Online Marketing Strategies

Having a website and various social media accounts is no longer enough to drive traffic to your site or customers to your store. You have to target the people you view as potential customers, plus you have to advertising to your current customers to keep them on board. In the electronic landscape, competition is fierce and, like anything, knowing how to work the system requires that you know how the system works.

Know your Customer Base

First and foremost, you must know your customer. You have to determine not only what they need but also where they hang out and where they go to get their information. If they check Yelp, then you need to be on Yelp, and you need to engage the people that post comments. If a customer posts that you worked hard and found the exact product they needed, reply to that post and thank them for the kudos and assure them you enjoyed helping them.

You don’t have to write novels, but you want to build relationships. Post in your own voice as if you were speaking to the commenter in person.

Know your Keywords

You also need to do keyword research. You may think you have optimized your website and blog for search engines, but if you used technical terms your customers aren’t likely to use, you may not get much traffic. You have to know how they are searching and what terms they are using.

Your business may have a Facebook page, but when a customer wants information about your product, they may go to various user forums instead. You should also go to these forums to answer questions and provide the link to your website. Not only will you become known in that community, but you will also let search engines see the link from that forum to your site, which increases your respectability. Several sites such as KeywordDiscovery.com and Wordtracker.com are good, plus you can also use the Google External Keyword tool. Once you find the keywords, use them.

Use Videos

Other ways you can maximize your marketing is through videos. If you get a new product in, make a video about it, and post it on your site and/or on YouTube. Be sure to tag it with the relevant keywords so it can be found. You’d be surprised how effective this can be.

Whenever you post new content, ping the search engines to let them know. They will crawl over and absorb the content, and when a search comes in, you’ll be there. Search engines like fresh content, but don’t wait for them to find yours. With social media marketing you must be proactive. Yes, it’s time consuming, but the increase in business will make it pay off.