Wide Web (retail, subscription-based services, etc), advertising has been, and continues to be, a simple and well-understood method for monetizing content or services.

Why is advertising such a natural fit? To understand that, it helps to understand the basic wants and needs of the primary players involved in any web interaction. In this case, those players are the publisher (or service provider), the user, and, assuming an advertising-based model, the advertiser.

The Advertiser

Online advertisers, just like offline advertisers, are businesses that need to communicate a message. Whether the message is intended to increase general brand awareness or to simply inform potential customers that your business provides the product or service they need, the basic need is the same.

Advertising

Advertising is so widely used because it satisfies all of these needs. The publisher gets the revenue needed to cover development and maintenance costs. The user gets value (they get to view content or use applications) for a reasonable price (they simply need to view the advertisements). The advertiser is able to communicate their message to the intended audience. Assuming each party acts responsibly and holds up their side of the implied contract, the system works, and is sustainable.

The system does need all three to be successful, though. If any one falls through, the system falls apart. If advertisers don’t purchase advertisements, the publisher can’t sustain development. If publishers don’t make meaningful content available, users have no reason to visit, and there is no traffic, and thus nothing for advertisers to buy. If users refuse to view advertisements, the advertisers get no value in exchange for their purchases, and will thus not continue buying.

All of these issues apply equally to offline advertisers as well as online. In fact, in many ways, the world wide web is just a new media channel, providing many of the same services as television, radio, and printed media. Assuming the market is there on all sides (publisher, user, advertiser), the system can be just as successful as it is in traditional media.

There are, of course, many other methods that publishers can monetize their content and services, such as via paid subscriptions, retail, and so on. However, these methods are outside the scope of this paper, and thus won’t be discussed in depth.