Is your business doing enough to market itself digitally? As more and more of the world we live in moves online and people spend increasing amounts of time either glued to their smartphone or tablet or connected to the Internet, so business is going to be increasingly driven by the sales that can be made online.
Here are some cold, hard facts for you from 2017. At least 34% of businesses had an integrated digital marketing plan in place. 72% of marketers believed that traditional marketing was no longer sufficient for the promotion of their business and 80% of businesses were set to increase their digital marketing spending plan beyond their IT budget.
If all this makes you feel like you need to improve the digital arm of your business, then here are four ways to do so.
Have A Website
Seems ridiculous doesn’t it, but remarkably 29 percent of American businesses still don’t have a website. The website is the most obvious way into the digital world, allowing you to promote your company across the globe as well as sell goods. They aren’t hard to create either – just find a host using Hostingkingdom.com, select a suitable domain that highlights who you are and what you do and then either use a basic website customizer or hire a professional to do it for you.
Email Marketing
By collecting the email addresses of customers, you have a ready made contact list of people to alert whenever you have new services available or are running a promotion. You can gather contact details relatively easily with a form on your website which allows people to opt in to receive updates or by asking for it when a customer purchases goods or services from you. Don’t bombard them with emails otherwise they’ll simply ignore them all but it’s a good way to let people know when something of interest is occurring, potentially helping to boost your sales at the same time.
Use Social Media
81 percent of American’s had at least one social media account in 2017, be it Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or one of the many others available. It costs nothing to set your business up a Facebook page or a Twitter account, with which you can post regular updates to your fans and followers, making it one of the easiest ways available to digitally market your company.
Create Advertising Campaigns
Gone are the days when an advertisement placed in a local newspaper or on a billboard was the best way to reach customers. Now, it’s all about digital advertising. You can pay to have ads placed on Facebook and Twitter which will encourage friends of people who have already liked your page to do likewise. This helps you increase the audience for your social media posts and with it, the potential audience to sell to.
If getting likes and followers seems like a roundabout way of doing things, then you can just dive straight in with paid advertisements of your goods and services which will show up to thousands of people for a much cheaper price than advertising in traditional media.