No matter your experience level or where you’re starting, marketing on the internet can be tough work. You have to keep up with the evolution of the market and trends and the audience, and sometimes it can be a bit overwhelming, to say the least. There are many ways to market yourself and your business online, and not all of them are expensive or difficult to learn. Finding the right marketing strategy for you is a huge step to getting started back on the road to success for you and your business. This is why we’ve provided our top five online marketing strategies, and reasons why they might be right for you.
Social Media
Marketing on social media gives you a great place to start because you can reach an audience that you already have (friends, family, followers, etc.) and grow from there. Promote your products to people that know you, and elicit their help getting the word out. If you promote on your page, then they promote you on their page and so on, you’ll reach a wider audience faster than just trying to market on your blog or site alone. When the product is something people know is good and can get excited about, word spreads like wildfire. If you don’t have a social media account because you’ve been living under a rock for the last several years, don’t worry. Popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and Pinterest are all free to sign up, and make it easy to find friends, family, and others who are interested in the same things you are. If this is the case, I recommend starting out with Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest first, as the others can be a little difficult to gain momentum on.
Niche Blogs
Niche blogs are all the rage lately. Finding an established blog or two that target your market isn’t difficult – in fact, a quick search for something within your market will result in pages upon pages of unique blogs that focus on topics within your market niche. The ones on the front page aren’t always going to be the most well-established blogs, but the likelihood of them being well-established enough is high. Once you’ve found one that you like, contact the owner of the blog and ask to be featured. Give them ideas and reasons why you can bring value to their readers, and offer to send them a sample of your product. This will allow them to familiarize themselves with your product and decide if it’s something they’d like to feature, and you can even offer them a batch of samples to give away to their readers as a gift. This gets your product into the hands of potential customers so they can try it out, and will bring them to your page to purchase from you if they liked it.
YouTube Videos
Creating content on YouTube is free, and they offer a few different ways to upload videos, including a video maker and editor right on the site to use, and a video maker on the app as well so you can upload directly from your phone to your channel. With millions of unique viewers coming to the site every month, you can use YouTube as an incredible platform for marketing your business and products. With this, you’ll want to make sure you’re providing interesting, informative content to your viewers, not just selling them a product. Let them get to know you and your business, tell them about the products, offer giveaways and contests, and tell them to subscribe to your channel so they don’t miss updates on new products and services.
Since YouTube doesn’t really employ a tagging system like other social media, you’ll also want to use keywords suitable for your content within your title to ensure your video reaches people interested in products like yours. This can sometimes be challenging, but doing a quick keyword search online for similar products or markets can help you determine the most popular keywords used by potential customers.
Get Endorsed By A Local Celeb
No, this doesn’t mean get endorsed by a high-end celebrity or famous person, though if you are successful enough to do that, I’m not sure how much this article can help you. What this means, essentially, is reach out to someone who’s made an impact on your community, such as a local athlete, a local businessman, or even someone who’s been in the paper for an achievement or local contribution. This is similar to reaching out to a niche site or blogger, and since they’re in your community, they should be fairly easy to contact even if you don’t know them personally. Let them know that you’re a local business owner trying to get your online business noticed, and that you’d like to send them a gift or sample of you product. If they accept, check back in with them after a few days and get their honest feedback on your product. This can be helpful for marketing within your blog as well as improving your product, and if they like it, you can ask if they’d be willing to endorse it for you.
Contests
Who doesn’t love a good contest? I know I certainly do, especially if it’s for a product or service I’ve had my eye on for a while. This can be easily done on all forms of social media, just be careful not to get them mixed up if you’re running a different contest for each platform. This is a great way to market your products to a wide variety of people, and all you have to do is set the guidelines for the contest, tell people what their competing for, and let it run its course. For instance, if you’re running a contest on Instagram or Facebook, you can tell people to like and share the post to enter. Be sure to make it clear whether they can enter once or multiple times throughout the contest and how many times per day, otherwise it can get out of control fairly quickly. This not only gets your product noticed, therefore generating visibility for your site and likely revenue as well, but it will get your product into the hands of the winners, who may or may not have tried your product before. If they like it, not only are they likely to purchase from you again, they’re also likely to tell others about it as well.
