Growing your business through online marketing - part one

With many people and business going online, there seems to be no better place to promote your business than online. This is actually necessary as more and more people are spending more time online via their mobile phones, laptop, desktops and tablets. Traditional methods of marketing ranging from banner ads, radio jingles, flyers and television advertisement still works, so, online marketing is not meant to and cannot replace the traditional methods but can work as a complement advertising weapon.
It is a proven fact that nowadays, people tend to make inquiry on the Internet about a particular product or service before purchasing. And, it is only your online presence that can bring your business and these group of searchers together.
The traditional methods of advertisement are usually expensive, that is why the advertisement messages are usually short and present in a rush manner. Whereas in online marketing which is cost effective, you have time to provide enough information on how your products and services can benefit users. Through quality contents you are able to motivate and persuade them to buy from you as some of them (through search engines) are already looking for your product.

Online marketing thus refer to all sort of method adopted online to reach your potential customers without letting the old ones slip through.

Few of the many strategies use for online marketing are
 
Paid reviews
This is the method of paying someone who is so influential online to write something good about your product or service in order to occupy a good market positioning in the mind of the public, without appearing to be paid to do so . Advertisers usually use authority bloggers, people with huge number of followers on twitter, Facebook and other social media network for their paid review and promotional campaign.

Email marketing
This involves sending commercial messages to people who have subscribe to your email list. You would have used squeeze page and opt- in form to subscribe people to your list. If you really want to make money selling products or service online, you must give serious attention to email marketing.

Visual marketing
This involves displaying your products, service or brand name in online television shows, online movies, online video games, youTube videos etc. Visual marketing is a very effective form of online marketing as some people prefer visual to text. The popularity of youTube videos have made visual marketing a sort after and modern method of advertisement. YouTube stated that an estimated 1 billion people on average are visiting their site every month. So, why not advertise your product through visual marketing such as youTube videos where it can be viewed by million of people within a short period of time.

Social media marketing
It is high time you create a business account with one or several social media platforms if you have not done so. Your business environ is social and one of the ways you can show that your business is also social is to have an online social presence. This will help your business to always stay connected with your current and potential customers through sharing of commercial and non-'commercial information at will. After creating a social media account, you should strive hard to build a huge number of followers by sharing good quality contents and giving of incentives.
One of the benefits of promoting on social media is that if you have many followers, say 50000, a post to these 50000 followers can be read by up to 1 million people or more who are also friends and followers of your main followers and friends.
Any modern business should consider it a must to create a social media account to compete favorably with competitors. Some popular social media network you can have an account with include Facebook.com, linkedin.com myspace.com, pinterest.com, whatsapp.com and twitter.com

Through e- newsletter
E-newsletter is an electronic newsletter which is distributed regularly via email to people who might be interested in it e.g subscribers.
You can use e-newsletters to provide both commercial and non- commercial information to your customers. You can use e-newsletters to promote your business by including news about upcoming events in your organization. It is faster and cost friendly than the traditional newsletter because it is done electronically via email.

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