Successful business marketing may seem like a daunting process, but it can be fun and easy once you know what you’re doing. While it is true that professional marketers go to school for many years and go on to earn MBAs in order to effectively market products and services to targeted prospects and customers, the majority of online marketers are small business owners and people with little marketing education. These individuals just want to expand their businesses online and they want to do it while expending the least money and effort as possible. If that describes you, you’ve come to the right place. The following business marketing crash course will help you get a jump start on the online marketing of your business and you don’t need a degree or an MBA to do it. All you need is time, effort and the following successful business marketing tips and you’ll be well on your way to fulfilling your online marketing goals.
Market Research
Before you get started with successful business marketing, it helps to determine if there is a market for what you plan to offer. Visit popular forums in your niche and search for your subject matter on popular social networks. Listen to the conversations that your prospective customers might be having and try to identify one or more problems that they may be suffering through as it relates to your business.
If you find a large target audience and you can identify problems that your products and services would be perfect for solving, you’ll be one step closer to business marketing success. Your next step is to research the keywords that you’ll be using to optimize your business marketing campaigns for the search engines.
Keyword Research
Visit the Google Adwords keyword research tool and start coming up with keyword phrases that your prospects and customers might use to search for and find your business online. Stick to buying keywords and phrases that include three or more keywords each, as these will have the least competition against them.
Fill in the Adwords tool keyword research box with all of your ideas and you can even include a competitor’s URL in the spot Google provides. This will give you all sorts of keyword ideas that you can then use to make your campaigns search engine friendly and competitor proof.
Setting Up Your Website
The next step in successful business marketing is to set up a home base where you can send all of the prospective customers that you’ll be marketing to. Later on in this course, you’ll learn how to drive Internet traffic – targeted customers who are interested in what you’re offering. A website effectively casts a net where we can capture all the new traffic and online leads that come our way.
Domain, Hosting And WordPress
Purchase a domain name using one of your most searched for and least competitive keyword terms. Purchase a hosting account you can afford and easily manage and then follow your registrar’s instructions for installing the popular content management system (CMS) WordPress on your server. WordPress will make the management of your website or business marketing home base simple and efficient, which is always what we’re looking for when successful business marketing is our goal.
Website Content, Meta Data And Internal Linking
Using WordPress, create Home, About, Products/Service and Contact pages and start filling them with valuable content. Your content needs to be top-notch or, in other words, it needs to be content that your audience actually wants to read.
Make sure, and this is very important, that you have a way to capture leads once your prospective customers land on your site. Either have your phone number prominently displayed, your email address or you might choose to have an opt-in box so that you can capture email addresses and other contact information from your visitors.
WordPress is by itself search-engine friendly, but you can make it even more so by installing an SEO plugin. Headspace is a good one and will make the inclusion of your Meta Data, which is the information search engines use to rank and describe your site to others, incredibly easy.
Use your keywords as your Meta Title and in your Meta Description, which are also the snippets that people will see when they find your listing in the search engines. Make your title and description enticing if successful business marketing is your goal so that you get more prospective customers to click-through.
Finally, link your pages together using relevant keywords as anchor text. Not only does this make your site easy to navigate, but search engines love internal links that are useful and relevant.
Expanding Your Business Marketing Network
Once you have a home base set up, the next step in business marketing is to drive leads to your website so that we can capture them and capitalize on them. Social business marketing works great for this. If you haven’t already, set up profiles on social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest. Make the content you share valuable and make a valiant effort to join the conversation and the social community. If you can show your prospects that you are a real person and not some faceless being hiding behind a logo, you’ll be far more likely to reach your successful business marketing goals.
Blogging is another way to expand your business marketing network, as are article and press release writing. You might also try video submissions on popular video sharing sites like YouTube or info-graphic creation. You are only limited by your imagination, but if you take anything away from this successful business marketing crash course, let it be this: Offer your customers valuable content and keep that content coming and you will be successful at business marketing.
It takes constant effort and the proper aforementioned research to really target your marketing audience. Once you find that soft spot and you hammer your message home with unique and high-quality content that your audience craves, business marketing success will be a hop, skip and a jump away.
As a final takeaway, I want to mention that testing is a big part of successful business marketing. While the above can get you started on your business marketing venture, you’ll never know what your audience truly wants until you begin to test your various marketing campaign elements and survey your prospective customers to get their viewpoint and the much broader marketing picture.
Testing will come in time. For right now, conduct your research, build your website and expand your network and your audience will come.
