How to Take Advantage of Your Web Visitors (aka Conversion)
Online marketing is a multi-faceted process. Not only do you need a professional website, but you need a way for people to find your website. And then once you have visitors to your site, what do you do with them? Unless your website visitors are contacting you or becoming customers/readers/etc., what is the point of your website?
Luckily, there are a lot of ways to take advantage of your site visitors, no matter how many of them there are. The process of turning website visitors into customers or subscribers is called conversion. Here’s a simplified breakdown of what we do at SmallFuel when customers come to us to get more out of their web presence:
The 8 Steps of an Advertising Campaign
In the past, I worked with a business that made its decisions on where to advertise based entirely on which publications and stations actually called up and solicited an ad. While plenty of publications are cold-calling potential advertisers in hopes of getting a little ad revenue these days, I wouldn’t really recommend taking a similar route. Instead, approaching advertising like any other business project can guarantee that your advertising budget actually has the affect you want in the long-term. An advertising project isn’t so different from buying a new office or designing a new product: with the right process, you can complete your project efficiently and with great results.
How to Leverage Twitter for Your Business
At first glance, many small business owners have a hard time seeing a use for Twitter. It’s a site that allows you to post only short messages, and it seems like many users are effectively posting random comments. But Twitter can be a very effective tool for your business — and you can use it to market your product or service for free.
Here are some tips for those just starting out:
When Is It Time to Bring in a Marketing Professional?
Marketing professionals run the range from full-out marketing firms capable of every marketing technique under the sun down to freelance writers who just crank out copy from brochures. Marketing services are equally varied, as are marketing price tags. It’s that last one that leads many small business owners to do as much of their own marketing as possible: even when a business has the money to spare, it often seems more practical to upgrade equipment or improve the business in other ways than spend money on marketing. Just the same, though, there are several marketing situations when calling in a professional can have a tremendous result on your business — you can find opportunities where the cost of a little marketing help is completely out-weighed by the sales that marketing professional can bring in.
Personal Branding Vs. Branding A Small Business
The moment you decided on a name for your business, you started creating a brand for your company. Your brand — no matter what product of service your company offers — is crucial to your marketing. Every transaction your business makes affects your brand: if you provide good customer service, you’re building your brand just as much as if you take out an ad or give a speech. But there’s another kind of brand that you may be building, whether or not you’re aware of it. Just as people associate a brand with your business, they may also associate a brand with you.
5 Must-Know Facts About Printing Marketing Materials
Despite claims that all marketing is headed for the web, printed marketing materials can be crucial to your small business. Brochures, business cards and other printed materials can help you stick in a prospective customer’s mind in a way that a website may not. After all, it’s easier to keep a business card than it is to keep track of a business website. The importance of your printed marketing materials means that you need to make sure that they’re high quality. In some cases, that can mean paying extra to get the best printing — but if you know the facts about getting your marketing materials printed, you can often find better deals with better printers.
However, knowing what’s important when it comes to using a printer can be rather tricky, especially if you’ve never had anything printed before. In order for you to understand what’s involved with the printing process, here are 5 facts you need to know.
5 Marketing Blogs You Need To Read Every Day
Marketing doesn’t work in a vacuum: even the best marketers spend some time every day keeping up with new information in the field. That used to mean subscribing to industry magazines, going to marketing conferences and using other resources that were only affordable if you were doing marketing all day, every day. With the advent of blogs, though, there is plenty of marketing information available immediately and freely. Even better, it’s already broken down into articles short enough that a small business owner can read a few over the course of a busy day. There are thousands of quality marketing blogs available, but there are five that we’d particularly like to recommend reading every day — in addition to SmallFuel Marketing, of course.
