There isn’t just one area of the internet that a small to medium-sized business should pump resources into, not if their goals are to build an audience, drive traffic, and increase sales. Digital marketing success comes from leveraging the power of multiple channels, some of which you own like your website and others where you are merely an active participant.
Should We Have a Company Blog?
The answer to this question is yes and it will always will be a resounding yes. Blogs are a great way to communicate important tenets of your business, including personality, personnel, announcements, products, and services.
With respect to SEO, blogs allow you to create webpages with fresh content and keywords to help a search engine do its job of indexing and ranking. It creates many side doors into your website, which is especially useful if your homepage isn’t highly ranked. If you don’t have a company blog, you would be wise to start one right away and to make sure you contribute at least one new post a week. Don’t forget to hyperlink to important internal pages or landing pages and to always end with a strong call-to-action.
Effective Email Marketing
Consistent email marketing is a great avenue to generate new leads. Your mailing list should be a mix of existing customers and people who have shown an interest in your business.
Here are some ways to make sure your emails are designed to drive leads:
- Pay attention to your opt-in strategy. You want to give people a reason to subscribe to your email otherwise it will become an exercise in how quickly recipients will click unsubscribe. We’d recommend not buying mailing list as engaging with unsuspecting people won’t yield results.
- Make every email easily shareable. This means including a feature that allows a recipient to forward the email onto someone else. Additionally, include copy that encourages them to share.
- Work promotions and offers into your email strategy. People like deals or freebies so toss them a bone every now and then.
Email marketing should be a vital part of your lead generating activity.
Don’t Forget About Social Media
Social media isn’t just a frivolously place for cat videos and complaining about Game of Thrones. It is also a amazing lead generation tool.
Here are some tips to make sure you use it properly:
- The first step should be audience building. Treat every follower as special and make sure you are engaging with them regularly.
- Get to know your audience. Social media is about lifting the opaque veneer of a business to give people a better glimpse of your true colours.
- Leverage the power of influencers. This might cost money or products but if you can enlist some influencers per network to promote your business you can see an enormous uptick in leads.
If you’ve been ignoring social media or not using it to drive leads than you’ve been missing out.
