In this day and age, relying on just traditional marketing methods like yellow pages and print ads will put you behind. Most small businesses struggle with marketing, an essential component of when it comes to business success. Today, there are dozens of people within your area using the internet to find a business just like yours. Having a website and hoping that customers will discover you “organically” is no longer enough. You need to make sure that customers can find your business when searching online. The question is, how will they find you?
Create A Digital Marketing Strategy
In this day and age, digital marketing is crucial. Again, say goodbye to those traditional marketing methods and say hello to the new and improved way to monetize your business. Here are some essential steps to market your small business online:
Step One: Create An SEO Strategy
The first step is to come up with a robust SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy. This strategy will allow you to reach new customers online directly. Many online resources can help you build a customer-driven website by offering a variety of tools. These tools can include generating backlinks to increase your online presence or advertising advice based on what you’re competitors are doing. Did you know that pay-per-click (PPC) ads have a HUGE advantage over SEO? Google collects 90% of its revenue from PPC ads! By paying for advertisements on search engines, you’ll be amongst the first advertisements to pop up.
Step Two: Design A Landing Page
With PPC advertising such as Google AdWords, you can control your budget and decide how to reinvest or continue based on proven results. You can also adjust these displayed ads on searches and social paid ads such as Facebook to show within a certain radius of the searcher’s location. Most businesses start with a 10, 20, 30-mile radius from their location. While these paid ads like Google can help bring potential customers to your website, the quality of your landing page is the key to sealing the deal. A website’s landing page should provide precise information, attractive deal offerings and a call to action. For example, working directly with the self-storage industry, I recommend adopting a click-to-call feature so that people can instantly connect with your business. Great landing pages with all the bells and whistles can convert leads into inquiries and hopefully a sale!
Step 3: Do A Data Analysis
So far we have explored the foundation for a grand modern marketing strategy, but how do you know if these efforts are working or if they are producing the kind of ROI you want? The next building block after the excellent marketing campaign is data analysis. Data collection is essential to measuring the effectiveness of your online marketing efforts. Any smart investor knows that when investing in the stock market, you need to have quality, transparent reporting to make sound financial decisions. The same goes for your digital marketing.
Step 4: Discover Source Of Leads
Local businesses are different than e-commerce sites in the fact that they primarily sell products online. For your marketing efforts to succeed, you’ll need smart reporting that can tell you if your strategy is paying off. It is essential to understand that most new leads generated by local businesses come in as a phone call. Someone who visits a self-storage website of a local listing will generally not buy anything online and will either send an email or call the business for more information. The Local Search Association, LSA, found that some 70 percent of local business leads are generated via phone calls. In this case, a sale occurs only after a customer has asked for a free consultation or received an initial session/ offering.
Step 5: Do What Works But Experiment With Tools
So how can you improve your online presence to get more potential clients to call you? A great way to do this is with dynamic call tracking systems, which provides you the real-time data and caller intelligence. This tool lets you see which ads and keywords you place with digital ads like AdWords; you can see not only how many each click costs and the number of clicks received but also the conversion rates – how many times a keyword leads to a phone call. Such data can be helpful when optimizing a marketing campaign, as it clues you into practical use of keywords and identifies words to abandon.
Discover the marketing attribution model that works for you!
Using a call tracking service can help you manage your budget and boost the overall success of your marketing strategy. Consider integrating your marketing campaign analytics so that you can turn the invaluable data into financial KPIs and measure revenue, costs, conversion, and impact on bottom line. You can finally establish call tracking and lead tracking that pays for itself and discover the marketing attribution model that works best for you!