If you had the time and looked hard enough, you could probably find a brand new marketing tool, tip, or tactic every day. They seem to pop up all the time. In fact, they pop up with such regularity that it's simply impossible to keep up with the information, let alone implement all of them. The key is to focus on the marketing strategies that work for you.
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Here are four that should arguably be a part of the marketing effort of every business.
SEO
Organic Google searches are a great way to get traffic to your website. When you have traffic, you can convert it into customers. SEO is a way of improving the quality of the traffic that you get and increasing the volume.
You can spend huge amounts of money beefing up your SEO efforts but it is not strictly necessary, particularly for small and medium sized businesses. Instead you should focus on creating a well-structured, mobile-friendly website. You should also make sure it is registered properly on Google Local, and is filled with useful content. From there, you can start reaching out to your existing network of contacts and build new contacts in order to get links.
Email Marketing
Despite being one of the old kids on the block, many marketing experts believe email is still the most effective form of marketing. People are comfortable with their email inboxes. If you provide valuable content, they will read it, and if people are reading your content, you have the opportunity to convert them into sales.
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You should therefore constantly work to increase your email subscriber list, and have an effective strategy in place to reach out to them with emails they want to read and click on.
Content Marketing
Content marketing involves creating content on a regular basis and then publishing it on your own website or on other websites. Creating a blog is one of the most popular forms of content marketing. But why is it important?
Content marketing is a great way to increase your authority in your niche. It also helps Google better understand what your website is about. It helps you pick up back links, provided that you create good quality content. Plus it gets you traffic from long-tail search queries. Content marketing requires effort, but it has many rewards.
Social Media
Social media can be used in marketing strategies in a number of different ways. For example, you can use it for brand awareness by building likes on Facebook and creating interesting content for that following. Or you can use Twitter to get information out to your customers quickly, or to answer queries. Alternatively you can use social media to build relationships and find leads – LinkedIn is particularly effective for this.
The strategies on this list do not require any level of technical knowledge, but they do require you to allocate time or resources. This can either be in-house, or you can outsourced. The most important thing is to do them well, though. If you do, they will yield results.
