So I received several email acknowledging and requesting I share more trends about the impact of digital and social media on business and I will be ending the year by sharing some of them. However trends are only as powerful as the people who understand how it works and how to leverage them. The last quarter is not only the season to learn how to finish the year big, it is also the time to identify how to being three year in a strong way. If your have a goal, you need tactical plans to achieve it. If you want your business to grow with more customers, how do you identify where they hang out online? With everyone on their mobile phones, how to you get the front line seat to getting their attention. With connected individual reading receiving an average of 50 emails every day, how do you ensure you get your share of attentions and do not end up in some junk folder? How do you plan to get more people online to listen to your promotional content online? how do you sustain the attention of your target market? What tactical plan to build a brand strong enough to make people happy to pay more and to be willing to do so repeatedly. Here are my simple checklist to help you promote your business this year.
Paid Advertising:
While most people are thinking online marketing is a free economy, there is a lot more adverting in putting your dollars and naira into online advertising. Several social networks have opened up their customers to advertisers and there is a ton of benefits if you actually pay to promote your business as against the free options provided to many other people. For example, expecting your websites to naturally rank well in search engines is good, but helping your website by actually paying for adverts will ultimately affect your rankings. Some of the common websites where this can be done include LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. The power of this approach is the ability to hone in on a selected target market and at place your adverts in a cost effective manner.
Email Marketing:
Apart from owning your website, emails are one of the most common way people are encouraged to promote their business. However what most people do is to look for emails and start sending ‘çold emails’ hoping they turn into customers. On the other hand today’s customers are becoming smarter and can identify spam email a mile away. One thing you need to start doing is to begin collecting emails from your own website. Your website needs to be your most effective marketer and you need to ensure it not only focused on answering questions from potential customers, it should also provide options for people to drop their emails through a great email marketing system.
Content Marketing
Oh content marketing will be big business in 2016. People are already creating awesome content and businesses are already leveraging the content creators to grow their businesses. To the uninitiated, content refers to articles, pictures, videos, online contests, music, campaigns e.t.c. particularly when it comes to videos, smart businesses will allocate more budgets to this in the coming year. The trend is already obvious to those looking out for it, people will rather watch your tutorial than read it, why not create content that will demonstrate your expertise, emphasize your benefits thereby leading your customers on a journal of credibility and profits. Develop remarkable, interesting, informative, newsworthy, controversial, opinionated content and people will share it with others without having to beg them. People who love your content are more likely to buy from you.
Other People’s Websites:
This is great especially if you have physical products to sell. While it is great to create your website and sell products, there website who are acting as middle men by enabling you reach out to their database as a merchant. Most of the popular websites are involved in this approach including Konga, Jumia and Tafoo and Gloo because they are also looking for products to offer their online visitors. Contact online deal sites like Rytedeals and DealDey, they are looking for online promotions offer their teeming website visitors. It works in two ways for you; it generates publicity for your business and traffic to your website.
If what you offer is a service, you can promote you expertise by offering your perspective within by contributing content on well-known websites. This is a great way to drive referral traffic back to your site from readers, who are interested to learn about your insight.
Implement Analytics:
The days of guesswork marketing is officially over. If you will succeed in the coming year, it will be because you understand the metrics behind the activities and know how to use the numbers to your advantage. Without sounding like a textbook, analytics is the study of historical data related to consumer behaviour on websites, social networks and marketing techniques and using that data and insights as a basic of your business and marketing decisions. When online movie distributions portal iROKO TV shut down its website and replaced it with a web application, one of the basis of its decisions was because statistics said that over half of its African website visitors access their website via their mobile phones.
Tactics are great, but they must fit into your overall strategy. The problem most times is that people understand these techniques but so not understand how this fit into their customer online journey, how to gradually ‘market’ and nudge your customers and eventually sustain a profitable relationship with your customers. What are your planning to do differently in 2016?