3 Step Online Marketing for Small Businesses Framework
Not only is online marketing is more cost and time-efficient, and it give you a way to reach your target audience more quickly and effectively.
Online marketing should be one of the top goals for helping to build your business.
Marketing isn’t something that you just do once it’s an ongoing business activity that is vital to the bottom line of your business.
Here’s our 3-step online marketing for small business framework
This framework is designed to help you know what you need to have in place to get started or improve your marketing efforts and get the results you’re looking for.
Step 1: Build a customer centered website
Choose a website platform that can grow with your business.
When you select a platform like WordPress to design your site and a template that is updated regularly there should be no need to continually spend money updating your website.
In fact some of our clients have been using the same web design for 5+ years. When your website is built correctly, only thing you need to regularly update is your content.
Make your website easy to navigate
This is critical…you want to build your site with your customer in mind. You want to create a clear path for them to get the information they are looking for.
Take a look at your current site. Is it easy for people to get the information they need to make a purchase or entice them to pick the phone and contact you? Do you have product information, services, testimonials all organized in a manner that makes the easy to locate quickly?
If you don’t make it easy for visitors to find what they need they will quickly go elsewhere and you’ve lost a potential client or customer.
Make sure your site is mobile friendly
More and more people are using their mobile devices to search the web. If your site is not optimized for a mobile device you’re missing out on a big amount of traffic.
Have clear calls to action
Whether it is a link to more information or signing up for a valuable resource you’ll want guide your visitors to and through the sales funnel with clear, simple-to-follow steps all along the way.
Make sure the next steps are in line with where they are in their customer journey and give them clear calls to action.
Step 2: Content Creation & Marketing
Create content that matters to your audience and use social media to amplify and engage your target audience.
Creating content that matters means that you do the research for proven topic ideas that relate back to your products and services. For example if you are a marriage therapist you want to create content about common issues that married couples face such as infidelity, dysfunctional families and so on…
What you wouldn’t write about is content about dating and other topics that single people face since that is not who you serve.
Once you have created content, you want to market it. You’ll use social media and other publishing platforms to get it out in front of a bigger audience and to use it to get traffic, leads and make sales.
Step 3: Email Marketing
Mastering email marketing is an important part of running an online business. This is a 3-part process which includes doing the following activities.
- Build Your Email List
This is a where you start building your foundation for successful email marketing. You must have a list of prospects that you can market to.
If is never too early to start buildng your list – ideally you want to start list building activities the day you go live with your website. You can ask people to join a newsletter list, sign up for a freebie, take a quiz or attend a webinar. The list of ways to get people on your list is endless.
Ideally you want to have a few different options for people to join your list.
- Design Effective Email Marketing Campaigns
Once people join your list you want to continue the prospect to customer journey. Design your email marketing campaigns to give them the information they need to build a know, like and trust relationship with you.
Always lead with helpful content, resources and case studies to help them see you as the expert who can solve your problem. Do this and you’ll find it much easier to make the sale.
- Use Email Marketing to Stay Top of Mind
Not only do you need an effective email campaign to help move your prospects to customers, you need to continually stay in touch. This is why a weekly email newsletter is so effective, especially when you combine it with your content creation efforts.
When you land in your prospect’s inbox with helpful and interesting content weekly you stay top of mind with them and they are more likely to become a customer.
This 3 step guide to online marketing for small businesses is meant to help you make sure you have these important pieces in place.
