Hone Your Online Presence To Maximize Profits

Digital marketing is more important than ever before for a new business. If you’re launching a new startup, be sure to develop an online marketing strategy to help make your launch a success. Continue reading to learn the best ways to build your online presence quickly and cost-efficiently.

In the digital age, starting a business is more complex than ever before, despite the low barriers to entry for many industries. The twenty-first century has seen a wealth of technological advancements emerge, with social media, cloud storage, digital magazines, and SEO taking prominence for any new startup. Taking your idea of a money-making venture and turning it into a fully-fledged business takes time, commitment, and effort. While you may be honing your business and marketing plans, you may be focused on funding, cash flow, and your financial forecasting. The idea of digital marketing and your online presence may take a back seat. However, it shouldn’t. Creating and launching a digital marketing strategy should be at the forefront of your new business.

Your online presence will end up being the face of your brand and will be the first thing that the millennial and Gen Z markets will see of your business. It’s vital that you pay attention to your website, your social media channels, and your online analytical prowess. You need to understand your niche market through the way you communicate with them, including where they hang out online. With the Internet being a vital medium through which to communicate, search for businesses, and receive news, it makes sense that you hone your online presence and digital marketing strategy for maximum profits. Here are our top digital marketing tips to help grow your business the right way from the start.

Ensuring Your Social Media Channels are Active

As a new business, you should have a Twitter feed, an Instagram page, a Pinterest account, and a Facebook account at the very least. These are the channels through which your potential customers will find and contact you. It’s vital that you update your feeds regularly and post relevant and meaningful content that can be shared and enhance your level of followers. The more shares your posts and images receive, the greater exposure for your brand and a more positive impact it will have search engine rankings. This is vital if you are to compete with your already well-established industry rivals.

As a new startup, you need to hone your branding, your market positioning, and your company voice. The best way to do this is via your social media channels. The millennial and Gen Z markets no longer want a stuffy corporate tone to greet them when making the first contact with a startup. They appreciate a more human, chatty voice to communicate with. This human level allows you to connect with your customer more and provide a better customer experience.

If a potential customer tweets you a query or sends a DM on Instagram, don’t ignore it. All conversations that you have with customers are in the public domain, so you need to consider your social media interaction as a public relations activity. The more professional, attentive, and respectful you appear, the more likely traffic will flock to your site. The key is to engage with your followers to build that conversation and trust while developing a community around your company.

Social media content and its quality can also dictate how many hits you can receive to your website. Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram are great at referring potential new customers to your shop and services pages. Treat them as a form of free digital marketing and never neglect the potential impact on your profits. These channels are ultimately great to start conversations with your audiences.

Conducting Relevant Online Analyses to Refine Your Digital Marketing Strategy to Reach More Targeted Customers 

As a new business owner, it’s crucial that you understand your niche market. Don’t think that you can have a stunning website alongside active social media channels, and then expect the sales to roll in. You need a more nuanced approach to your online presence that’s targeted and resonates with your audience.

By developing a native ads network, you can source traffic revenues for your brand and optimize your algorithms for online targeting of your audience. Alongside Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, you can develop a clearer picture of how long your potential customers stay on your site, the top referrers to your site, and the demographic of your developing niche. You will also be able to see where visitors are bouncing off your site—which is critical to building a loyal following. This data can help you adapt your digital marketing strategy to harness more of the market and convert hits into sales more readily. 

Designing a Website that Resonates with Your Audience

The website that your business utilizes is your little patch of the Internet. This is the face of your brand and should emulate your ethos and values. The design should be on-brand and make people want to click through to other pages. No longer can you get away with a simple and static Geocities style web page that looks like it was designed in 1997. Your website must be aesthetically pleasing to the eye, easy to navigate, and fully search engine optimized.

There is no point in having such a stunning website if no one can find it if they search. Organic hits are few and far between and you want to find new customers through alternative referrals. Good SEO means using Google’s Keyword Planner to find the right keywords and PPC techniques to enhance your website’s standing in the Google rankings. With enhanced SEO, you can be sure of leapfrogging the competition to ensure that your website is higher up on the first page of search results. You will just want to ensure your website’s SEO strategy adheres to Google, Bing, and Yahoo’s webmaster guidelines to prevent it from being penalized.

 When you have the hit—better known as a unique visitor”, it’s vital that you can keep the user on your site rather than deviating elsewhere. This is why you need fast upload speeds, increased bandwidth, and a top-performing web host. WordPress is the host that most websites utilize in the twenty-first century. It’s fully customizable, easy to use, you can create a really professional looking website even as a novice, and there are plenty of widgets to explore. However, we like to use Squarespace due to its beautiful templates that can be fully customized without writing a line of code. In fact, it’s the perfect option for visual web designers without coding experience.

With a website that is informative, interesting, and beautiful, you will portray a professional image and showcase your credibility. Bad grammar, dodgy spelling, and fuzzy or pixelated images do not set the tone for your startup and will drive your traffic away. You want your website to make the best possible impression when someone lands on it.

 Acquiring Feedback from the Right Customer Segment and Stakeholder Groups Online

Online feedback will make or break your business. If your customer service levels are high and you respond to queries effectively and speedily, the chances are that you can foster a bank of positive reviews. People are often reluctant to part with their cash on a newbie company. The reviews you generate will encourage people to take a punt on you. Price your product or service reasonably and go the extra mile to provide your customers with the best possible experience.

Add a free gift, offer free delivery, or give a discount on the next order if the customer follows you and leaves a review on Facebook, Google, or Yelp. If you do receive negative feedback, address it immediately, and respond to defuse the situation. Explain the issue, how you solved it, and the impact it has had on your future transactions. Showing that you have learned from a poor experience will help your customers come to their own conclusions when it comes to your reputation.

In the twenty-first century, it can seem more challenging than ever to make a success of your business both online and offline. However, if you can harness the marketing and sales potential of your online presence, you can future proof your venture and it will thrive. It’s all about creating a product or service and offering a customized and personalized customer experience that will have them coming back consistently.

Digital Marketing: The Pros and Cons

Digital marketing efforts can be more effective than traditional marketing initiatives when campaigns are tested, measured, and optimized.

You’ve probably heard of the term ‘digital marketing,’ as it is one of the buzziest newer business terms, more than once by now. But what is it, precisely? How can businesses benefit from learning about how to execute them?

If you guessed marketing campaigns implemented online, you’re not that far off. The more standard definition would be marketing strategies that use online-based media (think phones, laptops, and tablets) to market a product, software program, or service. After everything that’s happened this year, there’s never been a better time to try digital marketing. But how can you be sure it’s the right move for you?

Today, we’re going to talk about some of the pros and cons of transitioning into a digital marketing career or executing your own campaigns for your business.

How can digital marketing improve your business? Why should you consider implementing such a campaign? What are some of the primary benefits?

You Marketing People understand the pains that come part-and-parcel with traditional marketing campaigns: exorbitant costs, less accurate response methods, fewer audiences reached, longer execution time, and, most importantly, decreasing interest in traditional marketing methods. This waning interest, in tandem with the lightning-quick evolution of online technology, has produced a prime environment for digital marketing campaigns to flourish.

For starters, digital marketing campaigns cost a fraction of their traditional counterparts to run and evaluate. Social media marketing paid campaigns provide an excellent example of this. For just under $3, you can reach over 1000 people through a social media campaign. Compare this to direct mail campaigns, which can reach the same amount of people for a whopping $57. That means direct mail campaigns are nearly 20 times as expensive as social media marketing campaigns. Running an advertising campaign on Pinterest or Instagram could be even less than that.

The last promoted Pin campaign we ran here at FemFounder.co to launch our latest PR course, we only spent .55 per qualified lead, and the last Facebook ad campaign we ran, we only spent $1.00 to acquire each new customer. And according to WebFX, driving web traffic from Pinterest is generally .10 to $1.50 per engagement with the minimum bid starting at .10. Additionally, Wordstream.com reports that Facebook ads cost approximately $1.72 per click across all industries.

Digital marketing campaigns also let you zero in on your target audience at a granular level. Unlike traditional marketing campaigns, you can choose the precise consumer who will see your ads through filters by location, interests, age, annual income, ethnicity, gender, interests, and family size, for example. You can also test and measure the effectiveness of any campaign you run with free online tools. Digital marketing is a great way to reach targeted consumers at a reasonable price.

What are some digital marketing cons? What should you be aware of before developing and executing a digital marketing initiative? How can a digital marketing campaign hurt your brand if you’re not prepared to monitor the web and social media?

Of course, not all that glitters in online ads is gold and effective. The same goes for digital marketing, too. Unlike traditional marketing campaigns, digital marketing campaigns tend to make less of a visual impact on their viewers and, therefore, are likely to be less memorable. The internet is a pretty crowded place as it is, so you’ll have to work harder to make your campaign stand out.

Moreover, any negative reviews that your campaign garners can exacerbate an already bad situation. People can see just about everything that happens online. They’ll probably know the fallout of a bad digital marketing campaign as well, which could translate to lost revenue and a chunk of time dedicated to damage control. In other words, your brand’s reputation is more at stake online, so you’ll have to execute your campaigns more delicately than you would via traditional marketing methods.

Lastly, your online digital campaigns are more likely to get overlooked by consumers. In the era of the unmonitored spam folder, thousands of smart email marketing campaigns go unnoticed every day, leaving digital marketers scratching their heads. So ensuring that your emails are deliverable and only distributed to people who signed up for your email list will help increase deliverability. Some sophisticated strategizing may help you overcome this obstacle, but it will require the help of someone who knows what they’re doing.

As you can see, digital marketing is not the foolproof marketing industry that many tech entrepreneurs and aspiring digital marketers might make out to be. However, that doesn’t mean that digital marketing hasn’t come about in a dazzlingly opportunistic age for it to grow, evolve, and thrive. Only time will show how digital marketers and savvy entrepreneurs fine-tune their skills in response to the increasing diversity of online commerce.

3 Ways to Build Your Business's Online Presence

How is your business performing online? When it comes to online presence, there are always areas that companies can improve. If you are concerned that your company isn’t using its online presence to its full potential, you certainly aren’t alone. 97% of business owners say that their online reputation is essential. It is crucial to recognize the importance of your online presence, and it’s vital to put plans in place to help your business maximize its online presence to achieve its potential.

Businesses that do not take active steps to improve their digital presence put themselves at risk of being left behind and allow their competitors to gain a significant advantage.

With increasing numbers of consumers carrying out product research online to inform their purchase decisions, and even more people regularly shopping on the web, your online presence matters more now than ever before.

In 2020, the question is no longer ‘should I invest in digital marketing methods?’ Instead, the real question is, ‘am I using digital marketing methods effectively?’ If you are looking for ways to strengthen your online presence, and ultimately give your bottom line a boost, these digital marketing tools will help:

Get Your Website Seen 

You may be selling the best products in the world, but if your website isn’t performing, no one will see these life-changing products, let alone buy them. 

Taking steps to improve your website will help to increase the amount of traffic that it receives, and ultimately, this should increase sales. To gain increased traffic, your site needs to achieve a high ranking on the search engine results pages so that it is visible to your target audience. Improved search engine results are achieved through effective search engine optimization (SEO). Optimizing your site can be complicated and requires up to date SEO knowledge, so getting some professional help with this vital.

Be Sociable

Engaging with your customers and potential customers is vital to strengthen your online presence and is also a great way to develop brand loyalty and increased sales. Using social media platforms to your advantage is incredibly worthwhile and is the perfect way to engage with your customers, both present and future. 

To achieve social media success, consistency is vital. Your social media posts should be scheduled to go out regularly, and your page will need to be monitored so that you can respond to any comments made on your posts. You need to ensure that your posts are consistent with the image of your brand and are suitable for your followers.

Use Affiliates

Affiliate marketing is a fast-growing area and offers significant potential for businesses. Affiliate marketing has many benefits and is an ideal way to help your brand reach new audiences. Affiliate marketing may sound complicated, but software can help. You can Get launch reviews and bonuses to help you expand your knowledge and improve your affiliate marketing methods. Some of the software even picks the best influencers for your brand and does the hard work for you.

The Difference Between Digital Marketing And Social Media Marketing

Since the wide use of the internet and social media, businesses have changed their approach to marketing. We Are Social and Hootsuite’s Global Digital reports a 2019 study in which they found 4.39 billion people worldwide, or 57 percent of the world’s population use the internet. Utilizing digital marketing companies figured out a way to reach their target audience in an organic way: through social media. Worldwide there are 3.48 billion social media users, according to the same study.

Social media marketing has become such a necessity, many companies use social media marketing and digital marketing interchangeably. Though digital marketing and social media go hand in hand, they are not one and the same.

What Exactly Is Digital Media Marketing?

Digital marketing is a blanket term that refers to all types of marketing tasks that a brand or company might do digitally. Digital marketing is about the implementation of a variety of customized digital media marketing channels to grow your products or services sales and profits, to create brand awareness, build strong relationships with your target audience, create and add value, and promote your products, services, or brand.

It is important to note that every digital marketing strategy is not a one-size-fits-all strategy. Some strategies include a couple of these digital marketing channels. Some only include one. Some include all. It depends on your specific company or brand and your specific objectives and goals. That is why it is helpful to collaborate with digital marketers like SunCity Advising, who are able to develop a customized digital marketing strategy that is specific to your company’s needs.

Some tools that are used to achieve your company’s digital marketing objectives could include things like email marketing through services like MailChimp, paid social media marketing, video hosting tools like YouTube, website analytics, SEO tools, content creation tools, and affiliate marketing just to name a few.

What Exactly Is Social Media Marketing?

As mentioned, social media marketing is only one component of digital marketing. Social media marketing only uses things like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Google+, Snapchat, and TikTok to promote or market your company or brand. This type of marketing is focused on grabbing people’s attention. It heavily involves engaging with followers, enlisting social media influencers, holding contests, posting consistent and relevant content, and live-streaming.

What Are The Key Differences?

Since social media is a great way of engaging with potential customers and clients, it is used mostly for that. It is a great way to build brand awareness and communicate with customers. On the other hand, other forms of digital marketing, like email marketing, are focused on driving sales and traffic to your brick-and-mortar store or website.

Social media marketing takes less time to plan whereas other types of digital marketing campaigns may need to be more thought out. Digital marketing uses online and offline ways to reach their audience while social media is only bound to the screens.

Social Media Marketing Isn't A Gimmick. It's Downright Profitable.

For years, marketing gurus have extolled the virtues of social media marketing. Reaching out to people over platforms like Twitter and Facebook seemed like one of the best ways to create deep and meaningful relationships with audiences. 

Businesses resisted the idea for a long time. Traditional marketing methods seemed so much more professional and low-risk. You could customize your marketing messages to reflect your predefined corporate image. And you could edit out anything that might impact reputation. 

Web-users - particularly millennials - however, had different ideas. They didn’t just want companies to spam them with corporate marketing messages. They wanted something more authentic. 

Social media, therefore, was the ideal platform. Here, companies had access to the entirety of their target market and could communicate with them one-on-one if they wished. What’s more, they were free to develop long-form marketing that explained more about their values. Memorable jingles and soundbites were no longer the aim of the game. 

According to data from Index and Empower, 45 percent of people used social media in 2019 globally. People are highly active on these platforms. A subset of users views social media platforms as the internet, rarely venturing outside of them. 

Firms, however, have been slow on the uptake. They’re used to one kind of marketing, but social media presents quite another. The traditional approach is to extract value from customers using advertising. Companies talk about their brands and then hope that customers listen and convert. 

Social media, though, is fundamentally changing the game. Firms now have to provide users with value if they want to stand any chance of gaining their attention. Advertising, therefore, is becoming more like outreach. It is offering customers something that enriches their lives - not just wastes their time. 

In general, this takes a couple of forms. The first is entertainment. Here the advertiser on social media attempts to get the customer to associate their brand by making them laugh or keeping their eyes glued to the screen. 

The second is through education. Marketers look for ways to teach their customers about their products and services in a way that benefits them. Therefore, a company that sells swimming pools might produce a video that helps people determine which type of pool to buy for their home. The hope is that the customer will eventually convert. 

Entertainment And Inspiration Have The Biggest Impact On The Bottom Line

Going back a few years, offering discounts through social media was the primary strategy companies used to pick up additional sales. Facebook and Instagram were a little bit like voucher websites - a place where you went for bargains. 

In the last year or so, however, there’s been a shift. Users don’t want money off or big discounts. Instead, they want entertainment and inspiration - a big turnaround from just a year earlier. 

The turnaround is probably starker than you’re imagining. Data suggests that twice the number of social media users prefer entertaining content to discount ads. It suggests that companies need to rethink the type of content they produce radically. Discounts aren’t profitable, but providing entertainment could be. 

Employee Advocacy Helps To Attract Top Talent

We’re also seeing a significant rise in the number of companies using employee advocacy to attract top talent. Here the idea is to use existing staff from the firm to talk about how great their work is so that new people will join. High-skill employees are much more likely to believe the words of the people who work for the firm already. Hiring managers just don’t have the same level of sway on their decision-making. 

In a sense, social media allows companies to offer budding candidate employees “social proof” (a bit like regular review scores). It is mimicking the insight that people can gain from services like Glassdoor, but providing your company with more control over the process. Employees are unlikely to say anything on social media that might damage your brand. 

Social Listening Helps To Understand Your Target Audience Better

Small businesses like to believe that they understand their target audiences, but rarely is that the case. Customers will hardly ever provide you with insightful, constructive feedback that allows you to push through problems. Instead, you often find yourself having to guess - and that’s not ideal. 

Using a digital marketing consultant, however, can help. The basic concept is to improve your “social listening” or your ability to interpret the needs and desires of your audience from their conversations on social media. 

Social listening isn’t as easy as it sounds. Usually, it requires using sophisticated software able to pick out sentiments. Typically, you need the help of an agency to set it up and point you in the correct direction. Once you get to grips with it, though, it can prove a massive boon to your enterprise. Being able to understand your audience's true desires provides you with a big leg up over the competition. 

How Marketers Use Social Media To Drive The Bottom Line

Social media, therefore, has turned a corner. In the past, only a small subset of companies say the outreach potential of these platforms. But, as time has worn on, more and more people are coming to terms with its benefits. 

Marketers are now developing systems that prioritize how they use social media platforms to maximize their revenues and boost their bottom lines. 

The main draw of social media is the opportunity to tap into a much larger audience. The potential reach of these platforms is genuinely staggering. Instagram and Whatsapp both have about a billion users. Facebook has two billion users. And Twitter has a lot of users who all share a particular political persuasion. 

Marketers also like social media because it allows them to sidestep the costs of paid ads. If you can create a compelling account, you can create a kind of tribe of customers and avoid spending loads of cash on attracting people from outside. Lead generation is a massive draw. 

Social media marketing, therefore, is no longer a gimmick. It’s downright profitable.