Marketing Strategies That Can Help Your Business

One of the main challenges when trying to grow your business is budgeting. Most small businesses tend to have a limited budget after having focused on initial start up costs, products, inventory and possibly a few marketing campaigns that may not have been the right choice at the moment.

Make sure your campaigns have been carefully set in place and initiated at the right moment during your business' growth when spending money on any marketing strategy.

These strategies are not only important when growing your business or improving your brand recognition. They are also great when on a limited budget.

1. Social Media

Social Media Marketing can be an extremely useful method in promoting your brand, expanding your recognition, creating trust and generating traffic to your website.

Nearly all businesses should at least have a Facebook. Depending on your type of business, you can even expand to social media platforms such as Pinterest, Twitter, Snapchat or YouTube.

There are a lot of pros and cons that we can get into for each one of these platforms. For the purpose of this article, let's focus on some of the pros.

Leveraging social media to benefit your brand can be done in a variety of ways. You can engage with your target audience directly by creating posts that offer more of an insight on what sets your brand apart from your competitors. The best way to use social media isn't by advertising every products you wish to sell. Rather, giving your audience a reason to trust you and your brand.

See Also: Should You Use Marketing Bots?

Giveaways are a good way of expanding your followers and creating that trust. By offering something for free, you are telling your potential customers that you care about them. Also, you're giving them a sample of what it is you wish to sell, so that they can tell their friends and family.

It is important not to immediately boost your posts or pay for advertising on social media platforms, unless you have already established a bit of trust among your audience. Immediately paying for these types of campaigns without high user engagement will result in a high CPC (cost-per-click). Facebook, Google & Instagram will work with the settings you chose to make sure you get the results they promised. They do this by raising your cost per click in order to engage with more of an audience.

2. Email Marketing

There are several ways to leverage email marketing and expand your subscriber base. Email marketing is very useful for any type of business. There are certain strategies and methods that can help increase the engagement and CTR (click thru rate) of your campaigns, but a simple email campaign is necessary to keep your audience engaged.

MailChimp is a great marketing platform that is free to use if you have less than 2,000 email subscribers. They offer automation campaigns and welcome emails that way you can directly engage with your new and existing subscribers on a scheduled basis. Automate your emails so that you can save time to focus on your business.

Springbot is another great marketing platform that is extremely powerful in expanding upon your email marketing strategies. Getting setup with Springbot starts at $199/month. You can customize your strategy that way you only pay for what you are going to use for your campaign. Not only do they do everything MailChimp can do, as far as automation and welcome emails goes, but they expand on this by sending out abandon cart emails for eCommerce stores and various other triggered emails on a scheduled basis. Their team helps create these strategies for you based on their own experience and setup automation that send out welcome emails, abandon cart emails, anniversary email and more all customized specifically based on your type of customer.

Another great way to massively increase your subscriber base is by integrating a popup or lead generation form on your website. You can accomplish this in many ways and it works best when customized specifically for your brand and your audience.

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3. Direct Marketing

Direct Marketing is a unique paid marketing strategy that differs from traditional paid marketing strategies such as PPC (pay-per-click) advertising. PPC advertising included Google Adwords and Facebook Ads which we discussed earlier.

Direct marketing or Targeted Marketing is a strategy where advertise directly to your potential audience. This is based on your current or target demographic. Campaigns like these speak directly to your customer, rather than an audience. These campaigns are more effective than any other paid marketing campaign, when growing your business.

You can use Facebook Ads to create direct marketing campaigns and these can be very useful when done correctly. It is still best to make sure you have tackled all of your other free or organic marketing strategies before investing too much in these campaigns.

One great example of direct marketing is by sending out advertisements to to your demographic locally. This lets your community know that you exist, and when done in conjunction with other campaigns, the message is sure to get across.

4. Blogs & Articles

Writing articles for your website's blog is a powerful way in marketing your brand. This method combines the important aspects of other campaign strategies, such as, brand recognition, trust, targeted marketing and SEO - which we will get to in the next step.

When writing blog articles, it is important that your content remains faithful to your brand. You want to have a specific end goal in mind and make sure that you are navigating towards that goal. Make sure your content is informative, well-written, and backed with research. If you can create an article that is worth sharing with the rest of the world, that would in turn result in more traffic and more back-links to your website.

Your articles must be optimized for search engines. We can accomplish this by using various tools and research regarding your key phrases, content, headings and images.

5. Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization. The most powerful marketing strategy. Search Engine Optimization or SEO, may refer to a plethora of marketing strategies. In fact, anything you that leverages your ranking on search engines may be considered SEO.

On-site SEO is a must, and, in order for this to work effectively, you must make sure your website itself is optimized. If you produce great content, but your website is just not fast enough, you won't be able to fully reach your potential.

Your website should be hosted on it's own dedicated server, optimized for speed, performance and security. Your website can only be as fast as your server will allow.

See Also: How Much Does DigitalOcean Cost?

There are a lot of resources that go into building a website. It is easy to overdo this. Your site should be built with the right resources so that they too are optimized. This can all come down to, among many other things, the type or size font you are using.

Test your website at GTmetrix, or any other online page speed analysis, and make sure that your website is loading in about 1-3 seconds.

Then, with on-site SEO, you can optimize every image, page, category, article and more, all on your website in order for Google to scan, index and rank your site on the top of search results.

Digital Marketing Help

It is important to create a strategy that strings all of these campaigns together within a unified and scheduled approach.

We help manage campaigns like these, so that you can focus on the important aspects of managing and keeping your business operating. 

We specialize in digital marketing, with over a decade of experience, making these campaign strategies work.

Contact us at realnicewebsites@gmail.com to discuss a strategy that will help launch your business.

What Are Marketing Bots?

What are marketing bots and how should you use them? If you’re not familiar with what a “marketing bot” is, it is anything that automates a marketing task usually used for businesses in order to get more customers.

Each and every day our world’s technology is improving. Specifically, artificial intelligence, which has seen a tremendous rise throughout society. This new technology can be very useful--if used correctly.

In terms of digital marketing, automation can help with certain processes which are otherwise tedious or daunting. Through automation, or by using bots, we can pull articles from our blog and post to our various social media pages based on a specific schedule. Also, we can schedule emails, which can be sent out weekly, daily, monthly; never missing a beat with future promotions and staying relevant with our audience. We can customize and personalize the user experience and create promotions to automatically notify new subscribers or send welcome messages.

Even by using A.I technology, we can accomplish some very interesting things while working with certain algorithms and creating a non-stop flow of new and exciting content.

These tools can be very powerful, on the other hand this technology can be very damaging to your business.

Bots Can Kill Your Marketing Strategy

There are thousands of digital marketing companies in the US. Not all of them are going to be the best. When there is an opportunity and shortcuts available, some may decide to go that route, rather than doing things the right way. 

One example of the exploitation of bots comes from a digital marketing agency in the area. Their scam, and I don't use the word lightly, was to have their client pay them to run a bot on their computer. The client isn't going to know that the program they are using is a bot, nor would they understand the risks, especially when focusing on the reward. It would cost $200/month to run a program on your own computer. You pay the marketing agency who came up with this whole scam and the bot then spams Google with key searches related to your business. Hundreds of times a day. All day. Every day. Using various proxied IP address, Google then thinks that your business is so popular and is being Googled by tens of thousands of users, every single day.

This might trick Google, but it doesn't take long for them to catch on. The sudden surge in search results, the consistency of the search terms. Nevertheless, when you decide, "Great! I am now ranking for 'Kid's Birthday Parties.' I do not need to use this program anymore." or, the agency no longer offers this service, your search queries drop. Going from hundreds of thousands of searches to a mere dozen or so.

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The consequences of toying with Google's algorithm is what you might expect. You won't be appearing on their search results. Not on page 1, not on page 2, not on page 5. Somewhere buried in the abyss right after every single one of your possible competitors. This probationary period can last a long time. Sometimes a year or two. Even if you spend all this money working on your SEO or search console issues, you still have to wait. It really is whenever they feel like you've 'learned your lesson'.

One of the more popular ways to exploit bots for marketing is by using social media bots in order to gain a large amount of followers within minutes. There are several ways to purchase followers online for as low as 1.0¢/per follower. That’s 1,000 followers, or likes, for just $10. Sounds great, right?

Here’s what happens when you purchase followers or Facebook likes. Obviously, the amount of likes on your page increases. This gives off the impression that your page is popular, or that your business is well-known. Except for the fact that these likes you purchased are coming from fake accounts or accounts that have no interest in your page or business and are unlikely to fit your target demographic. They are practically never going to engage in your content and others will see that.

Your actual potential audience may notice the extremely high amount of likes or followers and extremely low amount of engagement on your posts. If you have 3,000 likes on your Facebook page and you are only getting one or two likes on a post, then not only does that look suspicious to your audience, but that actually has very real consequences for your page and ultimately your business.

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Fake Facebook Followers

In 2014, Facebook announced that of their 1.23 billion followers at the time, 11.2% were fake followers. As much as they try to weed out the spammy accounts, their efforts are largely unsuccessful. What Facebook does, however, is punish the pages that may or may not be aware that they have a large amount of fake followers. They do this by removing your page from the news feed. Like Google, major tech companies have their own algorithms in order to keep their projects relevant and service valuable. For instance, Facebook rewards pages with relevant content and true user engagement by giving them priority in the user's news feed.

In 2019, Facebook had shut down over 5 billion fake accounts. Each year, they remove billions of fake accounts from using their services.

If your profile has fake followers, you most likely have low user engagement, and even if your actual followers are actually following your page, your content won’t always show up in their news feed. Many major companies, such as YouTube, Twitter, Instagram & Google all use this reward and punishment tactic in order to prevent spammy accounts from spoiling their services. When they are actively removing these accounts from their platforms, you will be losing a majority of your followers, which also has been seen to result in your account being put on a sort of probation.

Are Bots Bad?

Bots can be used to help automate our otherwise mundane routine needed to keep our accounts relevant. There are ways to use bots, automation or even A.I technology to help handle certain tasks. Automated posts scheduling, emails, welcome messages, chat bots, these are all acceptable uses of the technology.

When this type of technology is exploited, there are almost always consequences. Using bots to fill out contact forms, sending unsolicited emails, spamming keywords, spamming Google searches, buying followers, these are just some of the many ways the people use bots to boost their internet presence. You may not always be aware of these things. You may have hired an agency that promised amazing results, holding secrets to success that only they know.

Unfortunately, it isn't them who has to deal with the consequences. Your internet presence and your brand is what is effected. It isn't a minor issue to deal with either. You may be lured into paying even more money to help with your failing internet presence or low user-engagement. You may be overpaying for your Facebook or Google ads due to this. Your business should be making money. Granted, you must spend money to make money. But, if it sounds too good to be true, if you're being promised spectacular results, thousands of followers in just a matter of hours, then it probably is too good to be true.

Be educated. Be cautious. Don't exploit the use of bots.

How Much Does it Cost to Build an App?

There are several factors to consider when estimating the cost of building an app. Mobile apps built and developed by large companies can cost anywhere between $100,000 to $1,000,000. Sometimes more. Other agencies advertise up to $500,000, while smaller developers are likely charge anywhere between $5,000 to $50,000.

The mobile industry is a multi-billion dollar industry. In 2018, the industry generated over $360 billion dollars (USD) worldwide. In 2017, it was reported that 57% of all digital media usage comes from mobile apps. Therefore, because of these market trends, corporations are capitlizing on the industry. From fast food apps to music streaming services, and everything in between.

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