How Internet Marketing Can Grow Your Business

With the pressure of establishing a company’s online presence, many business owners hesitate to create or increase an online marketing budget. “Let’s see how the site plays out,” is a phrase that we hear at Online Potential quite often. But a website isn’t going to grow your business without some help from marketing and advertising. Internet marketing is different from traditional marketing, and you may find that it’s easier to track how well your online campaigns are doing than radio, TV and print marketing.

When it comes to traditional marketing techniques, there’s a lot of waiting involved, and you may never have an accurate count of how many people your message reached, how many purchases were spurred by your advertising, or any real specifics about your consumers’ identities or behaviors. How can you measure what age group prefers a billboard, or which level of income your consumers fall under when they hear a radio ad? But with the Internet, you can measure how many people visit your site or ad, which clicks lead to conversions and sales, and a lot of consumer behaviors that are impossible to track through any other form of advertising media.

Internet Marketing Advantages

After your website goes live, how do you plan to attract visitors to your site? Do you have a strategy for ranking well on search engine organic search results? An Internet marketing strategy can increase site traffic, improve online reputation, increase brand awareness, and define a target audience that excludes people who are not likely to purchase. By fine-tuning your marketing campaign, you can increase sales and conversions, which will lead to growing your business.

There are a lot of ways to increase the site traffic of your website. Search engine optimization (SEO), content creation and social media marketing are just three of the most common tactics used by inbound marketing companies and their clients.

SEO

SEO is a technique that optimizes a web page’s content for a search engine’s algorithms in order to rank at a higher position in search engine result pages (SERPs). SEO develops content for humans and search engines alike so that when a page is crawled by a search engine bot, the content can be indexed correctly. Then, when a search query is conducted, the web page has a better chance to be recommended by a search engine in one of the top spots based on relevancy, quality of content and credibility of the website. There are other factors that are considered in search engine rankings, but if you focus on these three, your website will improve in overall quality.

Content Creation

Content is what drives traffic to websites, and it can be the determining factor between a great website and a crummy site. Internet users expect a level of professionalism, readability and relevancy to a web page’s content, so providing poor or “thin” content (text that doesn’t say anything or provide real information) won’t gain you any favor. By providing well-written content on your websites, business blogs, and online press releases, you can improve your rankings on SERPs while providing a service to your consumers. This sets the basis for brand loyalty and building a better online reputation. Quality content can also drive traffic to your site and encourage purchases.

Social Media Marketing

For all the talk about the love-hate relationship society has with social media (oversharing and about a billion pictures of our food), the user-oriented sharing sites won’t be going away anytime soon. Companies have taken advantage of social media sites to connect and interact with consumers, sharing information and hosting promotions and giveaways. Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and LinkedIn can spread awareness of your brand and help you build loyalty with your existing consumers. And you can point your followers to your website from your social media profile to drive traffic and encourage sales.

ECommerce Marketing

Television commercials can cost quite a bit, especially if you want a slice of prime time, such as the Super Bowl. But with the rising number of consumers cutting their cable cords and opting to watch streaming videos or downloadable content, your top dollars may be going to waste. It seems that radio doesn’t offer much of a solution with the popularity of streaming radios and XM satellite radio. So what’s left? Billboards and print adverts in magazines and newspapers. The print industry has been whittling down during the last decade and is expected to continue downsizing in larger markets where the digital presentation of information is preferred. The best thing you can do for your company is to create an Internet marketing campaign.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and marketing lets you see exactly where you money is going. Like the name suggests, you pay for each click your advert receives. There are a lot of variables in PPC marketing, but you can target your existing consumers as well as potential consumers so that you only pay for people who are most likely to convert or buy. Other resources like landing pages and conversion website designs are created with conversion goals in mind, so they optimized for your eCommerce business.

Web-based Tools

There are a lot of web-based tools to help you monitor your online marketing campaign, track user behaviors, compile data on your websites, and analyze the data to implement best practices and changes that are guaranteed to provide results. Google Analytics can monitor site behaviors and provide the data you need to make changes or rethink strategies. And Google Webmaster Tools will help you website stay on the right path with alerts for spamming or malicious code.

Other web-based tools can help you keep your site looking fresh and running smoothly. Content management systems (CMS) are web-based applications that let you update your website in real time, schedule content publishing, and perform many of the recommended maintenance to your website. Business owners who are tech savvy can often perform these actions on their own, but many prefer to trust an inbound marketing company to handle site maintenance for a streamlined marketing campaign.

Trust an Inbound Marketing Company

You can find all of these services offered at an inbound marketing company. Online Potential uses only the best SEO tactics, design schemes, and analytical and development tools so help you create, implement, analyze, update and maintain your website and your Internet marketing campaign. Online, like in most other marketing platforms, you only get what you pay for, so don’t let your online business falter due to non-existent or inefficient marketing. Choose Online Potential and watch your business grow.