1. SEO – Search Engine Optimisation
Image Credit: Google
SEO involves adding keywords to the HTML of a website to boost it’s placement in organic search results. It is normally used to increase a websites ranking up the search engine listings so that more customers are directed to the website.
It is very easy to create a website or blog, but what is the use if you are page number 50 in the Google search rankings. SEO is very worth while for increasing traffic to a website when done correctly.
These SEO changes however, can take time to implement and show a positive return on work put in, mainly due to the fact that it takes a while for the website to organically rise up through the search rankings.
An example of a business losing out due to poor SEO is Navan Hire and Hardware.
A quick search for “hardware store Meath” on google shows that Navan Hire and Hardware comes nowhere on page one of the search results even though they would be a major builders supplier/hardware store in the county:
They actually only show up half way down the results on page two. Their biggest rival – Commons Hardware, appears first on the page.
When “hardware store Navan” is searched, they still only appear third in the google location ranking and fifth in the search results under other competitors:
This highlights the fact that if proper SEO along with better key-wording was implemented on the Navan Hire website it would bring it up the rankings and not leave it behind rivals in the region.
2. Email Marketing
Image Credit: susheelonline
Email marketing is the easiest way to send a commercial message to a group of people on a mailing list by email. Email marketing is permission based marketing form, so you do need to have a list of people to market to and you do require the permission of the person you are sending it to in the first place.
Look at your inbox nowadays versus back in the early 2000’s. I can almost guarantee that your inbox from the early 2000’s was a mess, with spam emails flooding in everyday. It was hard to see wanted personal emails for the amount of clutter! Today, thanks to filtering and algorithms, the inbox is clutter free with marketing emails potentially being diverted into your promotions folder and only personal emails making it to your primary inbox/folder. All this and very little spam emails coming in also.
Trade shows, organically having conversations with customers, service where the customer exchanged emails or even your website contact form/opt in/sign up form are all avenues that customer email lists can be built up.
It costs companies very little and most of the time, nothing at all to market products and services to potential customers via email marketing. They can immediately send out, or even schedule emails to send out a blanket message to a very large amount of people.
The flip side of this is that not everyone wants to receives these emails from companies and most of the time they get deleted without even being read at all. Companies have to think out of the box regarding email marketing to get noticed or it ends up being just a waste of time.
A great email marketing strategy can include knowing what you want to include in your emails to your customers, do i include money off/coupons for their next purchase? what links do i put in the email? what information am i trying to convey about my business so that customers go on to purchase.
Getting Started with Email Marketing:
The Do’s and Dont’s of Email Marketing:
3. Social Media – Facebook Advertising
Image Credit: Facebook for Business
Five years ago if you told somebody in a company’s marketing department that you were going to spend some of the marketing budget for that quarter advertising on Facebook they would have been miffed to say the least!
Sure why would you want to do that? – Facebook is only used to see what your mates are up to! But companies and individuals are seeing the benefits nowadays from advertising on Facebook – its the biggest social networking platform and it is where advertisers need to be.
More and more businesses are using Facebook to set-up a company page to promote their products and services. The setup of the page cost nothing to the business/company and advertising and promoting can cost as little as €5 to start off with. When you run a Facebook Advert, you choose the audiences that see it by location, age, interests and more.
With Facebook Adverts, you choose the type of people you want to reach and Facebook delivers your adverts to them. This makes your adverts more relevant for the people who see them, and brings the business real results.
The call to action feature is a brilliant feature that can be used to promote customer interaction and the call to action button can be changed to encourage a customer to click to visit an businesses online shop, sign up for a newsletter/campaign, contact the business and a lot of other options as shown below…
There are a lot of pros for using Facebook advertising to reach customers:
- Compared to traditional forms of advertising (television, print, etc.) Facebook advertising is extremely cost-effective. They have a minimum spend of just €5 per campaign and boast the lowest cost per 1,000 impressions (around €0.20 per 1,000 impressions… only 1% of TV ad cost).
- Facebook’s system automatically optimizes for the highest performing ad variations, so advertisers can create multiple ads within each campaign to see what performs best. That gives great feedback to businesses when figuring out what kind of content to create.
- It can be easy to target the customers you want via adverts if you know how to tweak the campaign boost/advert setting correctly.
There are also a few cons of using Facebook advertising:
- Reputation management policies need to in place. For example, if a customer is not happy with your product or service they have the ability to post negative comments on your Facebook page. Your support staff must either rectify the customers issue on Facebook or direct them to a support e-mail address. Deleting negative user comments is never a good idea as it can lead to trouble if the customer reacts.
- Lack of interaction with customers on Facebook and not publishing regular content can reflect very poorly on a business. A Facebook page is not just something to create and then forget about. Posts need to be regular and provide useful, relevant content.
- A businesses’ Facebook page should not be left to an intern or someone who thinks they know how to use Facebook. This is a common mistake made by business page owners. Social media is a powerful marketing tool. It’s important to represent a business in a professional manner.
4. YouTube
Image Credit: Internet marketing team
The worlds most popular video sharing website used by people worldwide to share videos is also being used by companies worldwide to promote their brands, products and services. The advantages of this are that it is free to post videos and they can reach a very large global audience.
Companies have taken advantage of YouTube by creating their own channels and using these channels to post videos about their product and services to customers. Take for example the Pepsi YouTube channel – They have large budgets spent on videos starring sports stars on their channel promoting their Pepsi max brand to sports fans.
In the below video, you will find that besides the title of “Pepsi max presents” there is no more pushing of the brand apart from subtle shots of fans holding Pepsi Max drinks in the crowd. They go on to state at the end of the video that the Pepsi Max product is a “zero-calorie cola in disguise” – Just like the NBA star in this video who goes in disguise to fool friends on a basketball court. This also informs viewers that it not a fattening sugary drink and portraying that sports stars drink it.
They have enlisted the help of NBA basketball star Kyrie Irving for this video, which helps bring fans of his and the NBA to visit YouTube/the Pepsi channel and search out the video, in turn raising the profile of the brand and hopefully increasing sales of Pepsi related products.
Their layout for their videos is purely to promote brand awareness. They have their logo in the bottom left of all the videos listed, they also have links to all their social media listed in every video summary – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google+ as well as a link to their main website.
With 42.8 million views on this video alone, 765,419 subscribers and 212,424,032 total channel views already racked up, this just goes to show that get it right and YouTube can be a very lucrative way of increasing brand awareness and in turn driving sales of product and services. This tied in with paid advertising on YouTube also, means that Pepsi would reach a large global audience.
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