When you decide to take your business online, you can be overwhelmed on the range of marketing options to choose from. Online marketing is not as hard as many business owners think. Most of the time, you will get by with a great website design, valuable content, networking with other industry influencers and connecting with your prospects on social media sites.

Whether you run a small or medium sized business are a start up or a home business entrepreneur, the following are tips on marketing your business so you get customers making orders on your website or at your store.

5 Tips on Marketing Your Business

1. Create compelling web content

This is the most important part of any online marketing campaign. Engaging web content will convert your site’s visitors into customers. Your content should be well written and appealing. The content should not always be about you, your business and your products. Instead, it should be geared more towards helping your prospects than selling your offers.

If you are not good at writing or creating compelling content, you can hire a content agency to help you. Your online content marketing strategy should follow the 80/20 rule. This means that 80% of your content should be about educating your prospects while only 20% should be about your products and services. Your content should take your audience down the sales funnel by greatly engaging them and leading them to your landing page with a strong calls to action.

2. How about you network and network

Getting to know other players in the industry is important. Face to face networking is common and sometimes gets boring. If you are not making new business contacts from the social or business events you are going to, you should try social networking online. Social media can drive loads of targeted traffic to your website, which can become leads.

Start social media networking on Facebook and Twitter and later expand to other networks based on where your target customers are. Social media networks are a great platform to connect with industry leaders and also learn what is happening in your industry. Social networking can increase your sales by an amazing 100% to even 1000%.

3. Have you started blogging?

This is one of my most valuable tips on marketing your business. Blogging is simple to start and possibly the best way to get targeted traffic to your website. Create valuable content and post it on your blog. Constantly update your blog with educational and entertaining article. React to comments in your post and endeavor to solve customers’ problems with the content you create. Make sure you optimize your articles with your target keywords to make your blog rank well on search engines.

4. Email marketing

Create landing pages with clear calls to action (CTAs) requesting only information that you need. When you get potential customers’ email addresses, send them regular content related to your business, products and services before you finally present them with offers and promotional content.

5. Professional web and graphic design

Don’t turn off visitors with ads that pop up on your website every minute. Poor color combination and congested content are signs of a lousy website. If you cannot design a website by yourself, let a professional do it.

Apart from the website, you need a professional logo that will leave a mark on your visitors.  Your website should load fast and be SEO optimized. A professional website is not just about aesthetics. Your social media profiles should also be linked to the website on the content you post.

The above 5 tips on marketing your business, simple as they look, require effort and time. Use this advice and your small or medium sized business will grow more than you expected.