Internet marketing is the fool-proof way to reach your desired audience without breaking your bank. This makes it an excellent choice every small business can take into account. While such businesses don’t have a big budget to spend on advertising, completely dedicating yourself to Internet marketing can make use of your resources in the most efficient way possible—even better than paid ads!
However, Internet Marketing is no joke.
Thousands of people start up their businesses every day but only a handful of them make it to the next year successfully. Why? The slight difference between bridging the gap from 99.9% to 100% is what makes those handfuls of them to where they are now.
Here’s a complete beginner’s guide to Internet Marketing for small businesses that you need to go from zero to a hundred sustainably.
What is Internet Marketing?
Internet Marketing, also known as Online Marketing or Web advertising is a form of digital marketing that involves promoting your business or message via the internet to other channels like search engines, social media, email, and websites.
Given how diverse options are now, all businesses have different internet marketing strategies that help give them a competitive edge over the rest. And that’s exactly the key.
You can never gain your desired recognition and success if you have your eyes glued to your competitors. Sure, competitive research makes a big part of the Internet marketing world, but you also need to find the unique selling point that will ensure to make you stand out from the crowd.
Internet Marketing nowadays is responsible for driving traffic, generating leads, and finally making unprecedented sales to bring you closer to your goals every day.
How Internet Marketing Works
Thanks to the saturated old marketing techniques, it has lost its efficiency. Nobody likes being told what to buy. Salesperonnels get hung up on the call as soon as they mention their first service, door-to-door selling sounds more creepy than a profitable marketing scheme. In this situation, Internet Marketing takes a unique approach.
Where 615 million devices today use ad-blockers, Internet marketing makes sure that potential customers come looking for your business in times of need. It uses a personal approach by guiding, inspiring, and teaching customers what’s good for them to help them make the perfect decision.
This is where strategic planning comes into the picture. You spread your word on the internet in a way that works exactly like word of mouth but only written. Whether it is a shared blog post from your website on Twitter, a Facebook group, or a post on Pinterest, internet marketing makes it easier to give people what they are looking for at the right time, in the right place.
This means, instead of shoving your services randomly to people’s faces, you take a strategic approach to make yourself stand out.
Internet Marketing vs. Content Marketing
Although Internet Marketing is quite straightforward, to begin with; there are still many misconceptions between internet marketing and content marketing that indulge people to follow the wrong route. But I wouldn’t blame you. Content and Internet Marketing are incredibly similar in terms of the strategies used to target audiences and generate leads.
However, one is aiming to bring more traffic to your site, the other aims to convert this traffic into customers, or best, long-term customers.
Think of content marketing as a single pillar of internet marketing. In fact, Internet marketing is the broadest approach to market your content, help people understand and resonate with our service, and generate brand awareness for your small business. In a nutshell, content marketing is curating content for your website and social media.
Internet marketing is all about sharing this content to potential customers via email, search engines, and social media through paid advertising, SEO, graphics, retargeting, you name it.
5 Ways to Start Internet Marketing for Small Businesses
Keeping the fundamentals aside, here are the 5 proven ways that have done wonders for countless small businesses to grow their brand using internet marketing.
1. Design a User-Friendly Website
You could estimate the traffic of a business as soon as you have a look at its website. Not only do these websites loo good but are mobile-friendly, have branding, and are easy to navigate through to make the customer experience a lot more enjoyable. Therefore, spending a few extra bucks at perfecting your website can go a long way to improving the usability and exposure of your small business.
2. Blog Posts & Articles
You can never have enough information on your website and simply optimizing your homepage with a little information is simply not enough. The sooner you understand this, the better. The blog post gives you the opportunity to stay at the top of your customer’s minds using weekly or daily articles that get shared on all your social media platforms.
With this, people can save and share your content to ensure promotion with no effort from your end. By optimizing these blog posts with relevant keywords, you also increase your chances of being found through backlinks in SEO.
Later, this content can be shared on your email list via email marketing to help keep your customers coming back for more.
3. Create Social Media Campaigns
You leave lots of opportunities on the table by noting leveraging social media on your internet. Here I’m not talking about a single post on Facebook and Instagram but building yourself recognition on other platforms like Twitter, Quora, Pinterest, Reddit, and Facebook groups to target the maximum number of customers on all platforms. You can also make sure of LinkedIn to build a stronger industrial network and opportunities to expand.
Here, consistency is key to having an impressive social media presence.
4. Podcasts
Podcasts are one of the most underrated methods that small businesses try to try a broader range of audiences. Here comes the magic. With a podcast, you don’t necessarily have to create content from scratch. Simply center the focus around writing long-form articles on your website and use that information in your social media profiles and podcasts to promote it further.
For businesses, you can do storytelling, interviews, and touching upon pain points to inform different ways you can help your customers. Involving two-way communication and people in your internet marketing can boost credibility in your brand and generate more leads.
5. Internet Marketing for Brand Awareness and Loyalists
As a general rule of thumb, it costs five times more to attract new customers than to retain an old one. So not make all of them loyal and cut down costs even more? Feel free to use email marketing to send frequent promotional offers on seasonal occasions, birthdays or entice them to buy the products currently resting on their wishlist now. This helps customers think more about the brand and build a solid relationship with your business.
All in all, you can never go wrong with a robust Internet Marketing strategy. The key is to personalize it in a way that perfectly complements your strengths and goes beyond your weakness to help give you the veer needed competitive edge. So, create a checklist of the things mentioned above and get started right away!