~by Brooke Chaplan~
Starting a new business can be a fun and exciting adventure, but many new entrepreneurs only focus on creating their product or service. It does not matter how great your products are when you don’t have the proper advertising campaign in place. Not only do you need to provide a real solution to your customers’ problems, but you also need to get your message in front of the right audience. Although many advertising platforms exist, you must try several of them before you decide which ones are right for you, and the following information can help as you get started.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is a good place to start when your goal is to implement a new advertising campaign, and it’s not difficult. Create several social media accounts for your business and start posting valuable content before you try to attract attention. Once you have useful posts on your accounts, start running targeted ads so you can gain exposure.
Many people make the mistake of being overly promotional on social media, but doing so only causes them to lose followers. People turn to social media for entertainment and to connect with friends. Once you build trust, you can occasionally post promotional material, but always offer a special discount or bonus to your followers.
Use network marketing as part of your strategy as well. Sites like crunchbase.com help you connect with leaders in your industry, and you can see how they are successful. For example, if in healthcare, connecting with brands like ASEA can show you how they reach out and connect with others online to get their products like ASEA Redox out on the market.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Search engine optimization is another great way to drive targeted visitors to your content, but you must remember that you can’t expect to see results overnight. When you do it properly, SEO is a long-term process that will take effort, but persistence will help you reach your goal. Once your website or blog gets ranked on the search results page, you will start to enjoy a steady flow of organic traffic. The best way to achieve your desired outcome is to create high-quality content that your target audience will want to share. Engaging articles and blog posts will inspire people to link to your website and Google will start to view you in a positive light.
Pay-Per-Click Ads
When you need an effective method to promote yourself and your business, you can’t go wrong with pay-per-click ads. You will target keywords for which people are likely to search when they need an answer to a question or a solution to a problem. The people that you bring to your website will be that much more likely to buy if you target your keywords effectively. Pay-per-click ads can be run on several search engines, but Google’s network is the most popular. But before you get started, you must do some research to determine which search engine your target audience is most likely to use.
Email Marketing
No matter which marketing platform you choose, you will need to invest money and effort to get traffic to your website, so you want to make the most of each visitor. Unless you start collecting contact information, you will lose your visitors forever once they leave your content. But you can use email marketing to avoid that problem. To get the most from your efforts, encourage each person who comes to your website to enter their email address. When they do, you can repeatedly market to them without incurring extra advertising fees. And even if you lose money on the initial sale, you can still generate a profit by encouraging past customers to make additional purchases.
Each of these methods has the potential to help you take your business to the next level, but the results that you get will depend on your level of commitment. Marketers often invest a lot of money on their first paid campaign, but doing so can be a costly mistake that could cause them to go bankrupt. To determine the profitability of a marketing platform, run a small test before deciding if you want to move forward.
Meet the Author: Brooke Chaplan
Brooke Chaplan is a freelance writer and blogger. She lives and works out of her home in Los Lunas, New Mexico. She loves the outdoors and spends most her time hiking, biking and gardening.
Contact Brooke via Twitter @BrookeChaplan.
