How to Promote My Business Online and Get Stellar Results

Are you leveraging online marketing to generate more inquiries and clients for your business?

It’s unavoidable, nowadays, more and more people are using online search to look for information when they’re in need of help.

Google is a leader in online advertising with more than 3.5 billion search enquiries conducted every day.

For the first half of 2016, digital advertising revenue was $32.7 billion in the US.(Source)

The fact, if you aren’t using online search to your advantage, most likely, your competitors probably are.

Referrals are great for businesses, however, often, it lacks predictability.

When determining if running an online marketing campaign is right for your business, there are few things to pay attention to.

How to identify online opportunities for your business:

1) Research your competitors

When you’re unsure if running a marketing campaign is the right fit for your industry or business, the quickest way to make a decision is by studying your competition and snooping what they do online.

• Check their website(s)
• Check their social media accounts, such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc, you name it!

2) Keyword searches on Google

Find out what your competitors are doing.

• A simple way to identify what your competitors are doing is to type keywords relevant to your industry or your business in Google’s search engine and see what businesses appear.
• The point here is to
  • Identify paid Ads from your competitions.
  • Understand their online strategy to see what makes them unique.

Tip: Try out a couple of relevant search terms to give you better ideas and a holistic picture.

3) Use Google keyword planner tool

Google Keyword Planner is an AdWords Traffic Estimator tool that helps you determine if your search terms have sufficient search volume.

Google KeyWord Planner tool helps you identify keywords you can use for your AdWords campaign.

If your business targets a specific city or country, Keyword Planner can also help identify the relevant search volume in your targeted location.

Tip: In order to use the Google Keyword Planner, you’ll need to have a Google AdWords account. Login to your Google AdWords account, click on “Tools” from the toolbar and choose “Keyword Planner.”

 

4) Check Analytics data

Google Analytics measures your website, app, digital and offline data. Every website should have Google Analytics installed. The data you collected will help you understand how your site is performing and analyses your visitor’s behaviour.

Google Search Console helps you measure your website search performance. Again, every business website should have this installed because it tracks your SEO (search engine optimisation) results and measures your marketing performance.

Once you’ve identified opportunities for promoting your business online, the next step is to plan where to reach out to find your target audience.

Leverage Search Engine Opportunities

Online marketing is one of the best ways to reach out to your ideal clients quicker and faster when done right.

1) Website Traffic 

Is your website helping you generate new business opportunities? Are you getting enough traffic?

You can use Google Analytics to review your traffic data and understand your visitors better.

If your traffic generates a high volume of traffic and not getting enough enquiries, this may mean that you’ll need to review the website performance and user experience by tracking, analysing your site’s data and testing your site functionality.

Learn more about website optimisation here- conversion rate optimisation (CRO).

2) Organic Traffic 

Organic traffic can come from direct search, referrals, social or anywhere possible online without paying for Ads.

Heard of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)? SEO is not just about building backlinks. The structure of your website is also part of SEO criteria.

In our opinion, whether you utilise SEO strategy or not, SEO is the foundation that every business website should include. When done right, it not only helps your business build brand awareness but also increases traffic and inquiries. SEO requires patience and strategy rather than only picking up keywords and building backlinks.

 

3) Paid Traffic 

Paid traffic is one of the most effective ways to boost a business’s online results. It helps companies build a consistent flow of enquiries and grow the business steadily.

Options to advertise your business are:

Google AdWords

You may question whether people are sceptical when they come across paid ads on Google, but it is reported 46% of people can’t identify the paid ads on Google’s search results page.Search ads that may appear if you type ‘Accountant in Sydney’ in Google’s search engine.

Does investing in a Google AdWords strategy deliver results? It is reported that businesses make an average of $2 in income for every $1 they spend on AdWords (Google Economic Impact Report).

 

 

Bing Ads

Bing Ads is a search engine marketing platform, similar to Google AdWords in terms of the way it operates. Bing Ads however, have much less market share than Google. The benefit of utilising Bing Ads is the cost per click is much cheaper.

Bing Ads works well for industries such as technology, business finance, retails, travel, auto etc.

Search ads that may appear if you type ‘landscape solutions’ in Bing’s search engine.

Facebook Ads

The Facebook platform provides you with the opportunity to potentially target 1.5 billion active Facebook users per month (Wordstream). Facebook’s immense reach is exemplified by the fact that Australians spend more than half a day a week on Facebook.

LegalVision’s sponsored Facebook advertisement

LinkedIn Ads  

LinkedIn Ads are predominantly used for self-service advertising. You can choose to either use sponsored content or text ads. Linked Ads are used more often in the B2B market where the CPC (cost per click) is generally higher. You also have the option to select CPM (cost per impressions) rather than CPC (cost per click).

Manhattan Exchange’s sponsored ad for their event

Manhattan Exchange’s sponsored ad for their event

Remarketing

Remarketing is a clever way to reconnect with your visitors. Through remarketing you can leverage the traffic your website generates and reconnect with them through different channels such as Google AdWord, Facebook Advertising, Twitter Ads, LinkedIn Ads or other 3rd party platforms.

The most popular approaches  for small businesses to remarket are through Google AdWords and Facebook Ads.

 

Educate, Educate and Educate

When it comes to selling professional services, it’s important to help your visitors understand the value you can provide them.

Without being pushy or salesy, education-based marketing is a friendly approach to providing value and establish your brand. This method helps your visitors make informed decisions, build connections with you and view your business as the go-to brand in your industry.

Ways to move your prospects towards becoming paid clients:

Help your visitors and prospects understand how you can solve their problems.

• Utilise social media.
• Utilise your website’s blog post.
• Use the COPE strategy – create once, publish everywhere
  • 20% of creation and 80% of promotion

Utilise Marketing Automation to leverage your time and efforts.

• Focus on guiding visitors through your inquiry funnel.
• Create an automated inquiry process to guide your prospects to becoming a client.
  • An Email Marketing System is an automated system to follow up with your prospects.

Trends

1) The Buyer’s Journey

Personalisation and understanding the buyer’s journey are critical to craft a winning marketing campaign.

Thanks to the internet, nowadays, consumers have more options and opportunities to compare at their fingertips. That also means businesses need to be more creative and proactive to stand out to attract prospects’ attention.

Understanding prospects’ pain point, providing solutions, showing them the point of difference of your offerings at every stage of their decision-making process, it not only helps them aware of your brand but also bonds a stronger relationship with your business.

By focusing on meeting these consumer demands at each stage of the journey, this will guide your prospects to select your expertise eventually. More so, it helps your business stand out from the crowd.

2) Go Mobile and Go Home

As mobile readership continues to increase and dominate of digital presence, every business website should be optimised for mobile users.

70% of smartphone owners who bought something in a store first turned to their devices for information relevant to that purchase. (Source)

 

 

Statista predicts in 2020; mobile data traffic worldwide is expected to reach 30.6 exabytes per month at a compound annual growth rate of 53 percent.

Digital advertising revenue is consistently growing with mobile advertising, up by 89% since 2015. (Source). In 2016 mobile advertising accounts for $15.5 billion in revenue (Source).

Be mobile-minded is the primary focus when building your online marketing presence or campaigns.

 

Conclusion

Building your business for online success requires a strategy rather than implementing various tactics. A good marketing strategy involves being patient, following a plan, understanding your timeline, allocating your marketing budget and running a campaign with thorough research and continuous measurement.

In this article, we covered three main points from identifying if online marketing is right for your business to proven methods to leverage your website and search engines.

More so, when running an online marketing campaign, having a strategy in mind, educating your prospects through the buying cycle, automating the marketing processes will help you succeed quicker and better than your competitions.

Action Step

Want to learn more how to grow your professional services business online with Google AdWords?

Register our live event here.