Examples of online marketing for small business

Online marketing in the past few years has grown a lot. The main advantage of nowadays online marketing is that it gives you the opportunity to advertise on vast platforms which can reach millions of people on different places. The biggest problem tho is how to choose the best way to market your brand when you are small business owner or even mid-sized business owner depending on your budget which will be limited, although it is a free way to advertise it can be difficult compared with traditional marketing and digital advertising which can be expensive.

To find which is the best platform for your business need we will take a look at the best networks chosen by the majority of small business owners and marketers for their campaigns.

Blogging – Blogging and maintaining a corporate blog on your site is still one of the best way to establish, strong connection with your prospects and auditory. Providing them with a quality content that they will benefit from and they will also be engaged to share it and use it with no commercial purposes, will quickly establish you as a authority among your business niche. Blogging regularly on your blog will also help your site to establish strong presence among search engines. By updating your blog with informative posts couple of times a month it will indicate the search engines that you are providing fresh content for them and by doing so this will also help you to get higher ranking positions in the search engines.

Social Media Leveraging – If your business is not yet on social media networks it is time to get involved in them. Depending on the type of your business you should choose the best platform fitting for your business, you should choose it based on which platform your customers, prospects and industry leaders engage the most. For example if you own a fashion brand you might consider building profiles on Pinterest and Instagram. The most important part of your social profile is not just to be a frequent user although it is very important but most of all you should provide informative original content for your readers and audience.

Facebook business page and advertising – Facebook is still one of the best marketing tools for the small business owners. A study indicates that the average American user stay 1 minute from every 7 minutes on Facebook. Creating a useful business page, interacting with users, commenting will help you build relationship with your clients. By providing useful and quality Facebook page with which your followers will interact will also increase your page awareness among your followers friends. You should also consider advertising and promoting of that Facebook page. The best part of Facebook ads is that you can choose when to run your ad the best tome of the days

that suits you, you can run the ad based on a demographic data, like gender, age and etc. by doing so you are targeting the exact audience you wish to attract for your page and business.

Instagram and Pinterest – Like I mentioned above Pinterest and Instagram are one of the bets platforms for brands that are more visual orientated. Lets say you are a fashion brand or an artist the best way to promote yourself is through these two platforms. Pinterest will not only help you to establish strong visual profile for your brand but will also help you drive traffic to your website and further that a study indicates that users willing to spend 1$ on other site by looking a picture usually on Pinterest they are willing to spend 3$. Pinterest is also called a women social network for a purpose, more than 80% of the users are women so if your target market is mostly for women this is your place to be. On the other hand Instagram is the fastest growing social network. Recent studies indicates that 90% of the biggest international brands owns an Instagram account with more than 200 million active monthly users, not being on Instagram is almost a crime for your brand. If you want to know more about the benefits of Instagram for business you can visit this infographic to find out that - You are already missing 200 million

potential customers .

Email marketing subscriptions and reminders – Email marketing is still one of the

best ways to promote your brand but to be efficient you must integrate it with your other

marketing campaigns. For example if you are running a Facebook campaign for a prize

let your email subscribers know, if you are running special offers you should also email

all of your customers and etc.

PPC Advertising with Google AdWords – Running a PPC campaign have a lot of

benefits but it also have a few downsides. If you are aiming for a fast way to promote

your business a successful PPC campaign can help you establish fast traffic and

audience for your website. And based on your landing page quality and few other

factors your business can even generate leads. The downside of a PPC campaigns is

that if you don’t know what are you doing and how to properly set your campaign you

might end up spending cash for nothing the users will just bounce on your page without

any particular reason.

Webinars – this is great way to establish yourself as a leader in your industry.

Organizing and maintaining useful webinars with influencers from your niche will quickly

boost your authority among you industry and niche. People will be also more socially

engaged via your social networks and profiles.

Press release distribution – another great way for small business owners is to

distribute their company messages via press release distribution sites. The biggest

benefit of this for your business is that you message will be distributed through hundred

of local and global channels which on practice will get you the same exposure as a

bigger brand with far more bigger budget.

About the author: My name is Albert Palacci, I am a graduated marketing

specialist at the London Business School. You can also find my work signed

as Palacci Albert. Visit my Twitter and Google+ profiles for more info.