The internet is a highly competitive place for businesses. Getting noticed is not easy in a sea of other companies who may be providing similar products or services; the key is to establish yourself as a thought leader so that people get to know you as one of the trusted names in your industry. Buyers now prefer to do their own research online rather than listening to sales pitches - here's how you can make sure that yours is the authoritative voice answering the questions your potential customers are asking.
The world is a very different place from what it was a few months ago, and in addition to the personal changes we've all had to make, business are also having to learn how to adapt and survive in an unfamiliar landscape. If you're looking at this new reality and wondering how best to allocate limited resources, here are some things you can do right now to maximize the return on your marketing budget and carry your business successfully through this challenging situation.
As business owners we try to be ready for any eventuality, but even the most prepared and organized among us couldn't have predicted the situation we find ourselves in right now. With all of our lives turned upside-down and the economy reeling, the Covid-19 crisis has taken us all by surprise and left us wondering what we can do to make sure our businesses survive. Throughout this time of uncertainty, it's important to pause, take a breath, and then get back to work with these suggestions in mind.
Starting a blog for your business website is a great way to establish yourself as an expert in your field, keep your site full of fresh content, and help improve your ranking with search engines. If creating a blog was one of your business goals for 2020 but you still haven't built up any momentum, here are ten interesting topic categories that will help bring traffic to your site and keep readers engaged.
Of all the pieces in the online marketing puzzle, SEO is often the most elusive. With search engine algorithms changing almost weekly, it can be difficult to keep up, but the good news is that there's still a set of current best practices that you can use to your advantage. Here are five of the ones you absolutely must have if you want to see your business rise through the rankings in 2020.
Keyword research is not something most business owners look forward to in their online marketing strategy, but it's an essential part of making sure that your marketing efforts are heading in the right direction. Because of advances in how search engines rank content, the keyword process has become incredibly nuanced and sophisticated, so you need to make sure that your approach takes recent developments into account. Here are three big things you need to keep in mind when planning out your keyword strategy in 2020.
It's that time again - the fresh start of a new year, and this time it's a pretty major milestone. Business owners everywhere have big plans for 2020 and beyond, but the first step in reaching your marketing goals for the new year is to assess what you have now, and decide what needs to be updated.
In the sixth and last part of this series on growth hacking, we're finally going to talk about the magic word that every small business owner and startup founder likes to hear: revenue.
In the first four parts of this series, we've talked a lot about how to bring in new direct customers. These are people who heard about your business either through your marketing campaigns, or through some other kind of exposure, perhaps on your social media accounts or elsewhere on the internet. This method of acquiring customers can be quite labor-intensive, not to mention expensive, and when you factor in attrition, sometimes businesses find that they're lucky if they get any growth at all past a modest user base.
Now that we've covered the three As of the Pirate Funnel - awareness, acquisition, and activation - it's time to move forward to the R steps. This half of the funnel is where visitors turn to paying customers, and where that customer base grows to the point where your business can thrive. The first of these steps, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, is retention.
Parts 1 and 2 of this series on growth hacking were all about the process of bringing customers into your sphere of awareness, and acquiring them in the sense of getting them to engage with you on an informational level. Once those steps are complete, it's time to progress to the crucial turning point of activation.
