Did you know that 83 percent of small businesses with online marketing strategies have seen improvement in sales?

Before the internet, you only had to compete against other companies in your location for customers. Nowadays you need to be able to compete against a much wider range of businesses for your customers.

That’s why you need to do anything you can to get yourself ahead of the game. Keep reading for our top 9 online marketing tips that can make the difference to your business.

1. Who’s Your Target Audience?

Do you know the kind of people you want to drive to your website? What problems do your target customers have to deal with? What do they expect from you?

By asking yourself these questions, you arrive closer to the answer of who’s your target audience. It’s important to understand to whom you’re promoting your products and services.

Your target audience doesn’t just mean demographics. For example, a good target group is not something as broad as “young people”.

But rather, it’s a category as niche as “men 18-29 years-old who enjoy outdoor activities in California”.

2. Grow Your Contacts Lists

What if you didn’t need to convert a prospective customer into an actual customer in one quick stroke?

Maybe, instead, all you have to do is develop subscribers and followers. Then, you can worry about sales to customers down the line.

Although it’s really difficult to increase your customers, you can grow your mailing list with a lot less effort. That’s because you’re giving your target audience something for nothing.

Maybe you provide your followers with interesting and relevant Facebook posts? Or perhaps, you send a bi-weekly newsletter about what’s happening in your niche industry?

3. Great Content People Actually Want to Read

The days when you could simply produce nonsense content to boost your SEO (search engine optimization) ranking on search engines are over.

Nowadays, you don’t only need to create content that it’s SEO-optimized, it also needs to be actually interesting to your readers. Google penalizes content that is not unique and relevant.

The best kind of content you need to produce is blogs. Blogs are a great way to improve your SEO-ranking while also providing top-quality content.

4. Share Your Content on Social Media

It’s no good writing great content if you’re not willing to put in the hours to share and promote it across social media.

It’s important to consider which social media platforms are best for your target audience. For example, young people are most likely to use Snapchat, whereas Business-types are probably on LinkedIn.

Now that you have developed your social media following and building your mailing list, it’s time to take advantage of your eagerly awaiting audience.

If your target audience enjoys your content, they might even share your content themselves. This way your audience do your marketing for you.

5. Make a Variety of Content

Of course, your blogs are the keystone of any effective online marketing strategy.

But that doesn’t mean that you have to concentrate all of your marketing efforts on blogs. You could re-produce your content in the form of an e-book. Maybe you could convert your blog posts into Youtube videos.

By producing a variety of content, you bring in new audiences for your products and content.

6. Mobile Friendly Websites

Nearly 80 percent of Americans own a smartphone with internet access.

And since 2016, over 60 percent of Google searches are from mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets.

Google has woken up to the importance of mobile device searches. Now, Google’s algorithm will boost your website if it’s mobile-friendly. And it’ll penalize any website that doesn’t operate over a smartphone.

You need to make sure your website is designed to work over a number of different screen sizes. This way mobile users don’t get frustrated and go elsewhere.

7. Benefit from Analytics

How do you know what you’re doing well and where you’re going wrong? You need analytics if you’re going to improve your digital marketing strategy.

With data about your website, you can determine the optimal time to reach out to your target audience. By doing this, you don’t waste time promoting content when nobody is online.

There are a number of pay-to-use analytics tools. However, Google analytics provides a high-quality free-to-use tool to find out about your web data.

8. Encourage Customer Reviews

Did you know that 84 percent of people trust online reviews as much friends? That means that you need to start caring about your customer reviews.

While there are many customer reviews websites that specialize in specific fields and niche markets, you need to make sure you improve your standing on the general reviewing websites, such as Google.

If you receive negatives reviews, it’s also better to reply and improve what you’re doing with the customer feedback.

9. Optimize Your Business Listings Pages

You also need to make sure your business listings are SEO-optimized and regularly monitored for mistakes.

According to a survey, around 85 percent of customers use business listings to find local businesses.

It’s especially important to make sure you have all of the relevant information displayed on Google My Business and other popular websites. This includes the following info:

• Name
• Address
• Opening Times
• Website
• Phone Contact
• Email Contact

Make sure everything is consistently included. If you change your opening hours or phone contact, make sure it’s changed accordingly.

Online Marketing Tips

It’s not easy standing out from the crowd on the internet. However, there are some online marketing tips that you simply can’t afford to miss out on.

By following our 9 online marketing tips, you can make sure your website is high on the search engine rankings. The higher you’re on Google, the more traffic and sales you’ll get.

If you want to find out more about how we could improve your digital marketing strategy, get in touch with us today!