In the online world, it is important to “sell” your online brand so that it stands out above your competitors. That is where smart Internet marketing comes in handy. This will help visitors find and remember you, which can result in more traffic and more profits. And if you’re a small business, you need to consider all of your marketing options before spending your hard earned money. Advertising for small business is easy for the experienced business person; however, others may struggle with the concept of using the Internet to market their small business. If you’re looking for free advertising ideas for small business, follow these tips to make your website stand out above the rest.
When email marketing, test both HTML and text versions of your email message. While you might think that the graphics possible in HTML would offer higher open rates, oftentimes it is the exact opposite. Text-based emails can be a surprisingly strong tool in your arsenal. They are less likely to be marked as spam and they typically feel more authentic to the reader.
Even if you are a one person business, use your website to give the impression that your business is huge. Use professional graphics, an organized layout, and a top of the line ordering system to make your business appear to be a giant of industry, even if it is just you in your home office.
Learn that improvements can always be made. Just because you think your website looks perfect, does not mean that it is. Look at competitor pages to see how and why they are showcasing their products and try to one-up them. There is no such thing as a perfect website and the sooner a website owner recognizes that, the sooner they can make positive changes.
Make sure your review speaks to everybody. Some readers want general information about the product, while some are looking for a very specific feature. Organize your review so that technical details are easy to find. Start off with a very general introduction that explains what the product does and then progress towards the details.
Reaching out to ‘influencers’ online is an incredible marketing technique. ‘Influencers’ are people whose messages reach a large number of people. They typically contribute to a blog frequently and tend to be involved in many online communities. You can have access to this large number of people and instigate them to action through an ‘influencer’ if you can make friends with them, and present your product in a positive light.
Use social media wisely. Remember that social media is mostly word-of-mouth, and if you have a dissatisfied customer, things can quickly spiral out of control. Be prompt and courteous when addressing these issues, and you will gain, or re-gain, the trust of the customers who have been informed of the problem.
No matter what you state in your advertisements, make sure you provide evidence to support it. Many individuals do not trust what they read. If you include testimonials, studies, guarantees or references, you will seem much more credible and are more likely to get a sale. If you simply make statements without any proof, many people will simply dismiss your product and your business.
A very important tip for Internet marketing is to keep track of all site data. You should pay careful attention to all of the visitors for your site. Information such as where the visitors come from, what they do upon visiting the website, and how long they stay on the website are all important and should be analyzed regularly.
If you can offer some sort of consultation to your web visitors before they decide to purchase your product. This is a great internet marketing technique because people can talk directly to you and you can use your closing skills to seal the deal. Offer either a chat session online or provide a phone number where they can speak with you.
As you can see from the previous list of tips, Internet marketing can really make a difference in the strength of your online presence. It takes a lot of work, a lot of networking, and tons of patience, but it is all worth it in the end to have a successful online business.
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10 Comments on "Free Advertising Ideas For Small Businesses"
I agree about using graphics sparingly in your emails which you send out. For one thing, everyone’s email settings are set to block all images until the user clicks the “show images button or sets your email address to automatically load images from all future emails. In my experience from having designed email newsletters I have found a good balance by sticking to the following guideline: Use plain text to state your main message as well as anything else that is important and that your recipients must read. Use graphics only to enhance, emphasize or repeat a key message which you have already stated in plain text. By following this guideline, you will ensure that recipients can get your message just by glancing at your email and without having to press any buttons. Once they do begin to trust your emails and get familiar with their format, they may set their email client settings to download all images coming from your email address.
Internet marketing is such a numbers game. At first, when you are just learning, the number of hours you spend will add up and become many as you research and learn about what works and what does not. Then you will discover that you have to invest a certain number of dollars to buy certain software or plug ins for your site or to automate certain tasks. Then once you’ll find yourself counting statistical numbers such as the number of followers you have or the number of emails sent. And once you finally do become experienced, you won’t escape the number counting as you analye the success rates of your promotional campaigns. By the time you get to this stage, you may as well consider yourself a quant.
I am glad to say that some of the tips that Tom Chuong provides in this blog article are things which I have been doing on the web instinctively. I have been emulating the web site style and layouts of corporate giants. And when I design a print ad or banner, I take inspiration from the national print ads by thumbing through major glossy magazine publications and selecting ads which catch my attention. This is something I started practicing when I first started working in internet advertising back during the dot com boon of the internet. We used to subscribe to Ad Age and other advertising publications and select the best ads to study and emulate. This resulted in some very creative ad concepts which I conceptualized over the years.
Email marketing can get quite tricky and can seem pretty technical and complicated to those with less IT experience. Many persons who want to mass market and through email are doing it for the first time tend to want to put out quantities of email rather than make sure each that each email offers quality information. Let’s face it, to put out a good email, it takes time to prepare it and organize the message so it is easy for the reader to assimilate.
What is the best way to do email marketing? How do you get it out to a large number of people? Where do you get the email addresses from? Not only do graphics not offer higher open rates but they sometimes will slow down the email from opening, causing the reader to close it and go on to the next one. Would something like Twitter be better for this purpose?
Using social media is an excellent way to advertise that is correct and the statement you made about most people not trusting what they read is also very true, I have found though that even if you have testimonials and references and such in your advertisement they some times still won’t believe it. Maybe if you offer something like a free trial or something they might believe it then.
Your advice about making improvements to your web site, are right on the money. I read not to long ago that if you want your web site to be a top ranking web site you had to update your content every three days or the Google search engine spiders were not going to find your web site anymore causing it to lose rankings.
I like your idea of using the web site to make the business seem huge. That is a great idea, I have to admit that being as I am a one man business right now the internet was rather intimidating right now because I didn’t know if I would have time to keep it up and run the brick and mortar business as well. You have given some great advice here though
Based on what I have been seeing in various marketing training sites, the first stage, before you begin sending out emails, is to build your subscriber list. So once you have the infrastructure of your news letter mailer setup, meaning once you have an email sending module, it is time to focus on generating traffic in order to build your list of subscribers. Once you start to get sign ups, have a sequential email sending module ready to go.
Your reader comments are very true, the graphics you use are automatically blocked in most cases in other they take to long to open and it slows everything down. The more this happens the less readers you are going to have because everyone wants instant access. If it is opening to slow they will move on to the next one. Use graphics sparingly.