As a business owner, you need to make sure your website is doing what it’s supposed to be doing: helping your business grow. Whether you use it to make sales or as an information portal, improving performance and increasing users should be your number one goal.
Not sure how to make that happen? Let’s take a look at the following 7 smart marketing tips that you can use to improve your business website’s overall online performance and reach.
1. Use the word free often.
Believe it or not, giving your product or services away for free can actually help you make more money. Everyone loves a good freebie, so giving away trials, product, or samples could lead more people to visit your site and sign up – an excellent opportunity to cross market to them.
Examples of freebies you may give away include:
- Trial versions of your applications
- Limited-time free service
- Buy one, get one promos
- Discounts or freebies after spending a certain amount
Get creative and try to come up with attractive offers that your visitors will not be able to refuse. Market your promotions on your site, your blog, your email newsletters, your social media and more, and you’re sure to see an increase in site traffic. If your products are worth it – that is! No one wants low-quality or ineffective products, even if they’re free, so be sure you have a solid product to back your solid offer.
2. Create a podcast.
While blogging is still a huge digital marketing opportunity, the younger generation is increasingly embracing podcasts as an alternative. It’s an easier way to communicate and helps brands strongly build their brand reputations, offering authentic and useful information in a fun and interactive way.
3. Offer some help.
How do you offer your clients help? This varies from industry to industry, but there are tons of tools you can use to offer a helping hand. Start a newsletter that touches on some common issues they may be having with your products or services. Connect users to customer service via live chats or a customer service portal on social media. Provide expert advice and hacks to pique your audiences’ interests. Create information how-to videos on YouTube or publish Q&As. The opportunities are endless.
4. Support a cause.
Create buzz by supporting a cause relevant to your users’ interests. Dedicate a page or area on your site to this cause, donate a portion of your proceeds or raise funds, or even volunteer time or create an event to support the cause. Your audience will have positive associations with your brand and you’ll be doing something to enhance the world. What could be better?
Plus, this will put you in front of entirely new users who may not have heard of your brand, but who are dedicated to the cause.
5. Embrace offline marketing.
Although you’re looking to promote your online presence, it doesn’t mean that can’t be done offline. A good way to meet the actual people who hold a stake in your industry – from raw material suppliers to consumers – is to create an event of your own that will ensure across-the-board interaction.
Although organizing an offline event might seem like a daunting task, especially for an online business owner, you can find great online resources on how to do it or you can alternatively hire a professional service to help you plan and organize.
6. Seek endorsements and sponsorships.
A great way of increasing your visibility is to ride on the coattails of the bigger players in your field. You can either have your ads displayed on their website or convince them to place their ads on yours.
When visitors see your relationship with a well-established company, their trust in you will increase accordingly. In a time when everyone is wary about doing business on the internet, having the backing of big corporations will help you go a long way.
7. Team up with the big boys.
Apart from seeking endorsements and sponsorships, you should aim to create co-branded products or services. Needless to say, the companies you choose should not be in competition with you. The idea here is to create a mutually branded product, with one of you handling the technical aspects of building the product and the other offering their marketing strategy and a wider client base as a marketplace. In short, find and grow a symbiotic relationship.
Think out of the box
With these 7 smart marketing techniques under your belt, you are guaranteed to see a rise in the number of visitors arriving on your website, as well as direct sales. Don’t worry about applying every single tip at once – that can seem like an impossible task for a small company with lots going on. Instead, start with one tip and see how far you can take your marketing. As your revenue grows, so will your team, and you can start launching more marketing tactics when the time is right.
