Fuelled with the increasing use of smartphones & tablets, people today are spending twice as much time online as they spent 10 years back. According to Ravi Shankar Prasad, Minister for Communications & Information Technology, the internet users in India is set to hit 500 Million by 2017.
If you still think you can afford to let your company / brand stay back on the digital front, you can safely close this tab and stop reading this right now.
Once you get these basics right, your path to launching & growing your business online will be set right:
Responsive Websites
Your website is your online brochure. With the increasing number of smartphone users you need to ensure your website loads on all the devices. It could either be an incredible first impression to your potential customer or a terrible last impression depending on the User Experience. Your website is your online lead generating machine. It’s the key to attracting new clients online, making an impact, generating reservations, bookings and / or purchases. You need to take your website seriously.
Content is the king
All the internet giants like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram & Bing, keep changing their algorithms. Sadly they don’t take our permission before doing that. However, you need to remember one thing – Good Content always wins.
Stock your website with information which provides real value to your customers & has strong links to your products & services. This will make it easier for your business to get discovered by targeted customers.
Content Strategy
Content Strategy enables you to achieve your business goals by maximising the impact of your content. Blogging & Social Media: both these platforms need a content strategy.
Creating content without any strategy could confuse your target audience & negatively impact your business.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is an important technique used by Digital Marketers to research your audience. Not only do you learn about what your target audience is searching online but also how many potential customers are out there waiting for you to reach out to them.You can get started with the Google Adwords Keyword Research Tool to understand your audience. Get to know things like their language, city, interests & so much more.
Content Marketing
Google automatically filters out the results that contain poorly written content. The first step to marketing your content is to ensure the content is original & written by a human (Not automated). Of course you need to keep testing & monitoring results of what’s working. One brilliant way to go ahead with content marketing is to reuse content that works well. Let’s say you own a Coffee Shop, and a photograph of a local celebrity hanging out at your cafe received a lot of engagements, invite the celebrity & host him / her once again. This time you can get more creative & record a small video of the celebrity saying “Hey, I love the coffee here” & you know its going to work well.
Social Media is not only about Facebook Page Likes
Think of Social media more like building a community instead of building a fan page. It enables you to provide value to your existing customers & attract your potential customers. Its great to have a lot of Facebook page likes & you can straight away pay Facebook to advertise & attract likes. What’s more important is how you engage with your customers. If you own a Garage, would you prefer 50 people knowing about your Garage & 2 walk-ins per day or 20 people knowing about your Garage & 10 walk-ins per day? That’s why your attention on Social Media needs to be on engagement on the whole & not just the page likes.
Email Marketing will never die
We tend to miss out on email marketing thanks to all the social media networks that we have today. However, the conventional email marketing will never loose its importance. You have full control over what your client / customer receives and how many times a week your customer receives your emails. With social media algorithms changing every day its increasingly difficult to ensure that your content actually reaches out to your audience.
Internet allows two way communication
Customer satisfaction & feedback can be easily received online. Internet enables your product / service to go viral. I interned at a Robotics company during my college days & was provided with a additional responsibility of promoting a Robotics workshop. The turnover of the workshop almost doubled in the year when the participants were encouraged to talk about their experience on Social Media. Internet provides incredible opportunities to generate referral customers.
Affiliate marketing Reward the affiliates which bring you customers. Collaborate with popular networks / blogs / social media accounts / complimentary businesses to get exposure in-front of their customer base. Technically speaking, this is one of the oldest forms of marketing, however, people tend forget things that work in the offline world when it comes to Digital Marketing.
Curiosity drives more customer walk-ins
Provide your potential customer the basic information & limit the details. Curiosity helps in moving your customer to the next step in your sales funnel. The next step could be visiting you / contacting you by email or by phone, thus making it easier for you to close the deal.
About the author:
Viresh Vazirani is a Digital Marketing Consultant & the founder of Growth Gravy, a Growth Hacking Startup based in Goa. He is a graduate from the National Institute of Technology, Goa & serves as the Managing Editor of EDMofy, a Digital Portal of Electronic Dance Music (EDM) which has over 90,000 followers on social media.
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