Building Your Online Business Profile
Marketing is crucial to the success or failure of any business, no matter which industry or sector. Without a steady stream of customers, just simply surviving can be a real challenge – particularly with the current economic climate. For those looking to thrive through the recession, it is essential to establish lead generation and sales processes that give you the most bang for your buck and provide your business with tangible long-term returns.
Working on the promotional side of your business – such as brand building exercises, direct response marketing, and streamlining your conversion funnel -can be a steep and expensive learning curve. But if you know what you need to do to get your voice heard, particularly online, you might immediately see the benefits of this type of marketing to your bottom line.
4 Ps of Marketing
On a theoretical level, marketing is often defined under 4 heads – known in certain circles as ‘the 4Ps’. These essential marketing elements usually need to be intermingled within an online framework to deliver a complete, return-driven, focused marketing campaign on an ongoing basis. But even with offline marketing, it’s important that the various elements of the marketing mix are given due consideration just to ensure that you’ve got all the bases covered.
So without further ado, let’s get down to the 4Ps on marketing theory and how you can integrate them within your business.
What exactly is SEO?
So just what do you know about SEO? When it comes to SEO are you a Novice, Intermediate or Expert? Regardless of your level, this article from a 10 year SEO war veteran may prove helpful.
First, you must understand that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization… which means you optimize your website and content so that it ranks high in the major search engines such as Google and Bing/Yahoo. This optimization can take the form of following a strict formula or layout of your website content with the proper meta tags, keyword density, linking structures and so on. It can also mean off-site optimization with link building, right anchor text, keyword positioning and so on.
The Importance of Search Engines for an Online Business
If your business has any sort of web presence on the internet, you should know how important search engines are to your overall success. Search engines have been relied upon to an enormous extent for finding information online. As a user types a search topic or is using google to search a website, the search engine sifts through millions of pages in order to present them with the most relevant websites. These results are ranked, based on the relevancy of those web pages.
Most users will only look at the first few results on the first page. Some will continue down that page and read the description of each website to see if it interests them, but very few will continue on to the second page of results. This means that if you are marketing your business online, it is extremely important to not only submit url on google search engine but to ensure show up on the first page for relevant search terms (known as keywords) when you get there. If your website isn’t on that first page, you may never be seen by potential visitors.
Keep in touch with your target market
Most of the real money in marketing is in effective follow up of prospects as opposed to capturing new clients. Any kind of email follow up that gives genuine value and makes an attempt to pre-educate prospects and post-educate clients is likely to be VERY effective. According to a recent study by DMA, the average return on investment (ROI) for email marketing was $40.56 for every dollar spent in 2011. This number is only expected to drop to $39.40 in 2012, when it will account for $67.8 billion in sales. Few other advertising mediums offer such a huge potential return.
