Following are the top 10 essential online tasks of small business marketing.
Last week, somebody who I met in social media world asked me what my top 10 marketing tips were from my book. This has inspired me to write this post. The following are tasks that I feel every business should attend to in order to commence their online marketing campaign.
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1. Create your elevator speech
Creating your elevator speech is essential so that you give a concise and consistent message as to what your business provides or sells in your marketing efforts.
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2. Ensure that the signature on your email is current and useful.
This is one of your marketing techniques that is free to use and can bring you extra traffic to your website. Even if you don’t have a website yet just include your contact details. Also include the following:
- Facebook profile link (for example mine is http://www.facebook.com/amelia.champion) You can find it by clicking on your profile and taking the url from the address bar on your web browser. It is best to take this address when you have first logged in. It’s possible that it may give you extra characters or words in the address, but just remove them so that the result is an address similar to mine but with your own name. Test that you have the right address by typing it into a new browser window.
- Twitter ID
- telephone no.
- tagline (use either this post – How to Create a Tagline or Lesson 1 Elevator Pitch to help create this)
- Linked-In profile
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3. Create a Facebook fan page for your business
- Add a profile picture, whatever information that you can including your elevator pitch and a link to your website.
- make a first entry on your page such as ‘Welcome to your company name fanpage.
- Suggest the page to your friends and contacts
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4. Create a Twitter ID
- go to twitter.com and sign-up creating an ID that is related to your company name
- add a background – unless you are experienced with graphics, you might prefer to use mytweetspace.com which provides a tool to create your own backgrounds with text
- obtain followers - to start getting followers, I suggest that you follow a few people in your field - use Geofollow which is a location based twitter directory. You can then be sure to find companies within your area. If it is not important with your business model to find your clientele from a particular location, then you can search using a keyword related to your business.
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5. Add your business to local business directories
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6. Create a blog
Search engines love blogs because their content is often fresh and that is one of the points that they grade websites on and how important they are. Having a blog is also a good way to bring new awareness about your business and it can instill some loyalty in your customers as it’s an opportunity for them to get to know more about you. Customers will especially appreciate your blog if you provide them with some useful information that helps them.
One essential task of having a blog is to keep blogging. Even if you only do this only once per week, it is something that needs to be done. Otherwise your blog will appear like a ‘ghost town’ with nobody home.
To create a blog, you can create one for free on WordPress.com or Blogger.com for freely hosted, or install WordPress software from WordPress.org onto your website. If your website is hosted by godaddy.com you will be able to install it from the backend.
Before investing the time and effort into a blog, find out the advantages and disadvantages of free hosted sites and having your own blog that you host yourself. I’ll cover this in my Free 45 Lessons of Small Business Marketing series.
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7. Get a LinkedIn profile
Having a profile on Linked-In is now a strong marketing tool for small businesses and for individuals. It can be used in many ways to promote your business.
- complete your profile as much as possible
- add a link to your Linked-In profile from your email signature and to your Facebook profile or fan page
- join industry or location business groups or start your own and invite your contacts
- network within the groups and provide useful comments and information when you can
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8. Use Alexa.com
If you already have a website or blog, visit alexa.com to see where you are in the big picture. Alexa gives a ranking to each website and using this ranking will give you some idea of how well you are doing with promoting it. You can also use google analytics or statcounter.com to monitor your visitors and see which pages or links they are coming from.
Alexa has a toolbar that provides useful information and links. As a benefit, it can also improve your own website Alexa rank. To make the most of this, install the toolbar on all the computers in your building with your website or blog as the homepage. This will boost your rankings. Here is a link to install the toolbar.
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9. Foursquare
If you are unaware of Foursquare, read my post on how it is helping small businesses . Add your business to Foursquare and if you have a bar or restaurant then you give ‘specials’ such as a free drink to the most frequent customer, or think of a special that would work and be appropriate for your business.
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10. Study the websites of your competitors
Take a look at the successful websites or blogs of your competitors and see what you can learn.
- What do you think works well on their site?
- How do you think they are getting their visitors?
- What do they post about and what type of writing or voice do they use?
- How often are they posting and who are they directing their posts at?
- Study what keywords they are using by going to their homepage and clicking on View, Page Source on Firefox and on Internet Explorer, click on the left hand mouse button and Select View, Page Source.
Do you have your own top 10 essential marketing tasks that you want to add to the comments area below?
