There has never been a better time for the online marketing of your brick and mortar business. More and more business people are discovering the power that the internet holds for their marketing strategy and this is strongly indicated by statistics that show that more and more money is spent in the internet marketing industry.
What is internet marketing? It is the helpful resources generic term given to a wide range of strategies that businesses of all sizes and industries are using to promote themselves on the internet. These strategies have an increasing advantage over marketing through other forms of media like the television, the radio and in print (or braille if you’re blind).
These benefits are numerous. Firstly, people are spending more time online than they are in front of the TV, listening to the radio or reading any form of print (or indeed braille again) media. Secondly, many of these internet marketing strategies are free of charge. You can get into business for as little as the sum total of your internet service providers fee and this means that anyone can become successful in their online business.
You can use internet marketing to increase customer and prospect recognition; generate more sales; quickly, easily and cheaply outsource work to freelancers and other services that are more skilled and experienced in the work you need doing and if you are known for your industry and you look professional, you will gain the reputation of an expert in your industry and a reputable company that customers and prospects can look to and approach with the work that you do.
For brick and mortar companies who are new or unused to using the internet to promote their businesses, there are services available that will either teach you how to run a successful internet marketing strategy or many such services offer to do this part of the business for you themselves.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) Search engine optimisation is one of those ways that is more effective than paying for the service. Google is the most popular and well-known search engine on the internet and the organic results are by far the most popular results that are found on the search engine results pages.
If you have a large customer base already, or even if you are just starting out, email marketing is an awesome way to go. To do this, you can have an opt-in form on your website, blog or landing page that collects names and email addresses of your customers and prospects. You then build trust and create a relationship between your company and your readers (customers and prospects). You should provide value for your readers. You need to ask yourself what can you do for them that would help them in their lives and businesses. If you can build this trust, there is more chance of succeeding when you do approach them with offers and when you want them to buy from you. You must always put your value for them first.
OK so i said free, well this is cheap, but not free. However, it enables you to build relationships with your prospects and customers. I would only recommend a WordPress blog though as they have some awesome plugins that you can use to dramatically grow your business – and the plugins are free. You should put your email opt-in form on your blog with an incentive for people to sign up to your email list.
There is so much value in an article. There is so much that you can do with an article. You can submit it to article directories like EzineArticles. You can approach bloggers who blog about your industry and offer them your article. That’s a really cool way of using your articles as the articles are targeted towards the people who are interested in spending money in your industry. You can also, of course, use articles on your own blog.
You shouldn’t implement every strategy there is. You need to investigate and try each one to find the most effective one for you, but in the end you should only implement two or three strategies. There is a second part to this article as it would be too long to all go in one article, so please look through my EzineArticles articles for part two. This covers more free ways of getting your brick and mortar business the promotion it deserves on the internet.