As a small business owner, you need to get your business out there and into the minds of the general public. While you might think conventional methods such as television and print ads might be the most beneficial, the current digital age means that online marketing is the best avenue when it comes to advertising your small business online. This blog post will look into how you can advertise online, and what tools and contacts you need to use to promote your business.
Pay Per Click
Pay Per Click (PPC) is a method of advertising your business on other websites using search engines such as Bing or Google. In order to get the most out of Pay Per Click, you will need a website. For more information as to why a small business owner would need a website, check out our blog post.
The way it works is that as someone searches via these engines, ads will appear relevant to their searches. The ad that appears is usually based on a bid based system where different companies compete in a silent auction for certain words where those who can pay the most for the words will get the larger ad space on a website. While you might wonder how you could even compete with Fortune Global companies who could easily outbid you, there are many ways to make PPC work for you. While search engines are highly used, there are other avenues such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Youtube who offer a fixed rate for PPC on their website. Another benefit of PPC is if you have a niche product it will benefit from PPC, since it will require a search on the internet for most people to locate it. A PPC while seemingly daunting, is an incredibly important part of online marketing as the potential returns outweigh the potential costs if a plan is effectively made. For small businesses, determining what ad words you wish to use, what your overall plan is and how much you are willing to spend can be handled by an adword manager to help you optimize your PPC endeavors.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is an incredibly cost-effective way to market your business online. As a small business, email marketing is a very good way to create a following. It gives you direct contact with your customers and gives you a high degree of control. However, in order to get the most out of email marketing, you need to pick a good email provider. Good providers will make email marketing easier by offering features like segmenting users into 
groups and tracking how well your emails work when it comes to getting clicks or creating sales to happen. While a provider is a good way to organize and track your outgoing mails, you first need to get people who are willing to receive those mails. By giving incentives for people to join your mailing list, you are increasing your ability and outreach as well as putting yourself out there. The purpose of these emails is to promote what is happening at your business in terms of sales, offers, or new products. By showing these offers to people who already have an idea of what your business does increases brand loyalty and will also increase chances of business. Another useful thing to do is to personalize mails, by naming recipients. Email providers are capable of doing this, and it gives the impression that you care about your customers in your mails. However with the trend of mobile browsing increasing make sure your mails are able to be read on a mobile browser, that way you have a better chance of having your mail read. People viewing email by phone opposed to a standard computer set up has increased to over 50% by 2013.
Social Media Advertising
With the rise of social media, avenues such as twitter and facebook make excellent pathways for advertising online. These are avenues allow consumers to know more about your business and what it stands for. However, it is not enough to treat Social Media like a website. It requires you to take action and be creative with how you engage with your audience to truly stand out. Many businesses hire people to solely look after their social media accounts, meaning the marketing potential these platforms provide is quite high in today’s social media focused world.
