Internet Marketing Strategies that Small Business Can Use

Whether you have an online business or a brick and mortar store, Internet Marketing is inevitable today. Also, whether your business is small or large, without internet marketing, it’s not going to get the exposure it deserves. Even if you have a lot of offline marketing strategies in place, to cut through the competition, you need to embrace the online strategies.

Here are a few steps that small businesses can take without chipping in too much of the budget. These are simple yet effective tricks that small businesses can use.

Search Engine Optimization

This includes optimizing the various elements of the website such that the search engines can easily understand and rank your web page. This increases your visibility on the internet and makes your business more accessible to the users. This is a very vast topic, but the main areas covered are On Page Optimization which includes changes to HTML Tags, Titles, Description, Keywords and content etc. Modifying and adding descriptions to videos and images is also a part of this process. Offline efforts include content marketing with articles, blogs, forums etc. that can be used to spread the word to a wider audience over the internet.

Local Search Marketing

Your business can be listed in various local directories and a map is used to indicate the location of your business. Your address and contact details are mentioned in a local listing for users to contact you immediately. This makes it easy for small businesses to get to the target audience and make a mark in the local market.

Content Marketing

Content Marketing is the use of Articles and Blogs to spread information about the products and services. Spreading knowledge establishes your business as a credible source and helps build trust in the minds of customers. People also attribute some amount of expertise to a company by reading the content that they are sharing.

Social Media Marketing

Be it Facebook or Twitter or Pinterest – people of all ages are on social media more often than on any other website. Tapping this as a valuable resource for reaching out to a wider customer base is one way to market your products. Recommendations and likes from friends and family create greater impact on the minds of people than any amount of advertisements from the company itself.

Email Marketing

Emails are a tried and tested medium of advertising. Email Marketing can send a personalized and highly targeted message to existing and new customers. This sends out a clear message that your business cares about what your customers want.

Predicting Internet Marketing Trends that will Dominate 2015

Internet is no longer used for information sharing it greatly impacts all the marketing efforts of businesses. Businesses are finding greater value in publishing content online and increasing the visibility of their website. Internet Marketing trends have evolved over time and as we come to an end of this year, let’s look at the predictions of the trends and techniques that will dominate the coming year 2015.

Here are a few internet marketing techniques that will dominate the next year (2015) – some old and some new:

Content Marketing will grow bigger

Establishing authority and trust over the internet is greatly dependent on the type of content a business shares. Creating a variety of content and distributing it over various channels will definitely be the future trend in internet marketing. This has ofcourse been an age old trend and will continue to be so for at least the near foreseeable future.

Social Media Will Require More Diversity

Diversity will be expected from social media marketing strategies. Social media sites are emerging rapidly. They provide businesses with a plethora of opportunities for sharing information and increasing their audience. Sticking to one social site will not work. Businesses need to target all the major and popular social media sites.

Mobile Friendly Websites

Mobiles and smartphones have revolutionized the marketing concepts and introduced new channels and opportunities for businesses to reach out to customers. Mobile strategies would be on the rise and 2015 will bring new and advanced mobile marketing as well as business strategies.

Online Ads

Advertisements other than the search networks and the content networks will emerge and open up new ways to measure the ad campaigns and statistics to measure success. Online advertisements will be highly evolved in 2015. Mobiles will also enter the advertisement area more fiercely.

SEO and Social Signals

Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing will be more closely intertwined and will provide businesses with faster and better results.

Overall, 2015 will be a year to look forward to in terms of internet strategies that now cover a wide range of technologies that include traditional websites, diversity in social media, blogs, content marketing and mobile strategies.