In 2017, 9% of the overall United States retail sales were made online, and that number is predicted to grow to as much as 12.4% by 2020. All businesses invest heavily in online existence, so smallish companies must contend with big names to get a share of the online sector. We asked advertising experts for sound advice on how small businesses can advertise their websites effectively.
Here are the top 25 site marketing plan and ideas from the professionals.
1. Invest in Search Engine Optimization
Joyce Chou, Content Manager, Compose.ly
According to research from Web.com and greater Visibility, the average small business owner does not utilize search engine optimization and really comprehend what it is and the way it functions. But, it’s internet advertising’s secret weapon as strong search engine optimization plans help drive more visitors and, therefore, more customers to websites. SEO does this by making your website more visible like making it look further up on a search engine results page such as Google. After all, what good is a site if people can’t find it? Given budget limitations, though, it may not be possible for small companies to employ an in-house internet marketer.
Bearing that in mind, marketing companies and SEO consultants provide a cheaper alternative. They can evaluate your present internet strategy and identify keywords you would like your website to rank for. Instead, to get a more hands-on strategy, you can also look into sources like Udemy and Coursera to learn the basics of SEO.
2. Join Facebook Groups and Other Online Forums
Leslie Fischer, Founder, Sustainable Slumber
I always ask myself,”Where do my potential clients hang out online?” There are Facebook groups and online forums for every interest under sunlight. I join that discussion and observe their talks carefully to gain insights to what’s on their minds. In addition, if I find that someone has asked a question in that forum that my website could answer, I respond and give them a link to my website. These forum discussions are often at the best search results in Google, and should I answer that question well while visiting my site, that will create traffic for future visitors to this forum.
3. Leverage Existing Frameworks
Zack West, Director of Digital Marketing, Novomotus, Inc
The huge majority of small companies, such as many software-as-a-service businesses, don’t need a intricate website. Knowing the way the website is to be used should be the first step in website design for virtually any business enterprise. If a website is mostly likely to function as a digital business card, then have some business information, a blog, and maybe a subscription service, then there is no demand to get a full-scale development group. Leveraging existing frameworks like WordPress, Shopify, and Squarespace will help get modest companies moving fast. Hiring a developer to get everything setup and in working arrangement initially can be beneficial but hiring an agency can be overkill.
Using these types of frameworks can allow for bigger percentages of advertising budgets to be spent on SEO, cost-per-click advertisements and other revenue-driving strategies. Once a revenue stream has been established, it’s a whole lot easier to justify bringing in developers to help customize and produce more complex possibilities.
4. Understand Google AMP and Optimize for It
Ryan Gould, VP of Strategy and Marketing Services, Elevation Marketing
AMP, that stands for speedy cellular project, is an initiative by Google who aims to drive faster cellular page loading to make sure that users can look at the content they’re looking for as quickly as possible. AMP-optimized sites feature a turbo symbol next to the URL in a Google search (an indication to readers that the content will load quickly), and while Google hasn’t confirmed that AMP optimization is incorporated into its SEO algorithm, even when you believe that a substantial proportion of those sites that make it to the first page of results are AMP-enabled, you need to concern yourself with the strong correlation. Luckily, for even the least web-savvy marketers, there are plenty of easy to use plug-ins which can enable Google AMP support for your site.
5. Send Branded Giveaways to Your Clients
Vickie MacFadden, Owner, PROMOrx
Focus on existing customers by creating a trigger. One of our customers, an e-commerce company (no brick-and-mortar locations), purchases branded giveaways to ship with every order. Some previous orders they made were for jar openers, telephone pockets and pens. Their product is a consumable, so getting something their customers will keep and utilize, with their website front and center, provides them the trigger point that keeps customers heading back to get more.
6. Produce an Online Tool that Customers Really Need
Mike Jones, CEO, Resound
I’ve yet to meet a company that didn’t have some sort of questionnaire or cheat sheet or assessment they made new clients fill out to help them get started. Ordinarily, it’s a one-off sheet printed or emailed to the customer. Why don’t you turn this thing into an online tool that individuals are able to fill out before they contact you? Allow it to be helpful — have it spit out a nifty personalized report after they answer the queries. Be sure to get their contact data in the process — like every good marketer should do.
7. Optimize Your Usage of Pictures
Clair Belmonte, Founder/CMO, Belmonte Marketing
Optimize your pictures with a tool such as ImageOptim (for Mac) or RIOT (for PC) to speed up your website. Page rate is a substantial consideration for Google when ranking your website in search engine results and clients love a quick website. So, optimizing your images is an easy triumph for SEO. Large images require a while to load, so decreasing the size of your picture files signifies your website pages will load faster and graphics are somewhat more likely to successfully look. When your site moves quicker, customers are more inclined to keep on your site and browse through more pages. It’s not necessary to add another plugin to your website for this task — the tools above are quick, easy to use and great for optimizing images in bulk before you add them to your website.
8. Retarget Ads With Google AdWords
Edwin Plotts, Strategy Architect, Ladder.io
If your marketing budget is actually thin, start with search intent retargeting on AdWords (and maybe Bing). Retargeting is often the safest investment you can make as the traffic has been on your site, which means something about your business has already resonated. Also, most individuals do not instantly convert after landing on a website. They shop around. Search intent retargeting is a more cheap approach to remain top-of-mind while they Google other choices or competitors.
9. If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Measuring
Gregory Hook, Vice President of North American Region, QKiddo.com
As an e-commerce merchant, it’s very vital for QKiddo.com to maintain attracting the ideal clients through correct marketing and advertising procedures, not just to bring more internet visits and sales but also to minimize price. We highlight the power of advertising analytics to discover the correct marketing approaches — analyzing customer and buying behavior information to identify the requirements for different client segments, decide the most effective marketing channel for each customer section, evaluate the performance of advertising campaigns and adjust the advertising cost to ensure the return on investment is reasonable. We are glad that we have successfully attracted the right customers employing this procedure, given the fact that our retention rates to existing clients and new customer acquisition seem great.
10. Create a Robust FAQ Page
Brian Jensen, CEO, Congruent Digital
An effective top-of-the-funnel advertising strategy for your website is to create a robust FAQ page. In addition to providing an enhanced visitor experience, with Google’s featured snippets continuing to increase in prominence, listing and then resolving your business or niche’s most frequently asked questions on your site may qualify a question from the FAQ page with this research engine results page attribute. An added advantage for any featured snippet you’ll earn is that lots of voice search queries in Google are resolved using featured snippets. Simply speaking, FAQ pages can increase organic search traffic to get top-of-funnel searches and might qualify for a featured snippet that Google relies on for voice search.
11. Increase User Engagement With Videos
Bruce Himmelblau, Producer/YouTube Strategist, Blue Sky Video Productions
Take your website blog to the next level. Add encouraging video content into your blog pages by turning the written articles into a movie or simply by recording a conversation on movie and transcribing or summarizing it as text. You can host the video on YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia or other video hosting websites and embed it on your blog page. This won’t only increase your participation, but additionally, it will decrease your bounce rate by maintaining the visitors on your page more. Developing a movie to your blog page will aid your audience associate with you more since they will be able to see and listen to you on camera as opposed to simply reading what you wrote.
12. Conduct a User Story Workshop
Maria Mora, Content Director, Big Sea
Gather representatives from the sales and marketing teams, in addition to decision-makers on your organization, around the dining table to get a collaborative workshop. Take this time to determine exactly what site users expect to do when they reach your website and the way they accomplish those jobs. Odds are, you will immediately identify holes in your user experience. Use the information you’ve gathered to rework the flow of your site. Until this is working smoothly, you can’t expect your promotion attempts to do all the work.
13. Partner With Other Brands
Patrick Whatman, Head of Content, Mention
1 thing that’s worked well for us has been to find ways to associate with different brands on mutually beneficial content. We know our own reach isn’t quite as broad as when we combine forces with others. A good instance of this is the influencer marketing pile we created in November 2017. We asked five different companies with strong, established content and brand names to give their best influencer advertising content. We then assembled a new section on our site, combined all these tools to a one-click download and promoted it like mad on Product Hunt and social media. The result was a massive spike in traffic and lots of leads.
It was perfect because Mention did all of the hard work like design, development, and coordination and our spouses simply had to help us promote the item. We utilized proven content that had already been written. Our partners were happy to donate because their effort was minimal and we all received exposure, links, traffic and leads.
14. Boost Search Engine Ranking With Guestographics
Cécilien Dambon, SEO & Growth, Venngage
Building links is crucial when it comes to ranking higher in the search engine results pages (SERP). While guest posting is still a fantastic way to receive high quality backlinks, I believe that”guestographics” are somewhat more efficient. What’s a guestographic? In other words, it’s a guest infographic for an editorial website. Why is it more effective compared to guest posting? Because an infographic is more engaging than text and can bring value to already existing posts. In any case, you can make your own infographic in minutes by using an infographic manufacturer like Venngage. It makes the whole process of getting backlinks very cheap.
15. Become a Contributing Writer
Merrick Porcheddu, CEO, Artist Uprising
If you are looking to get the word out about your company, become a master in the area. Research reporters who cover stories about the media outlets that your clients read. Reach out into the reporter who covered a story previously that seems down the street of what your company does. Then submit a very short synopsis of what you’d contribute if given the chance. Don’t be shy. There’s no harm in asking a reporter if they’re open to leading writing ideas. If you’re an expert in the field, then give them something juicy to print. Guarantee that the journalist hyperlinks back to your company’s website.
16. Ensure That Your Site is Mobile-friendly
Ajay Prasad, President, GMR Web Team
Consumers are increasingly spending more of their time on their smartphones. This is essential for businesses to take into consideration when formulating their site strategy, because if your website isn’t mobile-friendly, then it might as well not exist. Not only is mobile-friendliness significant for SEO purposes (Google heavily takes mobile-friendliness to account when ranking sites ), but for a practical user experience too. Consumers aren’t likely to take the opportunity to pinch and then zoom to press on your poorly optimized checkbox on a cell site. Therefore, it is of extreme importance for businesses to go over their whole mobile website and make sure everything works properly.
17. Have a Solid Website Testing Strategy
Patrick Delehanty, Marketing Manager, Marcel Digital
Always seek advice from your site information — it’s your source of truth to exactly the way users are participating your website and articles. Once you examine data from the Google Analytics, look at installing Hotjar on your site. As a founding member, we at Marcel Digital continually use Hotjar for its warmth and click on map capacities as well as the user surveys and polls attributes to get feedback straight from our customers’ visitor resources. We then compile that information and hypothesize various website evaluations, such as design, content, and calls for action, which would greatly improve the general functioning of the site and conversions such as sales or leads.
18. Leverage Pinterest and SEO to Drive Website Traffic
Stephanie Pope, Partner, Hope & Harmony Farms
Unbeknownst to several e-commerce and small business owners, Pinterest is a shining star in the universe of societal media; properly optimized hooks, meta descriptions, and high-quality images can really help your pins (read: hyperlinks to your website) rank in search engines. A visual search engine, Pinterest has assisted lots of manufacturers drive traffic, increase traffic and boost positions for industry-relevant keywords.
19. Take a Newsletter Subscription Pop-up on Your Website
Harrison Doan, Director of Analytics, Saatva
Ensure that your site has a newsletter subscription pop-up when people arrive so they can get a way to connect with your brand beyond the site. Newsletters and direct marketing are a great way to talk straight to your viewers as it mostly engages people that have a deeper interest on your brand. By obtaining visitors to register, you’re able to use your newsletter as an extension of your site, marketing promotions and updates as they appear.
20. Hold a Contest Linked for Your Site
Sam Howard, Director, Magaluf Tickets LTD
We are a small dinning company serving Mallorca and specifically the holiday resort of Magaluf. 1 effort that we ran was a competition to guest DJ on our principal boat party alongside our resident DJ. This was sent out via a really prominent Facebook set for the DJ industry. To be able to finalize your submission to the competition, the applicants would have to talk about the use link, which was a link to a component of our website, on their Facebook page. We have hundreds of applicants and the webpage received in excess of a million hits.
21. Add Interactive Content for Your Website
Justine Beauregard, Owner & Founder, Mirelle Marketing
When it’s video for software companies, 360 images on e-commerce sites or click-to-reveal infographics for consultants, interactive articles is a unique (and enjoyable ) site design strategy that is guaranteed to get your prospects speaking. The more individuals share your website, the more customers will flock to it. From a sheer numbers perspective, this equals greater conversions and, if your site is optimized for conversions using strong calls to action and enticing gated content provides, you’ll see an incredible yield — fast.
22. Interview Influencers in Your Specialty
Shannon Mattern, CEO, WP+BFF
Interviewing influencers in your niche and turning those interviews into blog posts allow you to leverage social media to get in front of new audiences. Not only will influencers normally share the meeting with their own networks but, if you ask that influencer who their mentors are, you can give their mentors”shout outs” on social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn to get even more social networking mileage from these blog posts, leading to more traffic to your site.
23. Contribute Guest Posts to Non-retail Websites on Your Marketplace
Stefan Debois, Founder and CEO, Survey Anyplace
I can not recommend guest posts enough as a solid marketing strategy. Guest posts, first and foremost, help set you and your company as thought leaders. When customers Google your organization or your own CEO, visiting an educational, comprehensive guest article shows them that you know what you’re referring to. Additionally, it shows how you can assist them. Last, guest posts assist with SEO — that they enable you to include hyperlinks to webpages on your site using specific anchor text.
24. Treat Your Site like a Brick-and-Mortar Store
Jennifer Ludy, Owner, Ludy Media
Treat your website just like a searchable shop. Is it nice, inviting and organized? Does this have a definite call to action? Are your business hours, contact information, and address clearly visible on the first page of your website? Can it be focused on what the customer wants or what the company wants? Customer-friendly websites specializing in supplying value is crucial in a digital age. When marketing, you’ll want to address all these factors as well as others before you spend your first dollar on advertising to drive traffic to your website.
25. Be Open to Pivoting and Trying New Strategies
Brittney Johnson, Director for Product & Business Development, Quinn Tech Consulting
Website promotion is a container of several moving parts. A strategy which works amazingly for one business might not work for another. As a company, it is important to be receptive to many different approaches and continue to test performance. We think it is beneficial to research unique methods based on the”customer” needs and the way the business’ products and support will help resolve those requirements. Creativity can be a business’s Goldilocks buddy.
Over to You
Whether you have a brick-and-mortar establishment or a strictly e-commerce business, your site has an important role in creating more sales and developing your bottom line. Test some of the specialist hints in this article for yourself and get the best strategy and site advertising ideas for your website.
Can we miss out on your favorite site marketing plan? Tell us in the comments!